Word: aec
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Atomic Energy Commission's Livermore, Calif, fusion laboratory, Teller turns his mind to development of tactical-size, low-fallout thermonuclear weapons. In addition, he serves on the AEC's General Advisory Committee and the Air Force's Scientific Advisory Board, carries on his own strenuous public education campaign in media as far afield from pure science as the This Week Sunday supplement. Main topics: the survival value of underground bomb shelters, the need for continued nuclear-weapons tests, and, above all, the urgency of keeping ahead of Russia in science...
...annual meeting of the Atomic Industrial Forum in Manhattan's Plaza hotel last week, the Atomic Energy Commission hit the uranium business with a hydrogen bomb. Said AEC's Raw Materials Chief Jesse Johnson: "We have arrived at the point where it is no longer in the interest of the Government to expand production of uranium concentrate...
...decision meant that while the U.S. will honor its existing contracts to buy uranium concentrate from mills, it does not intend to sign any new contracts that would appreciably increase production. Thus, after ten years of an all-out program to expand uranium mining. AEC put on the squeeze: any big new uranium discoveries will probably not be able to find a market. But Johnson did leave the door open a bit for the building of mills in hitherto undeveloped regions: "If new contracts are considered, preference will be given to providing a limited market for areas having no present...
...Will Search? The freeze, AEC said, was ordered because the U.S. by 1959 will be able to produce 15,000 tons of uranium concentrate a year, easily enough for the nation's military and power needs. But the hold-down seemed aimed more at squeezing the budget than at controlling an oversupply. Johnson himself admitted that the U.S. has only a ten-year supply of uranium-ore reserves at the projected 1959 production rate. Later he conceded that he does not know how much ore the U.S. will need for its military and economic security ten years from...
...more basic problem is that the commercial market is far too small to support the many companies that have bounded into it. While six big companies supply almost all the equipment for the $1.5 billion-a-year conventional power market, 50 to 60 firms plan to make reactor equipment. AEC expects few of them to survive. Said the commission's Reactor Development Director W. Kenneth Davis: "During the next few years the business will not support 50 companies or even a fraction of them. We could have a few good companies or a lot of mediocre or bad ones...