DISCUSSION

Mr. BRUCE. First, thank you, Dr. Sproull. I am just curious about your comments about 10-year commitments and the ratio or the problems that you face with funding new starts versus sustaining funding for activities already in progress.

What should the ratio be? You indicated that a program ought to be at least it looks like 10 years in nature, that you ought to look toward a 10-year funding cycle. What should be the ratio if we obviously start all programs and didn't start any new ones, you wouldn't do any new starts for 10 years.

Dr. SPROULL. Well, it's a rolling affair, of course, each year. If you have an average lifetime of 10 years and you get a chance to make changes at the rate of 10 percent per year, there's no science to this and there's very little art even. It's kind of a judgmental call as to what is good.

Those of us on the Committee have all served or are serving on the laboratory bench. In 10 years you can accomplish a great deal in a research program. You can take a year or two to get started and then you have, particulary if you have graduate students factored into it, kind of a lifetime of three years for a graduate student. In 10 years that program can bear a great deal of fruit.

Usually a faculty member himself or herself finds he gets a little bit of hybrid vigor by moving on to a different area of science anyway, perhaps coming to the Department of Energy for support again, but then it would be called a different program.

I can't claim any expertise is that that's just about right, but if it was much shorter than 10 years it wouldn't be an efficient use of money. If it's say 20 years, you would only have 5 percent of the money each year for new people or new programs and that would be a pretty static kind of program. So, I would just say that we looked into this and all of us agreed that that's a pretty sensible way to manage the peoples money.

Mr. BRUCE. In this first year then, you are going to be stuck with a 90/10 ratio of 90 percent continuing and 10 percent new projects. We are talking a 3 percent growth in your budget in this area. Is that going to be adequate to meet the requirements, do you think? Dr. SPROULL. It is not. It certainly is not adequate. Unlike people that are in harness to the Government, I can say it straight out. That certainly is inadequate.

Mr. BRUCE. You didn't read your statement line by line, and we also thank you for that. Can you give us any idea what you see from your Advisory Committee's perspective as an adequate increase in the budget this year as a percent of what you received last year?

Dr. SPROULL. No, I can't. Look, if you are pushing as hard as you can, it isn't going to be enough. It's kind of fruitless to decide whether 20 percent or 50 percent should be applied. There has been a gradual starvation of basic research and basic research facilities over the last half dozen or a dozen years.

The real question is how much could you spend efficiently. Obviously, you don't just want to throw money at the problems. Probably, without adding a great deal of staff in the Department of Energy, you probably couldn't spend more than 20 or 30 percent

additional efficiently. The chances of getting that are so slim that I wouldn't spend any time on trying to figure out whether it should be 20 or 30.

Mr. BRUCE. Maybe you can help us in another area. I know that your Advisory Committee is new. Do you propose in the future years of your Advisory Committee with a set set of priorities, what programs we ought to fund?

Dr. SPROULL. You have tasked us to do this and the Department has tasked us to do this, and it's the obvious thing that we ought to do. I just want to point out the disability of the committee and I don't want you to expect too much from us.

The problem is that in order to get technical competence over the tremendous range of science and engineering that the Basic Energy Sciences program sustains, like Noah's Ark we have to have one of these and one of the other and one of the other, and so on. We have, within the committee, spokespeople for just about every program there. Every one of those people thinks that his program is being starved.

You shouldn't really expect too much from a Committee like this, to be able to sit down and say where some programs ought to be cut in order that other programs could prosper at a faster rate. It's easy to say the latter. It's very difficult for a Committee like this to come up with anything useful for you in the former. So, we will do our best but don't expect very much.

Mr. BRUCE. We will expect more. Noah wanted not one of these and one of those but he wanted two of these and two of those. Dr. SPROULL. There were certain biological problems.

Mr. BRUCE. Right. We need to get them in two's. Mr. Morrison, do you have questions for the witness?

Mr. MORRISON. Maybe that's what is wrong with the budget process. We've just had one of these and one of those. It hasn't been growing very well.

Let me start by saying on behalf of the Subcommittee, we really appreciate your service and others that work with you on the Advisory Committee. We have been criticized in the science and technology area Congressionally and perhaps appropriately, for a number of projects that have been started that really didn't lead us anywhere. As I indicated to Dr. Decker, I think we should be very pleased at what we see in the Basic Energy Sciences Program. I know that you are new on the job, but I am very confident the Advisory Committee can serve the necessary role of keeping this on track.

One of the greatest problems that we have on this Subcommittee is first about sorting out what you start, and sometimes even more difficult is when do you cut off something you have started and should be transferred into the private sector.

Have you established any guidelines for your committee on both initiating new activities and eliminating old ones within this average 10-year timeframe that you have discussed?

Dr. SPROULL. Yes, but I don't think that they will surprise you. There is certainly no wisdom that we have contributed that the Department of Energy didn't already have.

One of the things that has been stopped is the older reactor facilities. As modern technology comes along, the older reactors have

been decommissioned, which is perfectly sensible and that's the way it happens. Now, there are two other reasons why things get stopped. One is that they get stale and the people aren't productive anymore. Second, is that in a more or less constant money atmosphere, in order to start something new with high promise you have to stop something that's going on that although it's not poor science, it doesn't have the open endedness the new programs have. This is done every year with several hundred projects, 50 or more are terminated for either one of those two reasons. Either the people have run out of steam or the good people have left the program and gone into other work or become over aged administrators like me, or because the work simply doesn't have the openendedness the scientific and technological promise that it had in competition with newer ones.

Those are the common reasons, they are good reasons, and it's up to the managers with the help they can get by voluntary unpaid advice from the technical community to put those into effect. We think they do it pretty well.

Mr. MORRISON. Will the Advisory Committee play a role in new initiatives such as the Molecular Science Research Center that is being proposed?

Dr. SPROULL. We haven't been asked to. I'm not sure how well we would do on that. I think we could do, for example, a thing like this Dr. Narath's high-temperature superconductivity task force, we could set that up. On the other hand, Dr. Decker's people could set up a task force just as well.

If we were asked to do that we would, I think, generate a group of people overlapping our membership somewhat but we would simply have to go outside of our membership in order to get deep enough competence. It might be useful; on the other hand, the people in Germantown may have better ways of going about it. I simply don't know.

Mr. MORRISON. Thank you. We want to make sure what we do is right and we have confidence in your group. Thank you very much. Mr. BRUCE. Mr. Fawell.

Mr. FAWELL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. You had mentioned that sooner or later DOE, the Department of Energy will be blamed for the next energy crisis.

Dr. SPROULL. That's a personal comment of mine. I suppose it's gratuitous and probably about as good as

Mr. FAWELL. It caught my fancy. In speeches that I have made in my District at least, perhaps we who are interested in the energy sciences don't do enough to pound our chests and say we aren't spending enough here. We aren't doing enough and we are not telling the story, and we are continuing to burn fossil fuels and do it the old way until such time as the last drop of oil is done and the last piece of coal-

This is maybe not a very good question and maybe an unfair one, but would such criticism be justified. I mean, who are we going to blame for the next energy crisis?

Dr. SPROULL. I think Congress-first of all, there's going to be a lot of blame to go around. [Laughter.]

There's going to be plenty of blame. The Congress deserves some of it, the Administration deserves some of it, and we in the techni