I think one of the best bellwethers of international interest in the desalting program is the tremendous response that we have had to the first International Symposium on Water Desalination which will be held in the United States in October. To date we have received official lists of delegations from 53 countries. Without question there is tremendous interest in desalting technology throughout the world and in this country as well.

We are constantly receiving letters from foreign governments and from other agencies of our own Government and governmental subdivisions requesting information on our processes and their possible application.

We are continuously working very closely with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare on water pollution questions, because I am sure that some of our processes will help solve some of our pollution problems.

We have also worked with the Bureau of Mines and the State of Pennsylvania and other States to study the acid mine water problem. Perhaps we don't have the full answer to the treatment of acid mine waters, but we certainly have a partial answer in being able to provide the communities on the banks of these streams with potable water from these polluted streams.

I think I would be less than honest if I told you that we have answers to all the problems that we see. We don't. We think, however, we have the means of arriving at the answers.

In reorganizing the Office of Saline Water, one innovation that we have added is an Engineering Advisory Committee made up of active, experienced professional engineers to examine our engineering development program. We have also appointed very responsible and knowledgeable people to scrutinize our entire research program to see whether or not we are doing research in the correct disciplines or in the proper magnitude. This is going on now, and it will continue for the next 30 to 60 days. When these evaluations are completed, we will be able to pass judgment on our research program as it is now constituted. Any changes that are indicated will immediately be put into effect and priorities on various projects will be established.

We also have engineering committees investigating each of the process categories independently including distillation, freezing, membranes, and ion exchange.

We are reviewing the state of our technology before we utilize any of these processes in expensive hardware.

Our current program-and when I say "our current" I am talking about the short-range program which covers the next 5 or 6 yearsis largely an engineering oriented program. It will take existing processes and really engineer them properly to get the best results from them.

This will result in a need for actual demonstration of processes in reasonable sized plants, because just as our experience at San Diego indicated, we can study things on paper theoretically for months and months, but there is no substitute for an actual operating plant under actual conditions. A little later I will discuss the San Diego plant and what it has meant to the program.

In analyzing the proper role of the Office of Saline Water to develop desalting technology in relation to that which industry can most ad

vantageously perform, and this analysis has been conducted by conversations with the industry representatives and with other departments of Government, we generally find an agreement that the Office of Saline Water must bear the major responsibility for proving out a process. I don't think that it can be done by any other method. The basic process, the basic economics, the basic design, at least through the first generation development of a process must come from the Office of Saline Water. I would like to point out that we do not build plants; they will be built by private industry on competitive bids, but developing the design and the economics, I think, is the responsibility of the Office of Saline Water. The improvement of the plant, which is something second or third generation plans will produce, is probably more in the domain of private enterprise than in the Government domain.

To reach this point of technical and economic development, some processes may involve only the construction of first generation plants. Other processes may require the construction and field operation of several succeeding generations of plants. The engineering economics of a process must be developed to a practical basis. In my opinion a practical range is when we bring water down to a reasonable price bracket for municipal and industrial water. It would not include agricultural water.

Although a percentage reduction in cost may still be indicated, once we get the basic price down in the range of 30 to 35 cents and someone may propose a method of reducing the cost 2 cents more-I don't think that the Office of Saline Water ought to participate in that kind of a project. I think this is where industry, using its genius for lowering the manufacturing cost and the material costs, can best apply itself. Once we bring the price to a reasonable range, from then on that process should be in the domain of industry, and it would be up to them to refine it and improve it. Competition between various companies will continuously keep whittling away at the cost. I don't think that we should build second and third generation plants to make minor reductions in the cost of water.

To make progress toward these objectives we propose a threepronged approach with short, intermediate, and long-range goals. The short-range goal is to develop processes and plant designs which will provide the lowest possible desalting cost at the earliest possible time.

To accomplish this we must undertake a dynamic engineering effort to evaluate the significant amount of research and development technology acquired through this program to date and to choose what is best for immediate incorporation into the conceptual design of a desalting plant sized in the range of at least 50 times larger than those we are now operating.

A first and a very important step in the short-range programthis is the next 5 years is the construction of an advanced technology plant to replace the demonstration plant which was moved from San Diego to Guantanamo.

The data on this one-which I would like to submit for the recordis that the San Diego plant was operated for 2 years and produced 516 million gallons of water. The improvements we made to the San Diego plant required a moderate expenditure of $5,600, which in

creased its basic design capacity from 1 million gallons per day to 1,250,000. Under ideal conditions it hit peaks of 1,400,000 gallons per day.

(The information referred to follows:)

SAN DIEGO (POINT LOMA) SEA WATER CONVERSION DEMONSTRATION Plant

Design capacity 1 million gallons per day (g.p.d.).

First annual report January 1962 through June 1963 No. 71.

Second annual report July 1963 through February 1964 No. 100.

First operations (other than testing) March 5, 1962.

Dismantling for transfer to Guantanamo Bay started February 27, 1964. A. & E. contractor-Fluor Corp.

Construction contractor-Westinghouse Electric Corp.

Management, operation, and maintenance contractor-Burns & Roe, Inc. Multistage flash distillation process.

Most production in a 24-hour period, 1,400,000 gallons, May 2-3, 1963, with brine outlet temperature of 240° F.

Highest monthly production 25,600,000 gallons, April 1963.

Total plant output sold to San Diego 516 million gallons during period, March 1962 through February 1964. To produce this amount of product water, only 71.1 percent of plant capacity was utilized.

Most downtime was caused by marine vegetation, sand, and silt interfering with continuous operations.

Plant is capable of continuous production at a rate of 1,250,000 gallons per day and has a potental of 1,400,000 gallons per day.

Major modification accomplished:

Installation of pH control equipment.

Retubing of air ejector condenser.

Design and fabrication of intake pit airlift.

Capital cost, $1,907,000.

Demonstration plant operating cost (1 stream-day-300 operating days per

Mr. DI LUZIO. To call the proposed San Diego II plant a replacement is actually a misnomer. It is not a replacement plant, because it is not the same kind of plant as San Diego I. It is a plant which is really a second generation, multistage distillation plant. When the first plant was transferred from San Diego, the Office was already in the middle of plans to make major modifications that would provide an opportunity to operate the plant at higher temperatures, and other process improvements which would demonstrate that we could get more water out of this size plant at lower cost.

In the meantime, of course, the plant was transferred. So we wound up with neither the old plant to modify nor a new plant in which to try this new technology which we think is very critical to the design of large plants. There is also a need for this process. information for the design of 3- to 5-million-gallon-per-day plants.

Through the construction and operation of this new plant we expect to push the multistage flash technology considerably beyond that of the original San Diego plant. It will provide technical operating data on higher temperature and pressures.

Operating temperatures of the modified San Diego I were increased from 190° to 250° F. The new plant will begin at 250° F. with provisions to increase to 350° F.

It will have twice the efficiency. It will have 66 flashing stages instead of 36. It will have a 20-to-1 performance ratio, which means for each pound of steam we will hope to get 20 pounds of water instead of 10 pounds of water for each pound of steam produced by San Diego I. I would like to point out, however, that there is no magic in simply increasing temperatures, it is not a panacea to the water desalting problem.

By pushing up to higher temperatures we will find the upper limit at which we can operate economically without scale or corrosion. We must establish the upper parameters of temperature operations, because once established we can back off to a point of greatest operating efficiency.

Another thing that we hope to do when we rebuild the San Diego plant is to show that the new module will produce 1 or 1.2 million gallons of water with about a third of the cubage of the old plant. I think we know now how to build a plant which uses smaller evaporator pans, shorter flow patterns, better intakes, and a much smaller hydraulic systein.

There are some engineering tradeoffs we can make. We would like to find out through San Diego II what these tradeoffs really are from practical engineering standpoint.

We need to establish a west coast test facility where we can operate modules and models which must precede the construction of the first large plant. It seems likely that the first large plants will be erected in California, for three reasons. One is that they have extremely large cities. Two, they have a water shortage in that part of the country. And three, they have an aqueduct system and distribution system into which these large quantities of water can be fed.

California, fortunately or unfortunately, has both a need for quantity of water that we are talking about and a distribution system in being which will handle it.

The projected requirements for power in that area indicate an opportunity to design a plant loading factor on both the evaporator and the generating units which will provide a highly efficient dual-purpose plant.

I don't think a question asked this morning about building a dualpurpose plant was answered completely. I think several considerations were overlooked. One is that when a generating plant is built during its peaking requirements it operates at its highest efficiency. During off peak requirements it may have 60 percent of its capital investment sitting idle, which increases the per kilowatt cost of power.

So that if you have a plant which is only needed for peaking purposes, it sits idle except for a few times during the 24-hour cycle. One of the economies we get out of a dual-purpose plant is better utilization of the steam generator.

There are other economies in dual-purpose plants, powered by large reactors. One is that if we have a water plant associated with it we don't have to build condensers, which are very expensive pieces of equipment. We also can bleed off steam from the final turbines for better use in the waterplant because these are the high-cost phases of the electric generation cycle, and they produce the lowest efficiency in terms of generating capacity.

If we build a plant which has a dual purpose in a very expensive land area like California, it would be better to build one plant to serve many purposes instead of having two areas of expensive land tied down, one for water and one for power generation.

The interties between power blocks is another factor. Power can be transferred during an offpeak load cycle from one center to other centers which are hitting peaks. This is also an economic factor.

There is the possibility of operating two or three different processes at the same time. We can build a larger evaporator powered by a reactor to distill water. We also can take the turbine shaft and extend it, put a vapor compression plant at the end of it and use the mechanical energy of the spinning gears to produce water.

We can take off peak power from an atomic reactor and carry it considerable distances to brackish water plants which use electric

energy.

The point I am trying to make is that no one has really thought out the best total arrangement of a dual-purpose plant incorporating all of these ways of getting the fullest efficiency out of available power. This is one of the biggest phases of our program, to take a look at water requirements and see how we can best solve, not only sea coast city problems, but also inland brackish water problems. There are schemes afoot which indicate that we can really get low-cost energy to operate machines or processes which are very favorable.

I am sure you will hear industry witnesses who will say that they are now ready to build a 50- or 100-million-gallon plant with no further technology. I would have to say that perhaps they can do this. There is no magic in building it, but I wouldn't know how to evaluate the economics of such an offer. I would hate to have us gamble on doing it right now. It would be a first-generation plant. It would have bugs in it just like any first-generation plant.

The proposal we are making, to go from 1 million to a 17-milliongallon module and then to a 50-million-gallon-per-day pattern, a size in which the Metropolitan District is interested, is a logical program for two reasons. One, we are doing it step by step, and I think will provide surer results.

Two, in designing San Diego II, it will give us an idea of how to build a very efficient 3- to 5-million-gallon plant using that advanced technology, than by going to a 17-million-gallon module plant, onethird the size of the 50, we will have solid data for a 15- to 20-milliongallon plant. Those are all things which will spin off from the central program.

Now, the intermediate range program is one which I think will provide plants for the 1972 to 1975 era. It will involve new engineering concepts. It may be a distillation process or a membrane process, but it will involve new things that we haven't thought about from the equipment standpoint.