Atom Blast

The U.S. Government will spend nearly $700 million on atomic energy this year, and this vast project will be largely supervised by a handful of U.S. corporations. Yet major corporations, which will spend hundreds of millions on research this year, will not put one red cent of it into atomic energy research (see SCIENCE). Many companies have even refused to take any part in the Government project.

The Atomic Energy Commission, worried over the enormous problem of integrating its Government-controlled giant into a free-enterprise economy, wanted to know why. It called in a committee of businessmen, headed by able James W. Parker, 62, utility engineer, onetime head of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and president of the Detroit Edison Co. This week, Parker's committee reported back. Its answer was a blast at AEC. (Snapped one AEC staffer: the report clearly showed that industry was "drooling" to grab off atomic energy processes.)

Too Many Secrets. The gist of the findings was that industry could not help AEC until AEC told industry much more about the atomic energy program. AEC should modify its sweeping code of secrecy, the committee said, since in many cases it was unnecessary and downright harmful to the program. Secrecy was carried so far, the committee implied, that businessmen often did not even know how or where to get the barest information.

Also, AEC's contracts with industry* were found too vague, as were the lines of responsibility between AEC's scientists, who want to supervise everything, and industry's practical engineers, who are accustomed to autonomy in carrying out specific contracts. After the objective is laid out by AEC, the report held, industry should be permitted to get there by its own methods.

Example: the building of a nuclear reactor (for developing atomic energy for ship propulsion, etc.) at Chicago's Argonne National Laboratory was put off repeatedly while contractors and AEC argued on how the job should be done. Just this week, Westinghouse agreed to do the designing and engineering, but the haggling over terms of construction is still going on.

Too Many Slide Rules. In addition, AEC was charged with failing to bring certain problems out of the physicist's slide-rule realm into the everyday trial-&-error world of engineers who might solve them and perhaps make good use of the results in other industries. For example, Committee Member Isaac Harter, director of Babcock & Wilcox Ltd., got an idea from an atomic process that helped his company refine its continuous steel casting process.

On the other hand, the committee frankly admitted that opportunities for commercial application of atomic energy are distinctly "limited as compared with the opportunities which exist . . . in other fields." Nevertheless, the committee thought industry would discover many "economically rewarding" activities if AEC would open up--and AEC, in turn, should benefit from industry's enormous know-how.

The report did not touch on one possible reason why companies like Du Pont pulled out of the atomit energy program at war's end. Du Pont seemed to be scared that it would once again be tabbed a "merchant of death." This week, proving that it was not so lax at wooing industry as the report said, AEC announced that Du Pont was going to make a survey of the atomic program to see if it would plunge in again.

* Almost half (in dollar volume) of the Atomic Energy Commission's present contracts with major companies are held by two of them: General Electric, which runs AEC's plant at Hanford and its Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in Schenectady; and Carbide & Carbon Chemicals Corp., which runs the plant at Oak Ridge. The other contracts are shared by Dow Chemical, Monsanto Chemical, Kellex Corp. (as a subcontractor for Dow and General Electric), and Westinghouse Electric.

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