g o v e r n m e n t & policy thousands of more barrels there, and this is a 35-year project. We are talking about a few months' delay." One of the groups likely to sue DOE over permit changes is the Southwest Research & Information Center in Albuquerque, N.M. Spokesman Don Hancock says the group plans to take legal action if DOE attempts to ship any waste from the Rocky Flats or Idaho sites before gaining a permit. Hancock is flatly opposed to WIPP and argues the waste should be left on-site. The federal judge's ruling that lifted the injunction and allowed the first drums of Los Alamos waste to go to WIPP did not address transuranic-only waste from other sites, Hancock emphasizes. Litigation is also likely from the New Mexico state government if DOE moves ahead with its plan to ship from those sites. However, if stored there, he says, the waste should be stabilized with concrete or grout rather than leaving it in 55-gal drums. Over the millennia, Hancock is sure water will enter the site and the drums will degrade, leading to releases of the waste. He also believes the waste will
be stumbled upon during mining and drilling operations in the distant future. "People forget," adds Arjun Makhijani, IEER's president. He predicts that eventually whatever kind of government runs New Mexico in the thousands of years ahead will lose institutional control, the waste will be discovered, and the site will become a plutonium mine—with all that that implies. He also fears DOE is underestimating the impact of leaving 140,000 eu m of waste in shallow graves at sites around the country. In addition, Makhijani believes the numbers themselves are wrong. He points to one of few studies that looked at so-called legacy waste, done in 1995 for the Idaho site, that found three times more plutonium—200 bombs worth—than expected. Consequently, he says DOE's self-congratulatory statements on WIPP's opening are "intemperate." "DOE is not solving an environmental problem; it is moving waste from one place to another. This can't be seen as a solution, particularly when the final answer must depend on what happens thousands of years into the future."^
ATP comes under scrutiny—again In late March, the National Academy of Sciences held a workshop to discuss the impacts that the Commerce Department's Advanced Technology Program (ATP) is having on technology and the economy. Participants pointed out that although the original impetus for creating ATP nearly 10 years ago no longer exists—that is, the fear that the Japanese economy would soon outcompete the U.S. economy—ATP is playing an important role in developing new technologies that keep U.S. industry strong. ATP is a competitive grant mechanism to encourage and nourish economically valuable technologies that might otherwise go untried because the R&D risks are too high to be supported entirely by the private sector. It was established in 1990 and is administered by the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Md. At the NAS meeting, NIST Director Raymond G. Kammer explained that ATP has had to fight for its survival almost from its inception. Partly as a result of repeated attacks, ATP has been evaluated almost every year. "ATP is probably the most thoroughly studied program of its kind in the world," Kammer said. However, the very nature of ATP— 3 6 APRIL 12,1999 C&EN
broad based and long range—makes it very difficult to get precise estimates of its economic benefits, Kammer said. Measuring broad-based economic benefits requires "tracking and measuring impacts that go well beyond the individual company or companies that did the original work," he said. "Long range means out in the future," but one can't wait until many years have passed to do analyses. The meeting at NAS is part of a new evaluation of ATP. In the fiscal 1999 appropriations bill for the Commerce Department, Congress asked the National Research Council to do an independent overview of the program, and the March meeting was the first step in that process. At the workshop, speakers described several important technologies they claimed would not exist today without the program's support. For example, with ATP funding, Albany, N.Y.-based X-Ray Optical Systems Inc. developed optics specific for the use of X-rays in the study of crystals, said David Gibson, president of the company. The technology is now employed in the semiconductor, steel, and cement industries. When Gibson was first attempting to start this project, he sold his house to pay patent attorneys
, m; and used his parents' pension funds, but still did not have enough money to develop the optics, he explained. Venture capitalists were not interested because of the lead time of seven to nine years before the technology would become profitable. As another example, in the past, when a potentially dangerous situation appeared to be developing in a refinery unit, the operator usually hit the panic button and shut down the whole process, said Richard Ramseyer, director of business development for Honeywell Technology Center. But Honeywell Corp. has used ATP money to develop a new cost-saving device that enables refinery operators to know whether to shut down a unit or to simply slow down the system. Jeffrey A. Schloss, program director at the National Human Genome Research Institute, a part of NIH, pointed out that the successful achievement of the ambitious goals of the Human Genome Project "can only be accomplished by an effective partnership between the publicly funded effort and private enterprise." The result of ATP investment in DNA and genomics technologies "has been to stimulate this sector so that a much wider array of ideas can much more rapidly get converted into methods, devices, and reagents that actually work," he said. At the meeting, Kammer released the results of a new internal study that evaluates the impacts of the 38 ATP projects completed by March 1997. He noted that one of these projects alone—processing and control technologies for the auto body industry—is projected to produce annual savings of $65 million to $160 million for the auto industry, in contrast to ATP's total investment of $64.6 million in all 38 projects. (The report is available at www.atp.nist.gov/atp/pubs.htm.) In the past, critics of ATP have argued that there is no need for ATP because private venture capital will fund really promising commercial technologies. However, Josh Lerner, a professor at Harvard Business School, pointed out that venture capital cannot be relied on to finance all deserving technologies because it is put into a very narrow range of technologies, mostly those related to the Internet and biotechnology. NRC will publish an interim evaluation of ATP based on the meeting in a few months and afinalevaluation will be available in May 2000, says ATP Director Lura J. Powell. Bette Hileman
