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5 

 CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS 



In the course of its domestic workshops and its two overseas trips, 

 the committee covered a wide range of topics concerned with inter- 

 national cooperation in the development of controlled, magnetically 

 confined fusion. The study considered "cooperation," in the general 

 sense of acting with others for mutual benefit on either a small or a 

 large scale and "collaboration," in a somewhat more specific sense of 

 working actively together as approximately equal partners in sizeable 

 enterprises. 



The various meetings identified three qualitatively different paths 

 to fusion energy that lie open to the United States. The first is to 

 support in a domestic program the full range of research, development, 

 and prototype plant construction efforts that are needed to optimize 

 the chances for successful fusion power generation, seeking all-out 

 competitive advantage with respect to other world programs, simple 

 parity with them, or somewhere in between. The second path is to 

 carry out that sort of full-range program using increased 

 international collaboration, which shares the financial costs and 

 risks among several partners. The third is to accept a 

 less-than-optimum domestic program, carried out at whatever level is 

 affordable, accepting some likelihood that the United States would 

 forfeit a greater or lesser degree of equality with other programs 

 and, at the extreme, might have to purchase the technology from others 

 sometime in the future. The middle path seems to the committee to be 

 the preferable and practical choice. As a result, the United States 

 would not, as on the first path, be mounting a more costly program 

 than the competitive circumstances suggest. Nor would the country, as 

 on the third path, be conducting a program more limited than it need 

 accept. The committee believes, that, in time, potential partners 

 will reach similar conclusions for themselves. 



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