189 



But the fact of the matter is that there is a stranglehold by the 

 Tokamak community on the whole fusion program, and whenever 

 you suggest something like that, it's going to take some of the 

 money from the Tokamak, so that we are not really aggressive at 

 doing alternative concepts. 



Do you see that our participation in international efforts should be 

 in those big expensive projects, and not address the alternative 

 concepts in this area of international cooperation? You have men- 

 tioned it only once in your testimony, and only kind of as one of the 

 things that we should do amongst the four things that you recom- 

 mended, and didn't show up at all in the rest of the testimony. 



Mr. Gavin. Well, I think I touched on it very lightly earlier this 

 morning, in putting out that one aspect of collaboration is to avoid 

 duplicating efforts in some of these alternative approaches. It cer- 

 tainly seemed to me that the major forcing function for our inter- 

 national collaboration is the fact that these big machines are terri- 

 bly costly and require a fairly long period to conceive, design, build, 

 and put into operation. 



I think that in all the places that we visited, there was a healthy 

 activity with regard to certain alternatives — the reversed field 

 pinch, for example — and then the question is, "Well, how many of 

 those do you need?" And it would seem to me that international 

 collaboration would tend to reduce the duplication amongst the al- 

 ternatives and, in fact, it might produce more rapid progress with 

 some of the alternatives. 



I am not in a position to recommend which alternative or to 

 debate that point, but I do think that certainly the consensus we 

 ran into is that we should not abandon the more promising alter- 

 natives prematurely even though there was a consensus — and I 

 think I can report that consensus accurately — that the magnetic 

 fusion, basically the Tokamak or something like a Tokamak 

 seemed to be the dominant mode and the one from which the next 

 step should proceed. There is a lot of debate as to just what that 

 next step should be and how big a step it should be. 



Mr. LujAN. Do you think we have abandoned some of those alter- 

 native concepts prematurely? 



Mr. Gavin. I am not sure that I am qualified to comment in 

 detail other than that I suspect that some of the alternatives might 

 move faster if there were a joint program. 



Mr. LuJAN. NET, according to your testimony, has the objective 

 of achieving an ignited plasma in a long-burning mode. That's the 

 objective of NET. That is the same objective that we have in pro- 

 posing this fusion engineering facility. We both have the same ob- 

 jective, is that so? 



Mr. Gavin. The basic objectives of all communities are roughly 

 the same, I think. I think it's true that the studies done at Oak 

 Ridge in the past few years have been aimed at about the same di- 

 rection as the NET in Europe or the FER in Japan. I think some of 

 the details are different, but the general size of the step seems to 

 be similar. 



Mr. LujAN. Would it then make sense that we participate with 

 the Europeans in NET instead of going it alone? 



