Tight-Lipped Report

The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission submitted last week a semi-annual report on work-in-progress that did not report very much:

Isotopes. The distribution of radioactive isotopes is growing rapidly. By the end of June, U.S. customers got 3,136 shipments of radioisotopes from the Oak Ridge pile. Foreign countries (none behind the Iron Curtain) got 159.

Radioisotopes have already revolutionized many kinds of research, particularly biology, and are beginning to affect industry. They are chiefly used as "tracers" to mark with exquisite sensitivity the motions or chemical transformations of a substance by "tagging" it with radioactivity. Direct uses are increasing, such as modifying chemical reactions by the radiation from isotopes.

Atomic Power. Commercial atomic power plants, says the AEC, are not just around the corner. Two "nuclear reactors" for producing power have been authorized and should be in operation in two or three years. But the commission warns that they will not be commercial. It thinks that fairly practical plants, still experimental, will be available within ten years.

The type that comes into use will depend largely on the supply of uranium. If uranium is cheap and plentiful, it will be used more or less in the natural state. If uranium proves scarce, the supply can be eked out by "breeding." A reactor will be surrounded by a blanket of thorium or the plentiful but nonfissionable uranium isotope, U-238. When these absorb excess neutrons from the reaction, they turn into fissionable plutonium or U-233.

Construction. The AEC tells little about its vast building program, expected to cost $1,250,000,000. The Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, with its nuclear reactor, is "well under way." Fifteen thousand workers are busy at Hanford, Wash., presumably expanding the vast plutonium works. The super-secret weapons plant and laboratory at Los Alamos, N. Mex. are being renovated and extended.

That was about all the AEC saw fit to tell.

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