It should be recognized, though, because when it comes to government disaster response, the Bush years marked a low point and right now we're experiencing a high point. For a vivid illustration of this disparity, look no further than the Gulf. During Katrina, FEMA director Michael Brown secured his place history as the poster boy for government incompetence. Now consider Chu, the Nobel Prize Winner who has been at BP headquarters in Houston with a team of government scientists trying to figure out how to stop the leak. According to a government official, BP initially "dismissed" Chu's gamma ray suggestion, but came back a week later and admitted "Chu's right."



I talked to Chu this afternoon about the government's response to the disaster. As a mental exercise, try and imagine what these answers would sound like if "Brownie" or some other top Bush officials were still overseeing disaster relief in the Gulf.

I understand you just got back from Houston? What were you doing there?

We went there Tuesday night, we were in Houston in the morning with BP, then visited for three or four hours with the manufacturers of the blowout preventers [the equipment that should have stopped the leak].

What advice have you been giving BP advice about gamma-ray imaging? Can you explain in layman's terms what BP was trying to do and what exactly you recommended?

Well, I was talking about a week and a half ago to some of the Department of Energy folks that BP had asked us to send down there. This was the week before last Sunday. There was a several hour phone call Sunday where a few of the national lab directors, I, and the people we had at the site were talking about what we can do to help BP, and we thought that we could perhaps help them specifically by imaging the state of the BOP, the blow-out-prevention valve, with high-energy gamma rays. By using penetrating gamma rays you can see whether the valves were closed.



The really important part of all this is that through our conversations with BP, they seem to be very open to having brainstorming sessions, having us help diagnose what the condition of the blowout prevention valve is and helping them think through potential solutions. The president charged me with assembling a small team of scientists to go down there and that was what we were doing beginning Tuesday night. The idea was to bring in very smart people who also have great connections to the larger engineering and scientific community. The national lab director who's been engaged in this from the beginning, Tom Hunter, and I and four other scientists and engineers went down there.

How is it that you know enough about gamma rays and oil spill technology to be helpful? I wasn't aware that that was an area you'd worked in before you were secretary?

Oil spills were not something I've worked on, but I do know about gamma rays.