iii. iv. - 5 research and development and engineering design should be immediately initiated. Construction commitments should not be made but funding for the pre-construction research and development should be explicitly provided. This should lead to proposals in two to five years for facilities that can be built with confidence for successful and timely operations at design goals and well identified costs. There is a recognized need for additional photon facilities in the The work on enriched pulsed neutron target and moderator assemblies sources. The National Science Foundation has accepted responsibility for upgrading the National Magnet Laboratory. This is important to the Department because of the need for superconductor research and development associated with accelerator and fusion magnets. As previously noted, the Department of Commerce is seeking funding to provide cold neutron capability at the National Bureau of Standards' reactor. These two steps, if successful, are complementary to the Department's actions recommended above and provide important contributions to the overall scientific capability of the nation. They underscore, however, the multiplicity of Federal efforts in materials research and the need for effective coordination in the advisory and decision-making process. As the principal sponsor of research facilities in this area the Department should take the initiative in establishing such a process. The Major Materials Facilities Report also refers to a need for further panels to address important aspects of materials research other than major materials facilities. We support this statement. A budget scenario is developed. It calls for a gradual increase in the construction budget by about $6-7 million per annum for each of 8 years and an increase in the operating budget, for operations, maintenance, and DOE research, of $7-8 million per annum for each of the first 3 years. In Materials are of primary importance in protecting the economic competitiveness of our nation, in efficient and reliable production and use of energy and also in any forseeable new energy and defense technologies. acknowledgement of this vital role, the Department of Energy and its antecedent organizations, the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), have consistently supported substantial materials research and development programs. The Department currently provides about $350 million annually for materials research and development--making it the largest reported single source of such support in the United States. Materials sciences and the associated development efforts are a major area of focus for the Department because the limitations of materials properties constrain extant energy production and conversion systems as well as the development of new alternative energy technologies and defense systems. Because of the vital importance of materials to the nation's long-range economic development, security, energy usage and energy conservation, the Department provides approximately one-third of the funding for research and development in the materials sciences. Materials research is a broad and diverse group of activities, ranging from concerns with improved alloys and welding processes to fundamental studies of structure and properties of materials on the atomic scale. As materials research and development have become more advanced, the associated scientific equipment has become more sophisticated and expensive. Within the last few years, increasing numbers of scientists and engineers involved in materials research and related disciplines have begun to need advanced research facilities such as sources of high intensity neutron beams, high magnetic field facilities, very intense sources of synchrotron radiation, and special electron microscopes. The DOE laboratories are natural sites for Major Materials Facilities. Indeed, the majority of the existing Major Materials Facilities in the U.S. are located at DOE laboratories: these extant facilities and facilities under construction command an increasing share of the DOE funding for materials research and development. Recently new major materials facilities as well as several upgrades of existing facilities have been proposed. Operational costs, development schedules and construction periods have increased with the sophistication of these new facilities. To expect all of the proposed construction to be initiated over the next few years is unreasonable. Due to the diverse capabilities of Major Materials Facilities and the increasingly larger costs of construction and operations, the President's Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in November 1983 asked the National Research Council (NRC) to assist in establishing national priorities for future Major Materials Facilities ((MMF)--defined to be those facilities whose initial costs were over $5 million). A committee of 22 members was formed within the NRC Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Resources, representing the diverse disciplines that use facilities for major materials. The Committee's membership was also intended to mirror the differing research styles and the wide spectrum of organizations where the research is done. Scientific work 8 with materials varies from that principally requiring laboratory-scale instrumentation to that dependent on the availability of major facilities. The research is done by governmental, academic, and industrial scientists and engineers. The Major Materials Facilities Committee, co-chaired by Dean Eastman and Frederick Seitz, first met late in January 1984 and three times thereafter. The task of studying the diverse MMF proposals was difficult. However, the status of neutron scattering and of synchrotron radiation sources had been reviewed recently by panels of experts for the NRC. A 1979 NRC study on HighMagnetic-Field Research and Facilities and a 1984 DOE planning study for advanced synchrotron radiation facilities were also available. The Report of the MMF Committee and its recommendations were forwarded to Dr. Keyworth late in July 1984 and published by the NRC as "Major Facilities for Materials Research and Related Disciplines" (Ref. 1). Appendix A contains the Executive Summary of this report. In July 1984, the Secretary of Energy requested that the Energy Research Advisory Board (ERAB) undertake ad hoc Reviews of four NRC reports including the one described above (See Appendix B). He recognized that the recommendations and information in the reports could have a major effect on the Department's science efforts in programs of the Office of Energy Research and also on those of other components of the Department. He requested that the Reviews: O Examine the substantive recommendations of the reports Assess the significance in terms of the Department's programs and о Recommend appropriate action and O Complete the assessment in six months Subsequently, Ralph Gens, Chairman of ERAB, asked Arthur Hansen to form a group to review the MMF report (See Appendix C). He requested that the Review: Consider the appropriateness and urgency of DOE implementation of the recommendations Set priorities by considering, from the DOE point-of-view, the needs of present and potential users and the overall importance to the nation Account for timing, costs and urgency of the various choices in a Consider any further needs or requirements which were not fully Obtain the views of DOE program personnel and of others having A Review consisting of four ERAB members and four external members was assembled. A list of the members follows the transmittal letters. The Review began its deliberations with its first meeting, October 30, 1984. - 9 III. REVIEW PROCEDURES AND CONSIDERATIONS The external members of the ad hoc Review were selected to provide broad expertise in the materials sciences and related disciplines but also to represent national laboratories, industrial and academic institutions as well as many regions of the USA. The Review held three publically announced and geographically distributed meetings: the first was held in Washington, D.C. on October 30, 1984, the second in Berkeley, CA, on December 12, 1984, and the last in Chicago, Illinois, on January 25-26, 1985. This provided the opportunity for participation by the public across the nation. Appendix D. contains the agenda of these meetings. An informal final meeting was held in Washington on April 30, 1985, for the purpose of clearing up some remaining questions and finishing the draft report to be presented to the Energy Research Advisory Board on May 2, 1985. NRC panels and surveys, DOE topical workshops and planning studies and other sources have produced more than a dozen reports which concern the MMF in the last few years. Consequently, much of the information pertinent to the Review was read by the members. See Section VI for the bibliography of reports used in this review. The first meeting was devoted to determining the response other Federal agencies expected to make to the MMF Report. Briefings on the applications of neutron research and synchrotron radiation research were given in the first and the second meetings. Speakers on neutron research and synchrotron radiation research were carefully chosen to be experts but with minimal institutional stock in the MMF Report recommendations. Before the second meeting, all of the DOE Laboratories were polled for their thoughts on the MMF Report recommendations in regard to their mission, their use of the MMF, and on the statistics of operation and use of any MMF located at their laboratory. (These statistics are presented in summary form in Appendix E.) The second, third, and the informal final meetings contained briefings from the DOE laboratories on these questions and their plans involving new MMF. The Review, while responding to the charges outlined in II., organized its thoughts around some managerial issues and the recommendations of the MMF Report. Its findings and recommended DOE actions are presented below. From the outset we will assume a familiarity with the MMF Report and the information in its references. For easy reference, Appendix A contains the executive summary of the Report. We suggest a careful reading of the first and second major sections, MATERIALS RESEARCH: FACILITIES AND MODES and MAJOR MATERIALS FACILITIES; SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, respectively. They form an excellent and succinct background for the following discussion. Here we will provide only information on developments since the writing of the MMF Report and give supplementary information important to the concerns of the Department. We believe our conclusions and recommendations are appropriate for the Department in response to its mission and the nation's needs. From briefings and other information available to us, we find that a forefront capability in materials research is vital for our energy production and usage, our national defense programs, and for a successful economic future which must necessarily be based on 'high technologies'. By the end of our fact-finding meetings, we unanimously agreed on our major conclusion--the prerequisites and scientific priorities set in the MMF Report are generally consistent with the needs of the DOE missions and in the best interest of the nation. The MMF Report is a well-balanced assessment of the national needs and carefully draws its scientific priorities commensurate with these needs. Our next charge was to examine the urgency and sequence of DOE actions and cost scenarios. We will present our views on the necessary costs to construct the array of major new facilities and new capabilities at existing facilities which have been recommended by the MMF Report and this Review in Section V. We find that a significant investment of additional resources will be required to provide the nation's scientists and engineers with the recommended modern facilities for forefront materials research in the next years and into the future decade. A conservative balanced overall plan based on the priorities of the MMF Report is required to secure the mutual agreement and support of Congress, the Executive Branch and the scientific community on the sequence and rate of expenditures. This plan must be responsive to new information and technological innovations as they become available. The The Department is presently responsible for the maintenance and operation of most of the major research facilities in the physical sciences (Ref. 2). This statement also holds for the MMF subset (Ref. 3 and 4). excellent capabilities of both the Department and the DOE laboratories to administer, develop, and construct major research facilities strongly support the conclusion that the DOE must play a leading role in implementing the overall MMF plan. During the review, a few observations were made that have apparently not been widely recognized. The first is that the MMF are not of the same |