Reactor Reaction

Harmony was in the air as the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy met last week to hear AEC's new program to develop U.S. atomic power. After the long battles between Lewis

Strauss and Congress, there was hope for an era of good feeling under new AEC Chairman John A. McCone, who talked of a more vigorous program--just what the committee wanted.

But McCone touched a sensitive committee nerve almost at once by saying that "efforts during the past five years have paid off in remarkable progress. I believe we have had a good program." Snapped Tennessee's Democratic Senator Albert Gore, author of a bill to spend $1 billion on advanced nuclear development by 1965: "It has failed miserably, else you might not be chairman of the commission."

Shortly after, California's Democratic Representative Chet Holifield tangled with McCone. Holifield had read a draft of AEC's plan two days earlier, and while McCone was testifying, he issued a press release criticizing the AEC's plan as "inadequate" and "pitifully small." When a copy of the release was handed to McCone while he was still on the stand, he grew red with anger, waved it in the air, cried: "I just don't know why I am here, Mr. Chairman. I find that Mr. Holifield had a press release all printed and written up before he even heard what I had to say. If you want me to come up and testify, listen to me, and then make up your minds." Holifield replied with a maxim oft quoted by Harry Truman: "If you can't stand the heat, don't go into the kitchen."

Six for Nine. The fact was that Chairman McCone, his funds cut back by the Bureau of the Budget, had presented a program that went little farther than last year's (TIME, Jan. 26). The Democrats charged that the AEC's plan, which calls for $249 million for atomic power projects in fiscal 1960--more than half of it for the military--actually represents a cut that would provide only $14.5 million in new money for civilian power reactors, v. $74 million authorized last year. AEC would drop six projects intended for 1959, including a 100,000-kw. heavy-water reactor, an experimental reactor fueled by molten salt, a small-scale pressurized water reactor, and three small experimental reactors. In their place, it would add six entirely new projects at about the same cost.

What particularly irked some of the public-power-minded members of the committee was the postponement of atomic power projects approved last year with two public power groups in Nebraska and Alaska.

Major Change. The committee had pressed AEC to take a bigger part in developing second-generation prototype plants for atomic power, on the theory that private firms have neither the money nor the know-how to go ahead fast enough. AEC's new plan still leaves the job largely to private industry, but there is one major concession. AEC, which now contributes only toward research and fuel costs of privately built plants, would offer private industry up to 50% of the cost of building prototype reactors, plus more money for research.

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