lion, the Biological and Environmental Research program for $129.8 million, the Fusion program, which is $444.1 million, and a collection of small programs which total $45.3 million. The total request being $902.1 million. The Basic Energy Sciences program is a broad-based collection of activities that provide the underlying basic research and technology base activities that support many of the Department's missionoriented energy programs. The Biological and Environmental Research program consists of a collection of activities that investigate various aspects of the effects of energy production and use on human health and the environment. Finally, the third one which I am going to spend a little time on is the Magnetic Fusion Energy program. Fusion is a mission-oriented program that first seeks to demonstrate net energy release from controlled fusion of light nuclei that are confined in a magnetic field and then to develop the technology needed to translate this result into a practical energy delivery system for eventual commercial application. I want to do two things. One is to talk about some specific activities but also to provide a schematic overview of a couple of activities that illustrate how the programs that I am talking about in Basic Energy Sciences and Biological and Environmental Research cut across many of the areas that are of interest. If I could have the first viewgraph, what I am going to do is talk about nuclear waste, acid rain and the carbon dioxide programs to illustrate these things. [Viewgraph.] NUCLEAR WASTE Dr. TRIVELPIECE. I don't need to tell you about the importance of the nuclear waste programs. There are activities currently underway in other programs that seek to contain the waste, put it into containers and store it for some acceptable period of time. In addition to the need to do that on a direct basis, however, there is also the need to understand some of the longer term aspects of the waste management problem and here you can see illustrated a collection of things that are done in the Basic Energy Sciences program. We seek to improve our understanding of what happens to the containment material as a result of radiation, how various hot brines influence the containment, how the mechanical containers that are proposed to be used are influenced as a function of time and stress and so on. This broadly based collection of activities, all managed within the Basic Energy Sciences program, illustrates, at least to me, how multidisciplinary activities are required in order to make progress in this area. [Viewgraph.] ACID RAIN Dr. TRIVELPIECE. The next viewgraph is a pictorial representation of what the acid rain problem is all about. Various sources such as power plants and cities and automobiles put material into the atmosphere. This material is then transported and modified chemically. It eventualy lands somewhere and there is certainly sufficient circumstantial evidence to support the belief that the acid rain is causing an increase in acidity in various lakes and regions of the country and that it is in some way related to the increase in the level of pollutants that are associated with the various sources that are indicated on the viewgraph. Nevertheless, there really is insufficient hard evidence of direct cause and effect relationships available at the moment to provide an adequate basis for an appropriate mitigation strategy. What the Biological and Environmental Research program seeks to do is to understand how these things are transported, how they are chemically changed, and what their eventual effect will be. We are working with other agencies in the government to develop a long range solution to this problem. [Viewgraph.] |