In these early years of the Atomic Revolution, a mood of transition is widely manifest. This mood helps to sustain our hopes for achieving, through the atom, not annihilation, but, instead, the vast betterment of all mankind. It affects the scope and the pace of our industrial activities. It exerts its influence on the course of our diplomatic negotiations, as well as on the programs of our great institutions of learning. And, needless to say, it is reflected in the Atomic Energy Act of i954,1 the statute which sets the legal bounds of our atomic energy endeavor. Wrhen this important congressional enactment became the law on August 30, 1954, the event marked the end of one era and the beginning of another in the atomic energy policy of the United States. A primary aim of the new act was to terminate the tight Atomic Energy Commission monopoly which the Congress had established in the original Atomic Energy Act of I946.2 This was in recognition of the factthough it was by no means a simple fact-that the changes occurring between 1946 and 1954 had gradually made it clear that, if continued, the AEC monopoly would become a national liability. Accordingly, in the I954 act, by extensive relaxation of the earlier legislative prohibitions, the Congress sought to make it possible for the full talents and resources of the nation to apply themselves energetically and unremittingly to the problems of atomic energy. This does not contemplate merely a greater measure of participation in atomic energy development on the part of the power systems which some day hope to generate, transmit, distribute, and sell the nuclear power. It also contemplates participation by the equipment manufacturers, the chemical companies, the metal fabricators, the processors of all kinds of specially adapted materials, the manufacturers of instruments and controls, and the many other groups whose contributions are needed for the development of the art. Basically, the problem is not, and has not been, to determine whether nuclear power can actually be produced. We know that it can, and we have known this for probably at least a decade. The real problem is to discover the ways by which nuclear power can be produced on an economic basis, genuinely competitively with the cost of power from conventional sources. For the regions where conventional power comes at high cost, such a competitive basis may now seem to be on the horizon;3 but for the regions where conventional power comes at medium or low