Mr. ASPINALL. When you talk about a 300-million-gallon-a-day operation, you are talking about a 900-acre-foot-per-day operation. And if you carried that out into the period of a year, you are talking about 340,000 acre-feet of water, which might be a sizable supply as far as the amount is concerned for irrigation. But do you think that there is any possibility of making water available for irrigation under the program that is presently envisioned ?

Mr. RAMEY. Not in the period of the 1970's, Mr. Aspinall. The costs of water during this period would be much in excess of the price of irrigation water.

I think the idea of this program, of going to these sizes is going to get the technical and economic data to project what these desalting plants could do in the 1980's in very large sizes.

Mr. ASPINALL. Now, let your engineers and scientists answer this question. How much do they figure they can break this down by 1990?

Mr. RAMEY. Well, my understanding is—of course, that is a good

ways away.

Mr. ASPINALL. I know it. But we have before this committee the southwest water plan, which is being talked about as including a desalination as a possible means of supplementing the water supplies of the Southwest. I just want to know what we are talking about.

Mr. RAMEY. These estimates for the larger plants in the 1970'sthe cost of water gets down to around 20 cents a thousand gallons, and then these very rough estimates for plants beyond that, they think, taking the economics of size again, would be that you would get below a 20-cent figure.

Now, we have not felt that we are in a position to really be saying how much below we would be getting.

Mr. ASPINALL. Well, I take it that is your best figure, and that will be some place between 10 cents and 20 cents per thousand gallons, and I will take the lower part of that, and still your water is going to cost some place between $30 to $45 per acre-foot.

Mr. RAMEY. Yes, sir.

Mr. ASPINALL. You cannot even use that kind of water for irrigation, and you cannot keep saying to the people of the United States that we are going to use desalted water for irrigation, because we can transfer it hundreds of miles perhaps cheaper than even your lowest cost.

Mr. RAMEY. You appreciate, Mr. Aspinall, that in our statements we have not claimed that the technology, as we have developed it, and how we project it, will achieve what is being charged, what the prices are for irrigation.

We have thrown out the hope—and, again, this may be overly optimistic. But we have the experience in the atomic power field where we are in process of achieving economic atomic power somewhat ahead of the time anyone thought we would be able to do so. And we have been pretty successful in the nuclear power applications.

Now, what we are trying to do on the technology, on these combination plants, is to see whether or not, by the engineering improvement and development of these plants, that water in the very large amounts would be at least competitive with other sources in the 1980-90 period. Now, one of the things that we will be doing in the next 10 years, of course, is getting a better figure on what the comparative costs of

other sources of water are. We will be in a situation, then, by the time our prototypes are in operation, to have a pretty good idea of what it costs on the dual-purpose nuclear desalting side in the bigger plants, and what it would cost in bringing water down from other places. And it could be that the nuclear desalting plants would be competitive.

I known you know much more about this than I, as to the differences between the cost of producing water and the price of water-that there are these differences, the same as in the electric energy game.

Mr. ASPINALL. Of course the only place this water can be possibly used would be in some large cities, as far as the seventies are concerned, where it might be needed, so that they would use it for municipal water at this price.

Mr. RAMEY. Yes, sir-and for industrial purposes, perhaps.

Mr. ASPINALL. For certain industrial purposes. That is pretty expensive water for industrial purposes, when you can circulate polluted water in many of your industrial operations.

I think that is all.

Mr. ROGERS of Texas. Did you have a question, Mr. Burton?

Mr. BURTON of Utah. Mr. Chairman, I just want to underscore what the gentleman from Colorado had said. In using this $30 to $45 an acre-foot cost, the gentleman is giving the program practically every conceivable benefit of the doubt, and that is almost an unrealistic figure.

Mr. ASPINALL. As you might water pansies in your window, but that is about as close as you are going to get.

Mr. ROGERS of TEXAS. Mr. Commissioner, in discussing further this cost-now, we talk about a dual-purpose project or plant. Now, do I understand that the same energy cost is being applied against the desalting water process as is being charged against the production of electric energy y?

Mr. RAMEY. Well, essentially, yes. The method that we have used to set a power value as to the value of the steam for electric power purposes is the cost of the cheapest alternate source of energy in a singlepurpose installation. And then figure out the cost of water from there in the dual-purpose installation using that as the value of the power. Mr. ROGERS of Texas. Well, now, we have heard a lot of discussion in Congress about waste power, power in a nuclear plant that would be wasted if it was not used for, we will say, production of electric energy, and I presume the same could be applied to desalting water.

Now, we are talking here about a plant designed to produce electric energy, and also to make it possible to desalt water.

Mr. RAMEY. Yes, sir.

Mr. ROGERS of Texas. What I am thinking about is just how far we are going in the question of waste energy. Are we making the determination on 10- or 20-cent water from the premise that this energy is going to cost less because it would be wasted if we didn't use it?

Mr. RAMEY. No, sir; it is not. It is an accounting method that does attribute a cost to the steam that goes into the desalting plant. And that cost essentially is the difference between the total cost of the steam and the cost that is attributed to the electric power production, which is the cost of the cheapest alternate source.

Mr. ROGERS of Texas. How much cheaper is that when applied to the desalting process than would be the cost if the steam was made for the simple purpose of desalting water?

Mr. RAMEY. Well, the main advantage that you get from this dualpurpose application, Mr. Chairman, I guess, is that you are building a bigger plant, and, therefore, the unit cost of the steam is cheaper for either purpose than it would be if you built a plant just for electric power production.

In other words, if you built a smaller plant for making electric power, your costs would be a little higher than if you built a bigger plant.

Mr. ROGERS of Texas. Now, as I understand it, you do contemplate building nuclear powerplants for the production of electric energy. Mr. RAMEY. Yes, sir.

Mr. ROGERS of Texas. I mean the Atomic Energy Commission is going to do this, regardless of what happens to desalting.

Mr. RAMEY. Yes. The private and publicly owned utilities are building them now economically.

Mr. ROGERS of Texas. Yes; I understand that.

In other words, the production of electric energy can be found from nuclear energy as a source.

Mr. RAMEY. Yes, sir.

Mr. ROGERS of Texas. Now, the next thing is, as I understand you, when you translate thermal kilowatts into electric kilowatts, you lose about 3 of your thermal kilowatts to produce 1 electric kilowatt. Mr. RAMEY. Yes, sir.

Mr. ROGERS of Texas. Now, what happens to those 3 thermal kilowatts? Are they lost altogether in an electric plant, or are you utilizing them for the desalting process?

Mr. RAMEY. Well, perhaps Mr. Williams can explain that again. My understanding is that we do re-use some of the steam that comes from the electric generator, the steam that would ordinarily go to the condenser, and then back into the reactor or boiler. So there you do get the advantage of this aspect of it in your cycle.

In addition, when you are designing a dual-purpose plant, you steal a little of the steam that would normally go through your generator and bypass it into your desalting plant, also.

Now, for both of these types of steam, we are giving a certain cost and a certain value. In other words, the desalting plant doesn't get this for nothing.

Mr. ROGERS of Texas. Yes; I understand that.

Now, if you didn't have that desalting plant on there, what would happen to this steam, would it just be wasted?

Mr. RAMEY. Well, it would go-the steam-you would build your generator a little differently to take as much advantage of your heat as you could, and then the steam that does go through your turbine generator then would go to the condenser and back. And in that sense it is wasted.

But I think there is a nice scientific point that the engineers and scientists make, that from a thermodynamic standpoint you are not really taking waste heat and utilizing it in your desalting facility, technically speaking.

Is that right?

Mr. ROGERS of Texas. Would you like to address yourself to that?
Mr. WILLIAMS. Yes, sir, Mr. Chairman.

Actually, in a power-only-type installation, you take water and apply energy to it, and you cause steam to be formed, usually at fairly high temperatures and pressures. This is led to a turbine, and generally speaking the higher the temperature and the higher the pressure the more valuable that steam is for power generation-it is more readily usable. As you get to the lower pressures, as you go through a turbine, it becomes less and less valuable.

Normally speaking, it would be rejected to a condenser at roughly 90° to 100°, under a vacuum condition-where you strip as much of the energy out as economically practical. This would give you an overall plant efficiency, perhaps, in the neighborhood of 33 to maybe even 40 percent, depending on the original temperature. And the dual-purpose concept-you still have the water, the applied energy, causing it to form into steam, and you take it through a turbine, only to the extent that it is really valuable for power, and you take, not waste steam, but exhaust steam at something above this 90°, say it is 200°, and you lead this to a desalting plant. And this furnishes energy there.

In the power only case, when you exhaust this steam to a condenser, you lose the heat of condensation. We can take advantage of that heat of condensation by running it to a desalting plant, say the brine heater, and then return it to the reactor. So there is an advantage to coupling the two plants together from a thermodynamic standpoint.

Mr. ROGERS of Texas. How much is your efficiency reduced by making a dual-purpose plant rather than a single purpose?

Mr. WILLIAMS. Usually the efficiency is given on the conversion process in a power only type installation.

From a thermal standpoint, I would say that you probably have an increased efficiency in the use of the energy by perhaps as much as 25 percent, sir.

Mr. ROGERS of Texas. In the use of the energy?

Mr. RAMEY. In the overall.

Mr. ROGERS of Texas. Which means the production of electric power, plus the desalting process.

Mr. WILLIAMS. Yes, sir.

Mr. ROGERS of Texas. What I have reference to is how much is your efficiency reduced when you relate it only to the production of electric energy?

Mr. WILLIAMS. I think you could say maybe there is a loss of perhaps 10 to 25 percent in the power only case.

Mr. ROGERS of Texas. But the one thing that is in the back of my mind is the cost of energy used-there is a base cost for your energy, for the desalting process, so that we don't run into the proposition later on of this being called, let's say, a subsidy, saying that the Pacific southwest is getting a huge subsidy, because this energy that would be used otherwise is being used to desalt water that is being made available to those people there therefore, people in the other part of the United States are entitled to the same type of subsidy, to produce water or to reduce pollution.

Mr. WILLIAMS. I think you can assign a value to the cost of prime steam-this is your high-temperature, high-energy steam.

I think you can also derive from its use in a turbine, depending on the takeoff point, an equivalent value for the exhaust steam to be used in a desalting plant.

Mr. ROGERS. Would you think that the desalting along with a production of electric energy is probably the best dual purpose project, or would there be some other purpose that you could associate with the production of electric energy that would pay greater dividends than desalting water, or trying to desalt, rather?

This

Mr. RAMEY. We looked at the application of process steam and electricity in paper mills, and that sort of purpose; and we found there and this was in the late 1950's-that the size factor hurt us. would be maybe making 25,000 electrical kilowatts, and an equal amount of steam for use in a paper or chemical plant. We found that that was just marginally economic. And we didn't find many people interested in doing it.

One of the reasons we found was that plants like this use wood, scraps, and various other types of waste material as their heat source. Mr. ROGERS. Then we can conclude that the dual purpose would be best served by the desalinization process along with the production of electrical energy?

Mr. RAMEY. I would say so. It is particularly adapted at the present time to these types of nuclear reactors that do not make high temperature steam, so that the steam coming out of the turbine goes through the normal drop, and then it is not so far off from what would be needed for a desalting plant anyhow.

Mr. ROGERS. Is research continuing on this particular type of problem?

Mr. RAMEY. Yes. One of the reasons we are doing this now is to get an idea of the optimum use of the heat energy for power and water; because this ratio of your power to your water differs as to the temperature of the reactor. When you have a higher temperature reactor you would be producing a higher ratio, a higher proportion of steam, and you would normally be producing more electric power proportionately to your water; whereas if you were using a water type reactor you would be producing a higher ratio a higher proportion of water to your electric power production. The cost of water in each case would be about the same.

So you can vary these, depending on the particular needs of the area. If the area is deficient in electric power, then you might build one kind of reactor, or fossil-fired plant. If it is deficient and needs larger quantities of water, then you would design it to get the optimum amount of water.

So one of the things that we always advocate is that you can't really talk about these matters in the abstract entirely, you have to take a particular area and see what the particular needs of that particular area are in relation to power and water.

Mr. ROGERS. And that would have to do with dual purpose?
Mr. RAMEY. Yes, sir.

Mr. ROGERS. With whatever other purpose outside of electric energy would best be served or would best serve in that general area? Mr. RAMEY. Yes, although again in these sizes of course, you might be able to use the steam for something else, for heating, perhaps. Mr. ROGERS. Mr. Reinecke.