Recognizing a few of those involved in the Acaden^y study: the chairman of the committee is Dale Corson, President Emeritus of Cornell University. John Dougherty of Electric Power Research Institute is one of the participants of the committee concentrating on the technological aspects. Thomas Payne, former NASA administrator now at Northrop; Kumar Patel of Bell Laboratories; Marvin Chodorow of Stanford University and Ross McDonald, now of the University of North Carolina, are a few of the others involved in this area. Turning to the economic aspects, the members of the committee studying this area are Charles Hitch, former president of the University of California; Klaus Heiss, president of ECON, Inc.; and Bruce Hannon of the University of Illinois. Leading various efforts on the environmental aspects are Richard Setlow of Brookhaven; William Gordon, Dean of Natural Sciences at Rice University and Gordon Little of NOAA. The work on the international aspects and public acceptance aspects is being led by former Ambassador Leonard Meeker and Norman Bradburn, Director of the Public Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, respectively. Donald Hornig now at the Harvard School of Public Health, formerly Science Advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson is organizing and directing the comparative assessment. As stated, it is not appropriate for me to draw any conclusions at this early stage but I do want to make a few personal observations. The DOE assessment is truly unique in its early timing and its thoroughness, and it has been adequately observed earlier that it will be a useful model in the future. I have found that the 20- to 50-year time frame of the concept makes it subject to a very large discount rate, both in money and in the time that people are willing to allocate to it now -- a handicap that SPS has to overcome. Some characteristics of the SPS concept are the following: its supposed to make a massive investment in a single piece of equipment; to design this for a very long economic lifetime of 30 years; to put it in an inaccessible place; and to use technology that is galloping along in its development. Under these conditions flexibility has to be designed in along with the ability to retrofit the system, otherwise we will be amortizing technically obsolete hardware. As we come closer to any actual deployment decision for SPS its going to be useful to examine the ripple effect on the entire economy of investing $30 billion every year for three years on one segment of one industry. A macroeconomic assessment needs to be done, not this year, but a little closer to actual deployment. Finally, what strikes me is that the real SPS decisions are going to be made in a new decade by people other than thee and me; the younger generation will be the inheritors of the SPS and so their attitudes are al 1-important. In closing, since starting on this project, one literary allusion comes to mind that might apply to our attitude toward this study: "Make no little plans, they have not the power to move men's minds."
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