Change at the AEC

After ten years as Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg, 59, resigned last week to return to the University of California at Berkeley. A professor of nuclear chemistry, Seaborg can look back on his long tenure at the AEC with mixed feelings. Under his stewardship, the agency actively promoted peaceful uses of atomic power and oversaw the modernization of the nation's growing nuclear defense force. On the other hand, the AEC has recently come under increasingly sharp criticism by scientists and conservationists who mainly fear the environmental effects of continuing nuclear experiments and proliferating power plants.

Nominated by President Nixon to replace Seaborg is James R. Schlesinger, 42, an assistant director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. In that job, he gained a reputation for being a brilliant analyst and an efficient administrator. Before joining the Nixon Administration in 1969, Schlesinger taught economics at the University of Virginia and then joined the Rand Corp., where he was a director of strategic studies. As part of his job, he conducted a study on nuclear proliferation. The exchange of a distinguished scientist (Seaborg won a Nobel Prize in 1951 for work in chemistry) for a full-time manager is probably a harbinger of a shift in the AEC's mission.

Reinforcing such conjecture is the President's choice last week of William O. Doub, 39, chairman of the Maryland Public Service Commission, to fill another vacancy on the five-man AEC. If approved by Congress, the two nominees, along with the earlier appointment of Clarence E. Larson, will make Nixon appointees the majority on the commission. Equally significant, it will be dominated by commissioners* who have devoted their lives mainly to administration rather than research --precisely the type of people to remedy what is widely known as the nation's "energy crisis."

* Besides Larson, previously president of Union Carbide's nuclear division, the present AEC members are James T. Ramey, lawyer, and Wilfred E. Johnson, former manager of the Hanford Atomic Works.

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