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we would like. Certainly, before we go into production, we would like to fix this training problem. As I say, I think we have a number of approaches that will work and we can fix it reasonably soon.

Senator JOHNSTON. Someone may come along and give this subcommittee $363 million, but I haven't seen him yet, and it is a long time until Christmas. As I see it at this point, the hope for SSC is that you can get a smaller budget, put off the major construction commitment for a while, and hope, in the process, that somebody can find a way to finance construction. They haven't thought of anything yet.

The administration submits a budget proposing to cut out the Appalachian Regional Commission, which is OK with me and Senator McClure, because we are not part of Appalachia. Even Senator Domenici doesn't have that problem.

Senator DOMENICI. They have done it three times and it hasn't stuck. Senator JOHNSTON. So, those kinds of cuts are just not realistic. Congress continues to fund those programs year after year. So I don't know where we are going to get the money for SSC.

Really, $363 million, I must tell you, seems vastly premature. I just don't see how you could spend that kind of money. Maybe you can obligate it, but I rather doubt it, if you got it. There is this figure of continued R&D of $64 million. $65 million is for long-lead procurements for components. Most of this is for developing overall industrial capability.

I am just trying to figure out a firm way to fund SSC.

Can you give us an alternative amount for R&D that would be helpful, but would not involve a commitment of a large expenditure for construction and long-lead items?

Dr. DECKER. I don't believe I could today. The R&D funding is particularly important to this project at this stage.

Senator JOHNSTON. I wish you would come back with a figure. I don't ask you to be against your own project, and against your own budget, but I ask you to assume that what I say is probably correct, that $363 million is out of the question. What would be useful for R&D and what would it do to your schedule?

We don't want to just throw money at the problem and waste it, but what would be useful, and I am thinking of something in the neighborhood of $60 million, in that area, maybe we could find that just in the budget.

Then, of course, there will be the question of whether we should do it at all, which the committee has not made that determination, but I would like to get the widest range of options that we can.

Senator DOMENICI. Mr. Chairman, would you yield on that?
Senator JOHNSTON. Certainly.

SSC INTERNATIONAL PARTICIPATION

Senator DOMENICI. Might I just share this with you and Senator McClure and Dr. Decker.

At some point, as you know, the SSC is supposed to be an international project, both from the standpoint of its utility and from the

standpoint of paying for it. The difficulty we are having surfaced again in the authorizing hearing when we tried to inquire at what point in time we would get a better picture of the actual cost to the federal government. We are having difficulty with that as evidenced when I asked whether we could condition an appropriation upon producing the international game plan. The answer was that that would not work.

Then there is the issue of state participation. As you know, to this point, states have not been able to indicate what they will contribute to the project because of the amendment that I offered and you all supported.

Incidentally, I did hear from the National Academy of Sciences that the amendment was actually helpful, rather than harmful, in their evaluation of the sites. They claim that had they had to evaluate those aspects, they probably would have been even more arbitrary in their decisions than they currently appear to be, and that they might not have been able to get it done.

But, I think a relevant question is at what point in time, when we start appropriating, will we get a full game plan of the federal cost?

Your question of how much we should put in for the very, very first phase of the SSC to keep it alive seems to me to lead to a question of when we will get a full proposal. It is not going to cost us $5 billion if what DOE has been telling us is true, that the Japanese seem to want to pay, and others in Europe do, too. The site of the SSC project is also an important factor. If you pick Texas, they might pay for the whole damn thing out of oil receipts. They said they could put up $1 billion at one point.

Senator JOHNSTON. That is the old Texas.

Senator DOMENICI. That was the Texas of a long time ago. [Laughter.] Thank you for yielding. Perhaps you could comment?

Dr. DECKER. I wish I could give you an answer as to a date when, in fact, we would have foreign support lined up and so forth.

As I think you know, we have just opened formal discussions with six countries on this topic. It will take each of them varying times to reach some sort of decision. In talking with the Japanese most recently, it could well be a year's time for them to make those kinds of decisions. It is very much a grassroots kind of a bottom-up process in Japan.

It has also been clear to us in our discussions with many of the countries that they are, of course, watching to see what Congress does on the budget for the project. I am not sure that we will get solid commitments before we have a good and solid indication that the Congress, in fact, wants to proceed with the project.

We are a little bit in a chicken and egg situation on this, unfortunately.

Senator MCCLURE. Would the chairman yield on that point?

Senator JOHNSTON. Yes.

Senator MCCLURE. It really leaves us, then, in the position, does it not, as a country, as a Congress, as an administration, to a commitment to doing it all ourselves, with no participation?

Dr. DECKER. I think, from my perspective, it would be good if we could make a commitment to move forward with the project. I am very certain, if we could make that commitment, that, in fact, we would get very significant participation by a number of other countries, certainly beyond the six that we have already talked to. We have had informal indications that there are a number of other countries, smaller countries, maybe contributing smaller amounts, but nonetheless adding up to significant contributions.

Senator MCCLURE. I understand that, yet I am not at all certain in my own mind, at least for myself, I am very comfortable with the notion that either we will get that participation and, therefore, we can depend upon it, and we are not really committing all of the funds in the United States for it 100 percent.

In the past, I have seen some foreign participation in which they got a lot more than they invested. They have a tendency to want to invest just enough to have full access to all of the benefits, without actually making a proportionate investment in the cost.

I am not at all certain that I want to go down that road again, and I would want the administration and our foreign friends to understand that at least one Member of the Senate is going to want to demand that they make a proportionate investment or they are not going to participate.

There are two different kinds of questions that we have to ask ourselves with respect to foreign participation.

Senator JOHNSTON. There is another more basic question as I see it. Why not let them build it and let the United States participate, which is really quite a serious question, because the benefits are benefits for all mankind, they are a little bit hard to quantify for the United States alone, especially at this price tag.

Let's talk about the magnetic fusion. Do you have a total price for the new Tokamak?

MAGNETIC FUSION PROGRAM

Dr. DECKER. Yes; our current estimate is $426 million for the total estimated cost of the project.

Senator JOHNSTON. $426 million?

Dr. DECKER. Yes.

Senator JOHNSTON. That is over

Dr. DECKER. For 1996 completion.

Senator JOHNSTON. $705 million I see here for operation.

Dr. DECKER. The total project cost, including all of the diagnostics, R&D necessary to complete construction, and other related operating costs, as well as the construction costs, is $556.5 million. The $705 million includes preparation for operation in 1995 and the 1996 operating costs. Operation is estimated to begin in January 1996.

Senator JOHNSTON. How many other generations would there be between this machine and one that would really produce electricity?

Dr. DECKER. The Compact Ignition Tokamak that is proposed would get at the one very important remaining physics question in fusion, and that is the physics of an ignited plasma. Beyond that, to establish a firm

engineering basis for fusion, there needs to be a device that, in fact, is aimed at engineering and fusion technologies. We see one device beyond this Compact Ignition Tokamak that would be required to do that.

I think once the engineering test reactor, as it is being called, is built and operated, then you would have built the science and the engineering information to decide whether or not to proceed with commercial fusion reactors.

Senator JOHNSTON. Doctor, I used to ask the question, some years ago, on this. It seems to me that we were talking about commercialization, if you had it, would be 2030, or around that time, or 2040. Is that still valid?

Dr. DECKER. Yes.

Senator JOHNSTON. Is that too far away?

Dr. DECKER. I would think, given where we are today, that we could not complete this engineeering test reactor before the year 2005, or so. It would probably be realistically 20 years beyond that to commercialize fusion as an energy source.

Senator JOHNSTON. You would need a commercial test reactor before you went to replications in the market.

Dr. DECKER. Yes.

Senator JOHNSTON. I also used to ask what would be the use of fusion, whether it would be as an electricity generation or maybe as a breeder. Do you know enough yet to be able to say what you think the use would be?

Dr. DECKER. Both of those are certainly possible. I think you will get varying opinions on that in talking with different people in the field. My guess would be that it would be electricity production.

GREENHOUSE EFFECT

Senator JOHNSTON. One final question on the greenhouse effect; I guess that would be for Mr. Gibbs.

Tell me about research and your theories on the greenhouse effect at this point?

Dr. DECKER. Well, certainly there is no doubt that the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has gone up by about 25 percent over the last 185 years. Most of the people who do global climate modeling would tell you that that will lead to some sort of a temperature increase. I think there is a lot of uncertainty as to when and how much.

Senator JOHNSTON. Has it already led to that increase?

Dr. DECKER. I don't believe that there is any evidence of that that is really supportable. You will find some varying opinions on that.

Senator JOHNSTON. There are those who say that it has already increased the global temperature, that some of the weather eccentricities that we see are caused by that.

Dr. DECKER. There are a lot of weather eccentrities, as you call them; whether any of them can be pinned down to CO, or any other specific cause, at this point, I think it is very tough.

Senator JOHNSTON. What more can we do? Invent more powerful computers?

Dr. DECKER. Certainly, the computer modeling is an important part of it. There are right now significant variations among the different climate models. There are really a lot of differences when it comes to predicting changes in regional climate, whether there will be an increase or a decrease in precipitation, for example, which is, of course, critically important, especially if you are in a farm region.

SUPER COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY

Senator JOHNSTON. Do you know anything, by the way about the new computer at Sandia?

Dr. DECKER. Yes, sir.

Senator JOHNSTON. Can you tell us about that?

Dr. DECKER. I know a little bit about it. One of the most promising ways to improve the performance of computers is to use a number of processors working on the same problem.

This has been the subject of research for some time. The question is, let's say that you have a 10-processor system, can you solve a given problem 10 times as fast as if you only had 1 processor working on the problem.

Senator JOHNSTON. From reading about the program, I couldn't tell whether it was sort of a breakthrough in programming so that they could, by the program, break the problem down into component parts, or whether it was a breakthrough in hardware.

Dr. DECKER. I am not sure of the details either, Senator. I suspect that it is a breakthrough in decomposing the problem so that it can be solved on 1,000 processors. That is the real key here, that research has been done using processors that may be up to 10, 20, 30 processors, and people have been able to achieve these significant speed ups by a factor of 20 or 30.

The question is, if you went to 1,000 or higher numbers, could you continue to get these speedups?

Senator JOHNSTON. It is probably mainly a computer program that did that.

Dr. DECKER. I am sure that that is the case.

Senator JOHNSTON. Senator McClure.

Senator MCCLURE. Let Senator Domenici.

Senator JOHNSTON. Senator Domenici.

CONFINEMENT PHYSICS RESEARCH FACILITY

Senator DOMENICI. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I will submit a couple of questions in writing to you, but I just wanted to clear up a couple of things.

For the Magnetic Fusion Program, in particular the confinement physics research facility at Los Alamos, the budget submission indicates that $52.5 million is the total estimated cost for the construction of that project, which is very urgently needed.

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