Minerals supply called major crisis of 1980s Problems the U.S. is having with its materials and minerals policy were aired last week at hearings held jointly by two House subcommittees. Among those testifying was the Federation of Materials Societies, a collection of 14 technical societies, including the American Chemical Society. The federation (FMS) is trying to coordinate programs and educate policy makers about materials issues. FMS says it is trying to make legislators and the public understand that the solutions to materials problems are much more complicated than just opening more land for mining or having large stockpiles of strategic materials. Speaking for FMS as its immediate past president, Stanley V. Margolin warned the Congressmen t h a t "international trade agreements, the Law of the Sea treaty, import and export policies, technical specifications, technology—these and many other considerations are vital, interacting factors that affect the availability of our needed materials and minerals. Many of the factors must be more fully recognized by government officials who exercise control over them." In all, FMS presented 14 points it said need to be considered. These include, in part, defense dependency on foreign supplies of sophisticated materials, advantages held by foreign industrial competitors, sensitive foreign policy issues, adequacy and quality of stockpiled materials, energy, and problems of adequate education and manpower. Margolin likens the situation to earlier national problems. "In the 1960s it was the environment, in the 1970s it was energy, in the 1980s the major crisis is going to be materials," he says. And the problem is not just going to be simple physical availability. Margolin says that the heavy industry necessary to process raw materials to usable materials is disappearing in the U.S. He cites the steel, copper, and aluminum industries as just the most obvious examples of this problem. He also lays some of the problem on government regulations that have led to 42-month periods to build a major new plant of any sort, and a run of 10 years necessary to open any kind of large mining operation. The two subcommittees holding the hearings, both from the House
Science Committee, are examining information relative to a bill introduced by committee chairman Don Fuqua (D.-Fla.) that would establish a coordinating council in the White House to oversee various materials and minerals programs. FMS maintains that one of the nation's biggest problems is that no one administrator exists to take charge of a U.S. minerals policy. D
Chemical engineering needs, supply balanced Demand for chemical engineers over the next five years likely will grow at about the same rate as the supply of new chemical engineers entering the marketplace, according to a survey by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. The survey was a project of the supply and demand committee of AIChE. Essentially, it asked 26 leading chemical and petroleum processing companies to project their fu-
ture manpower needs for the next five years. The committee also expects the survey to provide a historical record as well as prediction and was based on hiring data from 1975 to 1980 that was gathered from 25 of the 26 companies. Selection of the companies to be polled was made on the bajsis of statistics showing that 40% of the demand for new chemical engineers from 1978 and 1979 came from just 23 companies, including Dow Chemical, Eastman Kodak, Du Pont, Shell Oil, International Business Machines, and Union Carbide. To these 23 were added Bechtel Power Corp., Rohm & Haas, and Standard Oil (Ind.). During 1975 to 1980, there was a close ratio between positions available and the number of chemical engineers graduating with bachelor's degrees. For example, in 1980, demand from the 25 companies was some 2500. Supply, figured at 40% of B.S. graduates, was about 2600. Both are projected to grow more or less in parallel over the next few
Bell Labs achieves shortest laser pulse yet The shortest pulse of laser light ever created—30 femtoseconds, or 30 X 10~ 1 5 second—is expected to enable scientists at Bell Telephone Laboratories to study fundamental changes occurring in semiconductor materials with greater precision than before. Charles V. Shank and his coworkers at their Holmdel, N.J., lab plan to use a series of precisely spaced pulses as "stopwatches" to time the early stages of physical changes as electrons move through tiny integrated circuit chips. Here, Shank adjusts the laser, which, he says, also could help chart energy movements from one part of a molecule to another. Moreover, the technique, a refinement over Bell Labs' 70-femtosecond laser, could be applied to the measurement of a whole range of unexplored and subtle phenomena—physical, chemical, and biological—that "begin to occur within the first 30 to 50 femtoseconds of a reaction," he says. In that time span, light would travel across barely half the thickness of a human hair.
April 26, 1982 C&EN
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