No Manhattan Project

President Ford has maintained that the U.S. will spare no effort to develop alternative sources of energy. Yet up to now the Administration has not answered the fundamental policy question: What should replace oil and natural gas, which presently supply more than 75% of the nation's power needs but are rapidly becoming scarcer as well as more costly?

This week the Energy Research and Development Administration, created by Ford last October to map out the nation's route to alternate sources of power (TIME, April 14), published its first recommendations. The ERDA policy blueprint will not stir much hope for a quick solution to the complex energy dilemma. Concedes ERDA Deputy Administrator Robert Fri: "One message of the plan is that we're sorry, but there is no simple answer." The agency calls for stepped-up development of a wide range of new and existing energy technologies and resources. But up through the mid-1980s, the country must try to keep pace with expanding power needs principally by squeezing more out of present sources, chiefly domestic oil and natural gas, as well as coal, which now supplies about 20% of U.S. energy consumption.

Further Research. For the time being, at least, ERDA is not advocating a federally financed Manhattan Project for the development of any single new source of energy such as solar power--a decision that will draw fire from environmentalists. Although ERDA expects to spend about $1.5 billion over the coming year on further research into such promising power sources as coal gasification and geothermal and solar generating plants, the agency is opposed to an all-out federal development effort that is focused on one or two energy alternatives. Instead, ERDA is persuaded that Washington can encourage a broader and more effective assault on the problem by private industry.

Later on in the century, as oil and natural gas reserves begin to run down, ERDA foresees a shift to two "essentially inexhaustible" sources of power: solar energy and nuclear power. While some other alternatives, notably geothermal power, will have a role to play, ERDA has decided that the sun and the atom are "the major candidates for meeting energy needs of the future." If the approach ERDA espouses is successful, the agency forecasts that by the year 2000 the U.S. will have 450 nuclear generating plants (current total: 55) and anywhere from 200 to 400 plants that convert solar power to electricity. As the oil-scarce 21st century arrives, ERDA says, the U.S. will be on the way to a virtually all-electric country, with 10-15 million solar-heated homes and 15 million electric cars weaving among the remaining gas guzzlers on the highways.

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