John P. Holdren, Professor of Environmental Science and Public Policy, Harvard University, and a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) has written a letter to the editor of the New York Times expressing his views on the U. S. fusion program. The letter was prompted by an October 22 article "Who Needs Oil" in the Sunday Times by science reporter James Glanz. Holdren told Fusion Power Associates that Glanz's article was a "misrepresentation of my views on fusion." A web version of Glanz's article is postedat http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/22/weekinreview/22GLAN.html and is reproduced below following the text of Holdren's letter.

Text of Holdren Letter:

"To the Editor:

"James Glanz’ article, 'Who Needs Oil?' (Sunday, The Week in Review), oversimplified my views on fusion energy. I did not say that 'fusion scientists had mistakenly concentrated on building the large and complex tokamaks, rather than seeking simpler ways to do the job'.

"I said, rather, that budgetary constraints had forced a premature pruning, in the 1980s, of the approaches to fusion energy that could be pursued, and that the unfortunate but understandable result was to concentrate most of the effort on the avenue closest to reaching energy breakeven -- the tokamak -- to the detriment of alternative but less well developed approaches that might ultimately prove to be simpler and cheaper.

"The report on fusion-energy research that I chaired for the White House in 1995 recommended a level of funding for fusion that would allow continued U.S. participation in a somewhat downsized international tokamak project, while maintaining a respectable effort in alternative concepts and a strong foundation in basic fusion science. But the recommended funding levels have not materialized.

"Neither has adequate federal funding been forthcoming for domestic R&D and international cooperation to achieve the advances that are possible in other energy domains -- renewable energy, advanced fossil-fuel technologies, safer and more proliferation-resistant nuclear fission systems, and increased energy-end-use efficiency.

"As two further studies my colleagues and I completed for the White House in 1997 and 1999 made clear, federal investments in developing the whole panoply of energy options are simply not commensurate with the energy challenges that the 21st century will present."

John P. Holdren
Chair of the Energy Panel
President’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology
Executive Office of the President of the United States
and
Director, Program on Science, Technology, and Public Policy
John F. Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University

All three PCAST reports mentioned by Holdren are available full-text on the Web at http://www.ostp.gov/ under "PCAST".

The text of the Glanz article, as posted at the NY Times web site (http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/22/weekinreview/22GLAN.html), is reproduced below:

October 22, 2000
WHO NEEDS OIL?
By JAMES GLANZ

IF there was one thing America's scientists seemed sure of during the energy crisis of the 1970's, it was that new methods of generating energy from the wind, the sun, the ocean waves and other sources would soon free the country from its dependence on foreign oil.

In particular, a form of nuclear energy called fusion promised clean, safe and inexhaustible energy. In an editorial in August 1975 that mirrored scientific optimism, The New York Times noted a recent "major breakthrough in fusion research" and predicted that a test reactor could be working "as early as the mid-1980's; commercial applications could become a reality a decade later."

What happened? Why couldn't President Clinton flood power grids with wind, solar or fusion energy during the recent oil squeeze?

"In 1976, almost everybody said the price of oil would keep going up," said Dr. Steve Fetter, a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland. "In fact, that's what drove a lot of the optimism about nonfossil technology."

Instead, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries the monopoly opened the spigots again, new reserves of fossil fuels were found, energy prices fell and financing for alternative energy research plummeted.

Nonetheless, even with the drop in financing, said Bobi Garrett, strategic planner at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Col., present-day generators of wind and solar power measure up well against the targets of cost and efficiency that were set in the heady 1970's.

"The technical goals that were set back in those early days of renewables, have been met," Ms. Garrett said.

For example, she said, advances in the design of the modern windmills called turbines have brought the cost of wind-generated electricity down from 40 cents a kilowatt- hour in 1980 to somewhere between 4 and 6 cents today. But a modern natural gas-fired plant produces electricity at 3 to 4 cents a kilowatt- hour, so wind turbines are still second best.

Despite that, although wind turbines produce only about 0.1 percent of the world's electricity, that still adds up to a lot of juice, and installed capacity for wind power in the United States is growing faster than any other renewable source by 30 percent in 1999, according to the American Wind Energy Association.

Solar electrical cells, called photovoltaics, have also fallen steeply in price, although they produce much less energy than wind, and at a higher cost per kilowatt-hour. Units totaling 200 megawatts in photovoltaic capacity were shipped worldwide in 1999 alone, compared with 40 megawatts in 1990.

Then there is fusion, the ne plus ultra of energy production.

Unlike fission, which generates energy by splitting heavy atoms like uranium, fusion does so by joining together light atoms like hydrogen. The sun is powered by fusion, and so are hydrogen bombs. Fusion produces no long-lived radioactivity, and it can be powered by a form of hydrogen found in sea water.

Controlled fusion made its peculiar debut in 1951, when Juan Peron, the president of Argentina, announced that one of his scientists had achieved fusion. He hadn't, but the announcement jump-started the fusion program in the United States. The high-water mark of fusion research in the United States arrived in 1994, when a doughnut-shaped fusion vessel called a tokamak generated 11 megawatts of fusion power at Princeton less power than it took to run the experiment, but a step forward nonetheless.

Dr. John Holdren, a professor of environmental science at Harvard University and a member of the president's council on science and technology, said that fusion scientists had mistakenly concentrated on building the large and complex tokamaks, rather than seeking simpler ways to do the job. Other scientists disagree, saying the real choice involves whether to rejoin an international effort to build a giant, multibillion-dollar tokamak that the United States abandoned several years ago, or to study fusion in the smaller and sleeker tokamaks that have now been designed.

Both sides agree that, despite high-tech windmills and solar cells that would have dazzled disco-era researchers, only a sustained research program will put nonfossil energy into the same league as oil, coal and natural gas.

Dr. Dale M. Meade, head of advanced fusion concepts at Princeton, speaking by phone from Rome, said he marveled at the scale of the Forum, the aqueducts and the Coliseum: "Amazing what people were able to do 2,000 years ago when they put their will to it."

There is some hope today that the will can be summoned, even as oil prices, for the moment, moderate. The reason lies with a term that almost nobody had heard in the 1970's, much less tied to emissions from fossil fuels: global warming.