WHAT'S THE TROUBLE?

Not so. Our very first issue of 1 Sept. 1973 carried an item "An Orphan Called MHD." (Remember? That was 6 weeks before the Arab oil embargo, and next to that item we advertised a bumper sticker Make America an Arab sheikdom! Join the Sierra Club.)

An MHD generator was first constructed by R.J. Rosa in 1959. By 1965, an MHD generator was developed that produced 32 MW, though only for one minute. It was operated by the AVCO Everett Research Lab in Massachusetts, which has remained the US leader in the field. A group of utilities then raised the larger part of the money to construct a 30 MW pilot plant, but the project died when the government lost interest. Work has continued at AVCO (which logged a continuous run of 95 hours above 200 kW on its gas-fired Mark VI test generator last February), at the U. of Tennessee (with a coal-fired generator, producing 100 kW in runs as long as one hour), and other places, but the 1966 momentum has not been regained, and a commercial pilot plant is not yet in sight.

Not in the US, that is. Using American results, the Soviets went ahead and now have at least four major MHD facilities, one of which, north of Moscow, is a pilot plant that has logged 100 continuous hours at 6 MW. Runs of 5,000 hours are expected within the next few years, and a commercial version is expected to go on line by 1985. The Soviet MHD effort involves several thousand scientists, engineers and technicians, and some reports suggest that the USSR may already have an MHD generator capable of producing up to 600 MW.

Meanwhile, in the US, ERDA has increased its MHD budget to $40 million (from under $6 million in 1973), but most of that has been squandered among the little piglets that always come out from nowhere whenever a new nipple appears on the federal sow. A small MHD test facility in Montana, financed by ERDA, has all the overtones of a political porkbarrel ("Sen. Mike Mansfield's parting present," say some; and the criticism in a recent GAO report would seem to support the charge). As for the Soviet leads says the director of ERDA's MHD division, a 1973 agreement now allows ERDA to monitor Russian progress; "we can move faster by simply watching them."

What a pity Michael Faraday was deprived of that piece of advice. He could have moved faster by sitting on his posterior and watching somebody else.