Mr. GLENNAN. It is 2,800 square miles. Multiply that by 640 and you get 1,792,000 acres.

Senator MAYBANK. 2,800 square miles, and for those 2,800 square miles you will have 2,346 passenger-carrying vehicles in the pools in various places?

Mr. GLENNAN. That is half again the size of the State of Delaware. Senator ELLENDER. Do these 2,800 square miles include the desert of New Mexico?

Mr. GLENNAN. Yes, sir. The total land area occupied by Commission installations is 2,800 square miles.

Senator ELLENDER. That includes the proving grounds?
Mr. GLENNAN. Yes, sir.

Senator ELLENDER. To what extent do you use cars at these proving grounds?

Mr. TYLER. We use them very extensively.

AUTOMOBILE REPAIRS

Senator ELLENDER. How do you keep tab on the repairs of those cars when you have every Tom, Dick, and Harry driving them?

Mr. TYLER. We have around 1,200 cars. This is the Santa Fe operations which includes Nevada and Los Alamos. All our cars are returned to the pool nightly. We have our own motor pool and maintenance operations there. They go out with a daily trip ticket. Senator ELLENDER. You have someone to supervise and see that they are properly gassed and oiled and greased?

Mr. TYLER. That is one of the advantages of the pool system, they have to come back in. They are turned in to the pool at the end of each day.

Senator SALTONSTALL. You have 2,800 square miles with 123,000 employees, running up to 135,000 employees, and with an operating budget of $767,800,000 by the end of 1953. It would be interesting to have the number of sites with the total capital outlay, situated on that 2,800 square miles; and if you want to go one step further, what is the value of those 2,800 square miles? That is something that could go on the record. If we can get that on the record, we can help you.

Mr. BOYER. We can get you a statement.

(The information referred to is as follows:)

Analysis of plant values
[In millions of dollars]

Land (59 sites) 1....
Community facilities.

Production, research, and general facilities..

Senator MAYBANK. Mr. Lovett made a statement the other day about the Pentagon and the public debt. We spent $65,000,000 on the Pentagon and charged it off in 1 year. If we had amortized it over 50 years, a great portion of this debt would not exist. As Senator Saltonstall said, you have buildings and land as assets to the Government.

Mr. BOYER. We have prepared statements that can go in the record for these other programs if you want to include them.

Senator MAYBANK. I believe the committee would like to hear from the other gentlemen tomorrow morning. Certainly I would like to hear Dr. Warren. I have been very much interested in the biology and medicine part of it. I think we ought to have here tomorrow morning all those who have not been heard.

Mr. BOYER. The other gentlemen you would not care to call back? Senator MAYBANK. The others have been heard. We will try to finish this in the morning.

The committee will now recess until 10:15 tomorrow morning and we will meet in the main room.

(Thereupon the committee recessed at 4:30 p. m., Monday, February 18, 1952, until 10:15 a. m., Tuesday, February 19, 1952.)

INDEPENDENT OFFICES APPROPRIATIONS FOR 1953

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 1952

UNITED STATES SENATE,

SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS,

Washington, D. C. The subcommittee met at 10:15 a. m., pursuant to adjournment, in room F-82, the Capitol, Hon. Burnet R. Maybank (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.

Present: Senators Maybank, Ellender, and Thye.

ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION

REACTOR PROGRAM AND RELATED FACILITIES

STATEMENTS OF MARION W. BOYER, GENERAL MANAGER; AND DR. LAWRENCE R. HAFSTAD, DIRECTOR OF THE DIVISION OF REACTOR DEVELOPMENT OF THE ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION

CONSTRUCTION PROGRAM

Senator MAYBANK. I think that we will proceed at this time, and I am hopeful that we will be able to have more Senators present at a later time.

The main purpose of this meeting is to make a record, and anything that is going to be testified to this morning, as I understand it, is not secret or classified in any way.

Mr. BOYER. We have certain portions of the reactor program that will have to be off the record, which we will make as brief as we can. Dr. Hafstad has an unclassified statement which he can present.

Senator MAYBANK. Doctor, will you go ahead. This is on the reactor program.

ESTIMATED COSTS

Dr. HAFSTAD. For the fiscal year 1953 the Commission is estimating costs of $92,400,000 for development of new reactors plus $44,100,000 to be obligated for construction of experimental reactors and related facilities, a total of $136,500,000. This compares with estimated development costs of $65,204,000 in fiscal year 1952 plus $50,147,317 for construction, a total of $115,351,317. This is a growing program, that is the most important thing.

REACTORS

As is fairly well known by this time, reactors are the machines for converting atomic energy into useful work. You see, just as the bomb

releases this enormous store of energy instantaneously to get the greatest blast effect, in reactors we release the same amount of energy in a controlled manner, letting it come out a little bit at a time, and thereupon getting in the end electrical energy for useful work. This can be done in two general areas, for mobile reactors which we will talk about separately for the military, or for civilian power ultimately if and when we get the costs down.

Senator MAYBANK. That is why I repeated the word "useful," when you said that, because I presume you intended to lead up to the civilian end, because that is what we have all been so interested in on account of thinking about what might happen, as Senator Thye said yesterday, and as Senator Ellender remarks about this, if you have peace.

DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM

Dr. HAFSTAD. From the long-term point of view, the development of reactors is the main hope, and almost the only hope, of appreciable civilian use of atomic power. For the immediate future, very little distinction can be made between reactors for civilian uses and reactors for military uses. In general the same ground must be covered in order to learn how to design a power-producing reactor for any purpose. Because economic factors are less compelling for military planes and submarines than for central station power plants, the military can justify reactor development and construction which cannot be justified on a civilian basis. Fortunately, the knowledge acquired for the military will be available for civilian application.

I can expand on that a little bit to indicate why it is that the military can justify higher prices for nuclear power than civilians. I have gotten these figures from the Navy recently, for example, and this is unclassified. Apparently for major naval vessels, the power that they use costs in the neighborhood of 2 cents a kilowatt-hour. This is about four times as much as we pay in civilian life. In submarines for normal submarines it goes as high as 8 cents per kilowatt-hour, and for some of the special-purpose submarines which are designed for very high speed for very short times, it goes up in the neighborhood of $1 a kilowatt-hour.

NUCLEAR POWER

Senator MAYBANK. Why is that? I imagine when you talk about power that you have down at Clarks Hill on the Savannah project, you have got a tremendous water power which will be supported by steam. The submarine would not use much electric power.

Dr. HAFSTAD. The submarine would not use as much, so that there is a scale factor in that, but the main thing is the hauling of the fuel and so on. They are operating under very restricted conditions and in order to have high range they have to carry a lot of fuel. They are hauling this fuel around and that pushes their costs up.

Senator MAYBANK. Do you mean hauling the fuel on the submarine? Dr. HAFSTAD. On their own submarine. With nuclear power we avoid the job of hauling around the fuel. It is fairly compact, as you know. For this reason in the naval applications, there is a much more promising opportunity for nuclear power at the present time than in civilian use.

For either civilian or military uses, the extent to which atomic power will prove practical will depend mainly on the adequacy of the supply of raw materials, both as to cost and as to the amount available. Senator MAYBANK. The cost is the main thing?

Dr. HAFSTAD. That is the most important now.

Senator MAYBANK. I hope you don't mind being interrupted, but how long do you think it will be before you are going to get the cost down? Are you getting it gradually down, or what is the status of it? Dr. HAFSTAD. The cost is coming down gradually.

Senator MAYBANK. The reason I asked is because this committee is appropriating huge sums of money to build power dams and if you have got this cost down within reason, it seems to me that so much of the land that is being flooded throughout the country might be saved.

POWER COSTS

Dr. HAFSTAD. I think that I can state this, that having looked over costs of power since this is the basis on which this whole program has to be planned, it is quite clear that hydroelectric power is the cheapest that we have available at the present time, and so it will be the last which will be replaced by muclear energy, if ever.

Senator MAYBANK. Nuclear power might replace the steam plants, but hydroelectric power is a low-cost power?

Dr. HAFSTAD. If coal costs continue to rise, and if the power demands continue to rise, forcing the coal costs higher and higher, then I think nuclear power will be able to compete in 20 years or something less, but it is still some time off.

Senator MAYBANK. That is 20 years?

Dr. HAFSTAD. Yes, or maybe sooner, and we are moving in that direction.

Senator MAYBANK. As I understand it you are going to build some steam plants down on the Savannah River project, are you not, because the power companies of course are going to forward their power to the towns there and so on, but I understood they did not have enough power to do that and have it inside the project, too.

Mr. BOYER. That is correct, and where we have those needs for power we have to look toward construction of new power facilities to supply our specific needs.

PRODUCTION MACHINERY

Senator ELLENDER. Going to the development of our present facilities for the production of this energy, I presume that the same machinery now being erected to create this power would be used if we turned everything to civilian use, that is in the manufacture of the products?

Mr. BOYER. I think we made the point yesterday that you wouldn't be building an expansion today if it were just for civilian use.

Senator ELLENDER. I understand that, but ultimately as I understood it from the beginning we more or less have a dual purpose here, to create it for war purposes as well as civilian use in the long run and that is one of the reasons assigned why we should go on with it. Mr. BOYER. Well, you couldn't just provide for expansion today. Now, the nuclear material does have a utility in power plants, at some