The cost of constructing a nuclear powered water desalination installation in Israel, as envisaged in preliminary joint planning between the United States and Israel governments, is $190,000,000, it was revealed last night by Charles F. MacGowan, director of the Office of Saline Water of the Department of the Interior.
Mr. MacGowan’s figure was the first given publicly since President Johnson and Israel’s Prime Minister Levi Eshkol agreed on the joint project in Washington last June. Since then, joint U.S. and Israeli teams have agreed on further details of the project, which will involve the building in Israel of atom-powered desalination plant capable of producing up to 200 megawatts of electric power and furnishing, at the same time, 125,000,000 gallons of fresh water for Israel’s use.
The Department of the Interior official made his announcement in an address to the seventh annual Conference on Science and Technology in Israel, conducted here yesterday and today by the American Technion Society. The group provides technical and financial aid to Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa.
At the concluding session today, the formation of a “scientific peace corps” for Israel was urged after an address by Dr. Alex Keynan, chairman of Israel’s National Council of Research and Development. He told the 600 delegates at the session that “the bottleneck holding back Israel’s accelerated scientific development is the acute shortage of qualified scientists in many disciplines.” He pointed out that the total enrollment in all of Israel’s institutions of higher learning, on both the undergraduate and graduate levels, is no more than about 18,000 students.
B. Sumner Gruzen, a New York architect who is president of the American Technion Society, told the conference that, despite the acute shortage of trained technical personnel in Israel, Technion has had to turn down nearly 900 student applicants, this year “owing to lack of facilities.” The student enrollment, he said, has been growing annually, reaching this year a total of 2, 800 undergraduates and 800 graduate students.
Dr. Sydney Goldstein, Harvard mathematician and expert in aerodynamics, told the conference that he is conducting a nationwide effort to find suitable faculty members who would teach in various engineering faculties at Technion.
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