349 



I believe there are three motivations. One is for the scientist 

 working now. It is a field which, because it is difficult, it is im- 

 mensely challenging. 



I have been living, not as an expert elementary physicist, but an 

 accelerator builder among physicists, and, God, have they got an 

 easy one there, understanding what symmetries are, in compari- 

 sion to the people trying to understand why the plasma disrupts 

 under certain conditions. 



The field is complicated and, therefore, can come in a ditch, I 

 think. That is an explanation why people get stuclc with it and why 

 they also hope. Their second point is I believe we can be more opti- 

 mistic than those people who maybe told you 10 years ago it will be 

 20 years. In these 10 years, progress has been dramatic. Sometimes 

 a nonplasma physicist gets angry when our experiment does 920 

 milliseconds instead of 1 second of confinement time. And I say, "We 

 said in this one, we said we would make 1 second, why didn't we?" 

 Somebody pipes up from the corner and says, "You just forgot 5 

 years ago we were glad to measure 10 milliseconds, look how far 

 we have come." 



I am not content, because we wanted to do 8 percent better. So 

 we have gone a long way and we are feeling that as far as scientific 

 feasibility and the proof goes, we are close to striking pay dirt. 



I mean, when you express it in the simplest way, what you have 

 to do is achieve a product of density temperature and energy con- 

 finement time, which in suitable units, is SxlO^i. In JET we have 

 reached 10 ^o. Our aim is a factor of five, only more, and we 

 haven't started yet, you might say. So we are very optimistic to 

 make it for the early nineties. But we also have to admit that 

 around the corner in this complicated field can be difficulties, and 

 my figures are assuming 20, 30 years for almost straight on, but 

 solving a lot of problems, 20 to 50 years, then there has been a 

 bandit around the corner and has held us up for 10 years. 



If it is worth it, I believe so, yes, because it is the only method of 

 energy production in my view which has prime materials which 

 exist everywhere. And we have seen how sensitive our world can 

 be, and especially our world and our standard of living can be, if 

 some prime materials are not equally spread over the surface of 

 the earth. 



I believe that is the final motivation, which in my view makes it 

 necessary. As long as we have the quality in our ideas and the 

 means to do it, we would be fools if we didn't try very hard. 



Mr. FuQUA. Mr. Packard. 



Mr. Packard. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 



I was intrigued by your comment that it may be as much as 30 to 

 50, 55 to 60 years before we— I didn't think anything we knew 

 about we would have to spend that much time getting to. The rate 

 of progress — we tend to think anything we can conceive we can 

 achieve within a matter of 20 years or less. 



So it is hard for some of us who recognize we probably won't be 

 around 50 years from now, we couldn't achieve most anything we 

 put our mind to, but, of course, there are factors. Money, the com- 

 mercialization part of it, would probably take as long as the devel- 

 opment part and so forth. 



