of time which will permit us to learn what the sources and sinks are, what the cause and effects are, and so on.

I think to get into the speculation that an increase of 2 degrees would result in 50 inches of increase in the ocean level is very speculative. It may happen. On the other hand, it is speculative at the moment.

So, to do a sound job of trying to understand what the sources and sinks are, it seems to me to be the proper responsibility, and that is the way, as the lead agency, I have tried to guide the efforts in this area, and not go off and do things which are inappropriate, given the scientific evidence we have. There is time to get the information, I believe.

Senator EVANS. You say it is possible. If it is possible and it did occur under those time lines, we would have precious little capacity to do anything about it.

Is that right?

Dr. TRIVELPIECE. The problem is a very serious international problem, too, because the United States in 1950, I think it was, something like 40 percent of the fossil CO2 going into the atmosphere came from things going on in the United States. We are now down to 25 percent.

Western Europe has gone from something like 34, percent down to 17 percent. On the other hand, Eastern Europe has gone from 16 to 24. As I recall, the developing world has gone from 6 to 12 percent.

So, what you see happening is even if the U. S. were to take unilateral action and stop burning fossil fuel in its entirety, which is a difficult thing to conceive, we are not the sole contributor to the problem.

So, this needs to be understood on a global basis with participation by other countries and before going to them, I think we should be in a position where we have a unassailable collection of facts, before we try to persuade the Third World and lesser developed countries to terminate their development by not burning fossil fuels, that we should confront them with hard facts and not with speculation.

At the moment a lot of it falls within the realm of speculation. There is nothing against doing an absolutely sound job at this. I think it is very important to do so, but I am concerned that we not take precipitous actions, based on incomplete scientific information at this time.

Senator EVANS. You can see the result of going to Third World countries. We went through with that phase and now we are beyond it, but you can't go through that phase.

If that is the potential and you say that, for one thing, it appears to be safe to say that if the level continued to grow and when they got to a certain position, that that very well could have physically the result of higher temperatures and the results we all know of from higher temperatures, doesn't that make even more important the search for alternative energy sources that get everyone out of the fossil fuel business, not just the United States and Western Europe which might have the capacity and money to get into nuclear fusion or a lot more esoteric energy sources, but energy sources that would be beneficial to developing Third World coun

tries which would be easy for them to use, environmentally benign and not as complex?

Dr. TRIVELPIECE. You state an obvious and highly desirable goal. I am not quite sure how to accomplish it.

Senator EVANS. I am not either.

Are we doing anything significant in research?

We spend billions of dollars in research on exotic nuclear energy development, which may be fine. I don't know what would happen if we spent the same amount of money with the same intensity and same scientific help, anything from photosynthesis to the development and the use of burning of hydrogen as an alternative to fossil fuel-are we really assigning the right kind of priorities given these various global potentials that we have identified?

Dr. TRIVELPIECE. The priorities of which you speak, of course, are very complex sets that are determined, in part, on the basis of technical merits and budgetary pressures, and political pressures as well.

Certainly there are things in the areas of photosynthesis which I think are quite fascinating. The idea that you could make inorganic photosynthesis is quite important.

Can you understand how it is that an electron can be caused to go from a low energy state, to a high energy state, as a result of light shining on it, and remain there, and not give up the light by radiating it away, and back down to the state from which it came, understanding that process is very difficult?

I was at Argonne Lab and saw some effort along these things. They have done remarkable things. There is a complex molecule, in which you can identify the location of the molecule which when irradiated by light generates the electron. You can track half of the electron through the complex molecular structure, down to where it crosses the barrier from which it doesn't return.

Once you understand the chemistry of it in a nonbiological way, you may make an inorganic photosynthesis receptor which would absorb sunlight, elevate it to higher energy state, from which it uses that fuel to convert it back to a lower energy state, without some of the things associated with the burning of fossil fuel.

Whether this is a target or not, I do not know, but I have high hopes that will occur and that is one of the things we should emphasize. Whether or not we should alter the priorities we have, that is a question for debate. Today I am not sure I have a simple

answer.

Senator EVANS. I am not sure I do either. I wonder whether that date has been elevated to a high enough, important enough level? It seems to me we are at a point, where we have a whole series of global problems which we mentioned earlier. They may or may not be as urgent as some suggest or as benign or trivial as others suggest.

It does seem to me we ought to be reviewing pretty carefully whether it is better, and more likely to make breakthroughs in signficant steps forward, in a given time line in a fuel like nuclear fusion, for instance, or in some of these other fields with the end result being an environmentally benign source of energy, to replace the kinds of things that are causing trouble, or whether the same money and the same effort and the same scientists assigned in a

different way, or encouraged in a different way, might get us to a better, cheaper and easier energy to use by smaller countries.

I am not aware that that kind of real high level debate has gone on. Has it?

Dr. TRIVELPIECE. I think there are worlds of future organizations, and so on, energy future organizations to talk about these things. I am not sure in the sense you are talking about, a set of good priorities has been established. Our own energy research advisory board, debates these matters from time to time and makes recommendations to the Department and has some influence in the outcome of budgetary requests in the future.

Again, there is the overall budgetary-political overlay that comes into play on this as well.

Senator EVANS. I understand that. Ultimately it is a politicial decision by the very nature we are talking about public moneys and congressional and executive process, but it sometimes seems to me that would and could be affected significantly by good information and a serious recommendation to change or modify priorities.

I am not suggesting either you or the Department of Energy does this, but it would be easier to try to anticipate what would be more politically acceptable and kind of arrange the priorities so that they have some really good chance of being accepted and going through.

Can you suggest any way to really elevate this in terms of the understanding of the knowledge of those who do have to make political decisions or within the administration?

An organization on the outside doing private kinds of research, world future organizations, is one thing. I think it is important to have that kind of determination or at least that kind of debate within the Department or administration, between the administration and the Congress, as we start dealing with billions of dollars in our own future.

Dr. TRIVELPIECE. I don't think I have a good answer. I would like to observe that we have been through some very painful pendulum swings of facing up to gaslines one morning, followed by creation of ERDA and DOE, followed by programs which were funded very heavily which got over into the demonstration arena rather intensely and then the energy crisis seems to be abating, at least on a short-term basis, and budget deficit circumstances seem to predominate and there is pressure to cut things back.

It may have been during the period when the demonstration projects were at their peak we were not spending money effectively on some of the things we should have. It is also true when we go through the nadir with this sort of thing, we are not doing some of the things that we should.

How to stabilize that so that proper attention is paid over the long haul to those things which need to be addressed is something I don't have a good answer for. If you have some suggestions, I would be delighted to take a run at trying to make them work.

Senator EVANS. I am not sure I have suggestions. At least I have questions.

I would like to continue this, not at this hearing, but I think it is important for us to try to find some better way. This is absolutely the right time when there is no current energy crisis. It may be a

difficult time, you can't get the people's attention, but I can't think of a better time to try to look at a longer range and have some chance of getting ahead of the game rather than behind it.

You mentioned the fact that we are now diminishing to a degree the work on nuclear fusion because it appears as though we don't need that kind of energy source as rapidly as we once did.

I am sure that you would agree that the gaslines which gave real pressure to some of the energy research we did in the seventies could be back by the end of this century. It is possible because the political decision is made elsewhere or a whole lot of things could happen in the world that we could be right back in the gaslines and in an energy crunch.

So, you can't slow down long-term research on the basis we don't need it, given current circumstances if we know that current circumstances could slip back in the phases of a few years ago very quickly. We wouldn't have time to react.

As always, you present not only excellent testimony, but give me an additional lesson in physics which I think I understood. All! have to say is that it was much simpler when I went to high school and electrons were the smallest element of nature.

Dr. TRIVELPIECE. Right on.

Senator EVANS. Thank you.

Dr. TRIVELPIECE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Senator EVANS. Let us to go the next panel, Dr. Stephen Dean, president, Fusion Power Associates in Gaithersburg, MD.

I understand Dr. Dworkin will be accompanied by Dr. William Ashburn, University of California Medical Center, Department of Nuclear Medicine, and Dr. Alfred Wolf, Department of Chemistry at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.

We will start first with Dr. Dean.

STATEMENT OF DR. STEPHEN O. DEAN, PRESIDENT, FUSION POWER ASSOCIATES

Dr. DEAN. Thank you, Senator.

I appreciate having the opportunity to present testimony again this year. Also, I would like to thank you and the members of the Energy Committee for continuing to be interested in energy during these last several years when the energy crisis has been seen to be abated and that people don't want to support energy the way they once did.

Senator EVANS. It is not easy, I tell you.

Dr. DEAN. Not for you or us.

There are two primary reasons for working on fusion which is the energy process that goes on in the Sun.

One is that the fuel supply is universally available, the primary fuel being heavy hydrogen that comes from water. It has been our belief using such a fuel would make a safer world because the fuel would be available to all countries, no country would have a corner on the market. Therefore, it would not be necessary to go to war in order to achieve this fuel when times got tough.

The other primary reason for supporting fusion has always been the safety environmental characteristics of fusion relative to fission where the radioactivity that is produced from a fusion reactor is

much less in quantity and much less dangerous in character than the isotopes produced in fission.

As a matter of fact, I just received a June 5 copy of "Nature" which is a science magazine in England which says the following: One lesson to be learned from last month's nuclear accident at Chernobyl is that there should be renewed effort in thermonuclear fusion. This was the opinion offered last week by academician Selikov, Vice President of the Soviet Academy and member of the investigating commission, speaking at a press conference in Moscow. Fusion has been recognized by all the major countries of the world as a very important undertaking for mankind. It is not that we expect to produce all the world's elecricity in our lifetime, but we hope to ensure a supply of energy in the future for our children and our grandchildren.

It is for this reason the advanced countries of the world have always worked hard on and long together on this difficult problem. The recognition of this is the fact that fusion is one of the primary activities that is on its way as part of the western economic summit progress talks.

There are working groups and parties among the United States, Europe, and Japan that have been for a couple of years now working together to try to plan the best way to use scare resources to develop the scientific and technology of fusion as a western initiative.

Last November, as you know, as a result of the Reagan-Gorbachev summit, the President reported, and it was in their final statement from that meeting, that the two leaders, Gorbachev and Reagan, agreed that the world should work together to develop fusion power and as a result of that, there are now active negotiations at the State Department levels to plan the next generation facility in fusion. So, fusion has been recognized worldwide as an important undertaking.

Fusion in this country has always been a delicate balance of large facilities which are required to prove out the ability to produce these plasma and small-scale facilities which are required to test new ideas and to develop better approaches for the long run. As the budgets have come down in the past few years, it has been increasingly difficult for the Department of Energy to balance the program in such a way as to maintain our commitment to prove out fusion even in the larger facilities and to maintain the thrust of developing new ideas in the smaller facilities. I think they have done a pretty good job trying to maintain this balance.

However, a crisis emerged last fall. It was in part brought about by the Gramm-Rudman cut and in part brought about, starting from O&M levels, the OMB cut their program even further in their 1987 submission you have under review.

At this point the delicate balance existing in the program became unglued. We had a large $250 million mirror facility that had just finished its construction that we are not able to operate. As a result of trying to maintain a balance, the Department of Energy made a difficult choice to phase out the entire mirror program. The House Committee on Appropriations just last week recognized that things had gone too far and too fast in cutting back on the fusion program and that this delicate balance in the program had become unglued.