852 HISTORY Ol "nil COMMITTEE ON SCIENCI AND TECHNOLOGY 



The report recommended no further funding for the Cresap facility, 

 except for placing it in mothballs, which was done. 



At the close of 1978, Williams submitted a highly critical report 

 on the H-Coal Liquefaction Plant in Catlettsburg, Ky. The report 

 found: 



Most all pipe anil conduit is already rusted. Supplies of new pipe, valves and 

 expensive components have been literally thrown in the mud during off-loading from 

 trucks. * * * Labor productivity on the project was totally unacceptable. * * * 

 The Department of Energy's top echelon has not dedicated the manpower required to 

 adequately control a job of this magnitude. There is only one single solitary govern- 

 ment official on site at this $300,000,000 project. To gain perspective, the price of 

 this construction and first two years of operation is the same as all of NASA's shuttle 

 facilities at all NASA centers, albeit in later year money NASA, however, employed 

 roughly 200 Civil Service construction specialists to control the same priced work. 



The investment in construction was so far advanced as to make it 

 not feasible to terminate the construction. However, as a result of the 

 scathing report by the subcommittee, radical management changes 

 were instituted. In particular, the management and project accounta- 

 bility were transferred to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which 

 had the experience and professional people necessary to manage such 

 construction work. 



FLOWERS SUBCOMMITTEE INFLUENCE ON APPROPRIATIONS 



Sprinkled through House Appropriations Committee reports in 

 1978, the second year when Flowers chaired the Fossil and Nuclear 

 Subcommittee are references to the initial recommendation and find- 

 ings of the Science and Technology Committee. These testify to the 

 closer working relationship with the appropriations process which 

 Flowers established. Before Flowers became chairman, the House Ap- 

 propriations Committee usually ignored or openly fought recommen- 

 dations by the Science Committee. Although Hechler was personally 

 friendly with Representatives Tom Bevill (Democrat of Alabama) and 

 Sidney R. Yates (Democrat of Illinois), chairmen of the comparable 

 Appropriations Subcommittees, one of the difficulties was that Hech- 

 ler's subcommittee in most cases recommended increases over the 

 budget for fossil fuels R. & D. This resulted in confrontations occa- 

 sionally extending to attempts to amend the appropriations bills on the 

 floor, which in most cases were beaten down. After some initial fail- 

 ures in 1977, in 1978 the Flowers subcommittee used a different ap- 

 proach: Deep cuts were made in outdated technologies in the fossil 

 area, which were respected and frequently adopted by the Appropria- 

 tions Committee. This not only made it possible to make some modest 

 increases in promising technologies, but it also cemented closer rela- 

 tionships with the Appropriations Committee which respected the 



