which this Government would join with other countries in a common effort to use atomic energy in a common attack against the problems besetting all men and women everywhere-the perpetual problem of human misery and want. All of us earnestly hope that the Soviet Government will see fit to join in such a great enterprise. If it does not, I believe we should ask the nations of the free world to join with us in this venture-leaving the door open for possible Soviet entry at a later date.

In the meanwhile, I believe the Congress should put itself squarely on record as supporting the splendid objectives of the President's speech. The modifications to the Act would accomplish this purposethey would permit our Government to enter into agreements with "groups of nations" for the purpose outlined in the United Nations address of last December 8.

I have every confidence that the domestic problems arising out of atomic energy can be solved through the application of willingness to compromise, wisdom, and patriotism. The outlook for successful resolution of the international atomic issues is much less promising. Yet despair would mean ultimate disaster. The future, our heritage tells us, is not pre-ordained. We cannot be held accountable for what other nations may do-or do not do-to usher in an era of true atomic peace. We are accountable, however, for what we do-or

do not do.

Let us never forget this simple truth as we strive to reach a world in which the atom will be not the destrover of all we hold dear but a tireless servant in the great task of building a better future.

Excerpts of Remarks by Henry D. Smyth, Member, United States Atomic Energy Commission, at the Sixth Annual Business Conference, at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N. J., Thursday, June 3, 1954

THE OUTLOOK FOR NUCLEAR POWER

As a final consideration, I would like to turn very briefly to the question of nuclear power in other countries. A compelling reason for developing nuclear power is to support our foreign policy. Power costs are generally higher in Europe than here and are still higher in some other parts of the world. I have had some difficulty in finding out what these costs are. In Japan, the estimated cost of power is 20 mills per kilowatt hour, probably the highest of any industrialized country. The best figures I can get as examples of power costs in Europe are: For the United Kingdom, about 7 mills or more per kilowatt hour; for Belgium, 9 to 10 mills and probably about the same for France. Since the last few mills will be the hardest to cut from our nuclear power costs, it is evident that nuclear power may well be competitive with these foreign costs considerably before they can compete with our own costs of 4 to 7 mills per kilowatt hour. The picture in other countries over the next ten to twenty years may be entirely different from the one I have drawn for this country. Nuclear power may be much more important elsewhere.

The United Kingdom, France, and Belgium are presumably all capable of developing their own nuclear power industries, but they still might appreciate help from us. Other parts of the world may need nuclear power more and may need much more help. To meet such needs, President Eisenhower, in his speech of December 8, before the United Nations, suggested an international pool of materials and knowledge. The amounts of fissionable material needed by this pool would be relatively small in terms of our total supply of fissionable material in this country, but the resulting benefits could be great, both in terms of nuclear power and in other uses of atomic energy which I have not mentioned. I sincerely hope the President's suggestion will be carried out successfully.

*

Excerpts of Address by Representative Sterling Cole Before the Convention of The National Fertilizer Association, Inc., at The Greenbrier, White Sulphur Springs, W. Va., June 15, 1954

My subject today is "Putting the Atom to Work in Industry and Agriculture."

However, this highly indispensable-albeit much maligned-military atom has a Siamese twin, the peaceful atom, which has been developing alongside its much publicized counterpart, perhaps much more slowly, but nevertheless persistently. It is this peaceful atom to which I would like to devote the major portion of my talk today. For it is this atom, I sincerely believe, which will in the long run pay dividends of a hundredfold on our huge investment.

The first useful by-product of the peaceful atom was the radioisotope, which the Atomic Energy Commission made available to research workers as far back as 1946. The radioisotope is in reality a new type of tool which to date has proven useful principally in research and development work. A radioactive isotope of phosphorus, or carbon, for example, is exactly like the phosphorus or carbon we know. It reacts the same chemically, it looks the same, it weighs about the same. However, it has one remarkable characteristic and that is that it constantly sends out what can be simply thought of as a radio signal. With the aid of instruments such as the Geiger counter, the scientist or research worker can follow these signals and thus trace the trail of radioisotopes and tell both their location and concentration at all times. It is this remarkable characteristic which has made radioisotopes so useful for research in agriculture, medicine, the physical sciences and in industry.

Most of us tend to regard the radioisotope industry as hardly an industry at all simply because we do not normally come into contact with it in our daily lives. The radioisotope is a product that is used by people who make the things we use rather than a product used itself by the consumer. The Atomic Energy Commission is the sole producer of radioisotopes in the United States. It spends about $1,500,000 annually on production and research. Its annual radioisotope sales exceed $1 million. It is not in the radioisotope business for profit however. In some cases it supplies them to hospitals and institutions at only 20 percent of their actual cost. The

industry which supplies instruments to radioisotope users is composed of more than 100 companies. Their annual sales run to upwards of 20 millions of dollars per year. Eight years ago this infant industry employed 200 workers; today they number 2,400. Today there is hardly a major research laboratory in the field of agriculture, medicine, or physical science which does not make some use of radioisotopes. This use is growing every year.

When radioisotopes first became available, their uses were extremely limited chiefly because of their unique characteristics. Industry and research had, in fact, to go to school to learn how to utilize this new tool effectively. It is, I think, truly impressive that in the past eight years its use has grown so rapidly.

Another by-product of the peaceful atom has been radiation itself. The beneficial uses of radiation are just now beginning to emerge from the research laboratories. Its first important use has been in medical therapy. The Atomic Energy Commission has recently developed radio therapy units utilizing radioactive cobalt. These machines cost only a fourth to a half as much as corresponding X-ray equipment and promise to be simpler to operate and far less costly to maintain than present-day X-ray machines. They can be put to the same uses and in addition make possible types of medical treatment not hitherto available.

Another new development which should be particularly interesting to your industry is food sterilization. We all know what a marvelous change the use of frozen foods has made in our kitchen economy. Radio sterilization offers an opportunity to preserve certain types of food for extended periods, without refrigeration or heat sterilization. I had the opportunity recently of seeing a potato, grown in 1952, which had been sterilized with radiation. This potato, to the eye, looked as though it had been out of the ground only a few weeks, and I was assured by the gentleman who showed it to me that mashed potatoes prepared from it would be just as good as that from this season's crop.

The radiation process also offers great promise for the preservation of meat products. It has been demonstrated in respect to pork that irradiation eliminates all danger of trichinosis without changing or affecting the flavor of the meat. The Quartermaster Corps of the Army thinks so highly of this process that it plans to spend several million dollars in research alone in the next few years to explore its possibilities.

Finally, we come to that most promising development of the peaceful atom, atomic power. Here we find that it is perfectly feasible, from an engineering standpoint, to obtain power in huge quantities from atomic energy. The nuclear-powered submarine, the Nautilus, is now undergoing dock trials in New London, Connecticut. A similar land-based power plant has been under operation for almost two years at the Commission's Reactor Test Station in Arco, Idaho. The taxpayer, through the Atomic Energy Commission, has already invested almost $200 million in research and engineering development in this field.

The Duquesne Light and Power Company of Pittsburgh, in cooperation with the Atomic Energy Commission is constructing the first large-scale atomic power plant in this country; in another three years this plant will be operating. While we cannot anticipate that

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this installation will be competitive, from a cost standpoint, in producing electricity in the Pittsburgh area, it will answer many engineering unknowns which will enable us in the future to construct other economically competitive power plants in those areas of our country and throughout the world which are not close to large fuel supplies. Ten years from now, electricity produced from atomic energy will be very much an economic reality.

The truly vast sums being spent on research in the atomic field are certain to bring about a revolution in industry and agriculture in the next generation. The AEC is spending $26 million per year on research in the field of biology and medicine alone; $40 million per year on research in the physical sciences. Most of this money is spent to find out the how and why of our physical world.

In the field of agronomy, for example, experiment stations of the Department of Agriculture, of the various states, and many universities are well equipped to rapidly develop practical applications of the scientific discoveries flowing from the research financed by these vast sums. This research effort is not a temporary one. It has been building up for ten years and it bids fair to continue for many years to come. We can only speculate on the results, but I am sure the next generation of farmers will consider as normal new methods and crop yields which in our wildest dreams we have never imagined.

Thus, the peaceful atom is steadily increasing its service to mankind under the shelter and protection of the military atom. Already today it is affecting our lives in many ways of which few of us are aware. It will be a major factor in the lives of our children.

This brings us to a question of particular interest to you. What effect is the atomic energy program having on the fertilizer industry and what effect can we anticipate that it will have in the next few years? I am happy to say that your industry is one of the early participants in the Atomic Age. The atom is bringing about a revolution in the field of agriculture and consequently will cause many changes in the fertilizer industry which is a key supplier to the farmer.

Your industry is also one of our potential long-term sources of domestic uranium. The phosphate beds of Florida and the West contain economically important quantities of uranium. Today, four phosphate chemical plants are producing uranium as a by-product of their normal operations.

In the Florida phosphate area there is a large quantity of material which lies above the commercial phosphate rock known as the leached zone. This material is now waste in the mining operation because it is not economically feasible to recover the phosphate materials in it. However, it does contain-in addition to important amounts of phosphate and aluminum minerals-fluorine, uranium, and rare earth minerals. The Atomic Energy Commission has been keenly interested in this leached zone because it contains as much uranium as the commercial phosphate rock and has to be removed in order to get to the phosphate rock. During the past five years, the Commission has spent several million dollars in research designed to extract uranium from this material.

In an effort to make the process economically attractive, investigations have also been carried on concerning feasible methods of recovering the phosphate and the aluminum in addition to the uranium.

The Commission recently paid the Blaw-Knox Company $50,000 to make an engineering study of a new process for obtaining both phosphatic fertilizer and uranium from leached zone material. The process, which utilizes nitric rather than sulfuric acid, was developed by the Tennessee Valley Authority in co-operation with the Atomic Energy Commission. This completely engineered process report is available to any member of the phosphate or chemical industry who desires to review and evaluate the process.

The recovery of phosphates and uranium from this leached zone, if it proves economical, will add a great deal to the country's phosphate

resources.

Research work in this field is said to have encouraged the Aluminum Company of America to spend considerable sums of its own money evaluating the possibility of extracting alumina, the raw material of aluminum metal, from this leached zone material. Thus, the phosphate industry may well anticipate the possibility of a new by-product -namely, alumina. In addition research has also indicated that there are substantial quantities of rare earths which can be extracted with the uranium. With the growing market for rare earths, this may well prove to be another by-product for the phosphate industry.

The Atomic Energy Commission, in its efforts to obtain all possible uranium, has undertaken major researches to develop new methods of exploiting all domestic uranium sources. This includes the Colorado Plateau ores and the low-grade uraniferous phosphates.

I would like, at this point, to make it quite clear that it is my understanding that the Atomic Energy Commission has no intention of going into the fertilizer business. I can assure you that the Commission, in discussing its affairs with the Joint Committee, has stressed this point. I also believe that it is not the intention of the Congress that the Atomic Energy Commission should go into the fertilizer business; the Commission has a full time job developing and producing atomic weapons and carrying out research work on the peaceful aspects of the atom. I think the four uranium extraction plants built to date further illustrate this policy.

The Blockson Chemical Company built the first phosphate plant to extract uranium economically from phosphate rock. Three other plants have been completed within the past year. Uranium extraction plants of the Texas City Chemical Company, the International Minerals and Chemical Company, and the Virginia-Carolina Chemical Company have all been built with private funds under a uranium purchase contract with the Atomic Energy Commission. This purchase contract contains in all cases a normal commercial price schedule. These are in no sense cost-plus jobs. The taxpayer does not have one nickel invested in any of these three new plants. Thus, both in theory and in practice, I believe the Commission has demonstrated it is interested only in uranium, and that it has no intention of going into the phosphate business.

However, it is most anxious to encourage both the phosphate industry and the chemical industry as a whole to study the new uranium extraction processes in order that our production of uranium may be increased. The need for uranium is urgent and will continue for many years. Today the phosphates constitute an economic source of uranium and reserves are such that phosphates should be considered a