Appendix III Summary history of the 1-2 GeV Synchrotron Radiation Source 1974 1979-1980 1981 Early 1982 July 1982 November 1982 Research began at Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Project; LBL collaborated in design and construction of PEP storage ring LBL designed and built SmCo5 insertion devices LBL began work on LBL/Exxon beamline at SSRL-world's most powerful x-ray source Preconceptual design work begun Draft proposal completed First DOE Construction Review; Draft conceptual design report (Preliminary Design Handbook) completed April 1984 1985 November 1985 ALS/SSRL Users Workshop; DOE Validation Review Center for X-Ray Optics created at LBL The Advanced Light Source: Machine Description and Background Design optimization continues Workshop on an Advanced Soft X-Ray and Ultraviolet Synchrotron Mr. FUQUA. Thank you very much, Dr. Shirley. Because of the compactness that we are having to have these hearings and the constraints that the committee is put under the Budget Control Act, I'm going to have to ask that the witnesses please try to hold your remarks to no more than 10 minutes, because we will probably be here till late afternoon. We do have some questions that we would like to ask you, and we will now hear from you, Dr. Bernstein. [A biographical sketch of Dr. Bernstein follows:] DR. RICHARD B. BERNSTEIN Richard B. Bernstein was born in New York on Oct. 31, 1923. He was educated at Columbia University: A.B. 1943, M.A. 1944, Ph.D. in Chemistry 1948. He did research on the Manhattan Project from 1942-46, serving in the U.S. Army, Corps of Engineers, Manhattan District and Bikini Operations from 1942-44. He taught at Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago (1948-53); University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1953-63); University of Wisconsin, Madison (1963-73) as W.W. Daniells Professor; University of Texas, Austin (1963-73), as W.T. Doherty Professor; and at Columbia University, N.Y. (1977-81), as Higgins Professor of Natural Science and Chairman of Chemistry Department (1979-81). From January 1982 to September 1983, he served as full-time Senior Vice-President of Occidental Research Corporation (a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum Corp.). Since 1983 he has been a Professor of Chemistry at University of California-Los Angeles. Research interests: physical chemistry and chemical physics, including isotopic reactions, gas kinetics, collision phenomena, molecular beam scattering, laser chemistry, and dynamics of elementary reactions. Author of some 280 scientific articles and co-author of book Molecular Reaction Dynamics (1974); editor of book Atom-Molecular Collision Theory: A Guide for the Experimentalist (1979) and author of book Chemical Dynamics via Molecular Beams and Lasers (1982). Editor of the journal, Chemical Physics Letters, and contributor to many scientific journals. Consultant to industry and government since 1951. Member of the American Chemical Society, Society of Sigma Xi, Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1968. Recipient of A.C.S. 1981 Peter Debye Award in Physical Chemistry and of the National Academy of Sciences 1985 Award in Chemical Sci ences. STATEMENT OF DR. RICHARD B. BERNSTEIN, MEMBER, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY'S ENERGY RESEARCH ADVISORY BOARD'S CHEMISTRY REVIEW PANEL; AND PROFESSOR OF CHEMISTRY, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES, LOS ANGELES, CA Dr. BERNSTEIN. I'm happy to accept your invitation to testify at this hearing. I'm a professor of chemistry at the University of California at Los Angeles. I'm also a member of a panel, the Chemistry Review Panel, of ERAB, charged with appraising for the Department of Energy the National Academy report, Opportunities in Chemistry, also known as the Pimentel report, and I will try to comment in some detail on the report. However, I refer you to my written testimony for details. I'm speaking here, however, only as an individual scientist interested in the welfare of chemistry and our American society. I do, however, speak on behalf of the National Research Council's Board on Chemical Sciences and Technology, and also my views happen to coincide with those of the Council for Chemical Research, which is an organization of 148 top universities and 46 major companies that work together to strengthen the U.S. academic and industrial base in chemistry. Let me give you a brief background about the Pimentel report. A committee of 26 members, chaired by Professor Pimentel, who is a distinguished professor at the University at Berkeley. He is a National Medal of Science winner and now president of the American Chemical Society. This committee, widely representative of the academic, industrial, and Government research sectors, were organized by the National Research Council to prepare the report. In fact, one of the authors, Dr. Alan Schriesheim, is here. He is director of the Argonne National Laboratory, and he will testify later on. The report was very well refereed and reviewed, and almost 400 colleagues contributed to the writing of the document. The report has a call for a major DOE initiative in those areas of chemistry relevant to the energy technologies of the future. Following a detailed analysis, the report recommends an incremental growth in DOE support of such chemistry research programs in the amount of $165 million over a 5-year period. Anticipating my own conclusions, I'll say right away that the recommendations of the report deserve your serious consideration and, I believe, your positive action. The report outlines the scientific frontiers in chemistry-chemistry, the science of molecules, how they are made, how they store and release energy, how they are transformed into valuable new products, materials, and how they can be used safely and efficiently to improve the quality of our life. There's a lot that we do not know, however, about the rules that control molecular behavior. Even though we've been burning wood, and coal, and oil, and gas for quite a few years now, we still don't fully understand the elementary chemical process going on when a simple hydrocarbon molecule reacts with oxygen to produce CO2 and water. We are still searching for efficient, environmentally acceptable energy for the future. The Pimentel report calls particular attention to current advances and opportunities in chemical reaction kinetics and catalysis, chemical theory, chemistry of new materials, synthesis and analysis, and the chemistry of life processes. These are not really new research areas. What is new is the arsenal of highly sophisticated instruments that are now available to help us to dissect previously intractible problems and explore them at the molecular level. These new tools include high resolution magnetic resonance spectrometers and mass spectrometers, tuneable, picosecond-pulsed lasers, synchrotron radiation sources, and supercomputers. With their increasing availability, we are seeing remarkable progress in the priority research areas. A section on intellectual challenges is very important. It points out that not only does chemistry offer many practical applications, but really it's an enormously intellectually exciting field. One of the areas that I'm personally interested in is the idea of understanding chemical reactivity. My own research is in this field. It's called molecular reaction dynamics. I won't take your time to go into the details, but we are trying to understand chemical rate processes from the most fundamental microscopic point of view, and we use molecular beam techniques and laser techniques to try to-to undertake studies of these kind. I should mention at this point that the leading laboratory in the world investigating chemical dynamics via molecular beam techniques is Prof. Yuan Lee of the chemistry department at the University of California at Berkeley. That work, which is world renowned, is carried out under the auspices of the DOE's Chemical Sciences Program at LBL. The research is of the most fundamental significance and is greatly enhancing our understanding of basic chemical reactivity while, at the same time, producing specific data on particular chemical reactions of importance, for example, to the very practical field of combustion chemistry-for example, the reaction of atomic oxygen with hydrocarbon molecules. None of this work is of practical importance yet for synthetic chemists, but such experiments are "grist for the mill" for chemical theorists. Theoretical chemists are looking for tests of their new-found ability to describe at a molecular level from first principles a detailed picture of chemical reactivity. Ultimately, with the availability of supercomputers, theoretical chemists may well be able to design new molecules, new reactions, exotic new materials, molecular level switching devices, and so forth. The intellectual excitement of chemistry today is matched only by the level of excitement about its potential practical applications. The importance of chemistry to society is stressed in the Pimentel report. Chemistry is the central science that responds to societal needs; it's critical in attempts to tap new sources of energy, discover new processes, develop new materials, feed the world's population, improve the health of the Nation and the world, monitor and protect our environment, maintain our economic competitiveness, and increase our national security. The chemical industry employs more than a million people, makes annual shipments of over $175 billion, and currently displays about a $10 billion positive international balance of trade. Now what is the importance of chemistry to the DOE mission? We believe it's a central science, and it's central to the mission of DOE. Despite the present availability of petroleum, thanks in large part to foreign suppliers, it is widely accepted that the economically practical world supply of oil and gas will diminish effectively to zero by the year, say, 2010 A.D. It is clear that we have only a relatively short time to come up with practical alternative energy sources. We would all like to see the DOE Fusion Program succeed, but enormous technological problems remain. My bet is that we will still be heavily dependent upon chemical and electrochemical energy at the end of the petroleum age, with such energy coming mainly from coal and biomass oxidation. The Pimentel report contains 11 specific recommendations. I'd like to just comment on those which apply to the Department of Energy's budget request for fiscal year 1987. The Department has basically-as I mentioned earlier, the Pimentel report suggests and strongly recommends a substantial new initiative in chemistry at this time. The Department of Energy has requested a 9.9-percent increase in operating funds for chemical sciences which is above expected inflation and which must, at the very least, be solidly protected. On the other hand, in our national concern about the deficit, we must look to those areas of science and technology which have contributed and will contribute in the future, if adequately supported, to our Nation's economic well-being and security. Chemistry stands out for its contribution. The Pimentel report points out a stark contrast between the overwhelming importance of chemical processes in our national energy picture, with 92 percent of our energy coming from chemical sources in 1983, and the 1985 funding of chemical sciences, which was only 5.3 percent of DOE's support for fundamental research. In the Chemistry Panel of ERAB, we learned that by some standards the contrast is not quite so bad. That is, if we include, along with chemical sciences, the funding of other chemical programs within the Office of Energy Research, then the fraction devoted to chemistry is now 9.3 percent. It's still a long way off from what's required. It's not clear that the Department of Energy has heeded the published advice of your committee to add to the funding of the areas of chemical sciences identified as especially fertile. The $9 million increase in the chemical sciences budget, as requested, hardly begins to address the needed 5-year growth in DOE chemical sciences research programs, this $165 million recommended by the Pimentel report. To make a real impact, an average increment of some $33 million per year for 5 years is required, and I strongly believe your committee could significantly enhance our long-range potential, our long-range national well-being, by authorizing an additional sum of some $24 million to the proposed budget for DOE chemical sciences for fiscal year 1987 and specify that it be used to strengthen research in the priority areas-chemical reactivity; chemical catalysis; chemistry around us, which is modern analytical chemistry; and chemistry under extreme conditions-this additional funding, this incremental funding, equally divided between efforts at universities and national laboratories. The chemical sciences are brimming with opportunities for discoveries. We believe they will advance human knowledge and provide practical benefits for our Nation. Energy independence must still remain as one of our important national goals, and chemistry, the central science, can help us achieve it, and your support can make it all happen. Thank you. [The prepared statement of Dr. Bernstein follows:] |