thermal pollution of reservoirs and an improvement 

 in the comfort of industrial buildings. 



Combined heat and power supply eliminates the re- 

 quirement for individual, small fuel-consuming 

 heaters. The use of powerful sources for the com- 

 bined generation of heat and electricity makes it 

 possible more effectively to organize purification 

 of the smokestack gases of steam generators of 

 fly-ash particles, which, for the small or even 

 large urban boilers, is difficult to accomplish in 

 terms of both the volume of work and capital in- 

 vestments required. 



As a result, the number of harmful discharges of 

 ash, sulfur oxides and nitrous oxides into the at- 

 mosphere is sharply reduced. 85 



We noted earlier that the list of 200 priority S&T 

 problems in the Tenth Five Year Plan includes R&D 

 programs in environmental protection. While "envi- 

 ronmental impact statements" have not yet become man- 

 datory in Soviet R&D planning, the importance of eco- 

 logical factors is definitely rising. Academician N. 

 P. Fedorenko writes, "Most economists now share the 

 opinion that purely economic criteria are becoming 

 increasingly inadequate as indicators of the optimal- 

 ity of economic growth and should be supplemented 

 with social and ecological indicators."" 6 



In general, though, there is still much room for 

 improvement in the selection of R&D programs. The so- 

 cial impact of new technology has only recently be- 

 come an object of planning, and the methods of eval- 

 uating "social effectiveness" are still undeveloped. 

 The new technical-economic indicators established by 

 Gosplan in 1974 have not yet become a firm basis for 

 standardizing the calculation of economic return and 

 technological level of prospective R&D. Their appli- 

 cation is still experimental, and opposition runs 

 strong in the ministries against centralization of 

 technical decision making. Given these circumstances, 

 Louvan Nolting concludes, "As in other countries, 

 rough rule-of-thumb balancing of economic and societ- 



125 



