Hier, à l'occasion d'une communication à l'Université Stanford, Chu a déclaré : "If you look at the amount of funding for that [the Manhattan Project], and the amount of funding to put a man on the moon, it was a huge spike in funding. I think we do need that. The recovery act actually was the start of that...you still need I think tens of billions of dollars as a minimum per year invested in these technologies and the associated science. The DOE, our base budget for energy research is on a scale of $3 billion...the primary energy industry budget is about $1 trillion, if it's a high tech industry 10-20% is the usable amount of sale that you invest so that's $200 billion, so what we're investing in federal dollar is less than 1% of that or on a scale of 1% of what should be invested."
Rappelons que le projet Manhattan était le nom de code d'un projet de recherche, mené au cours de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, qui permit aux États-Unis de confectionner, en 1945, la première bombe nucléaire de l'histoire.