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Show leport from Washington Development of Minerals in Nation One of Pressing Current Problems "By Rep- Laurence Burton , Ono of Annwa's nioro iressiiy proMoms toJ.iy is tut of mineral dovelopiiKMit. UK-Uy. tluxii;!). unlike ( tuny "of our ptvsoit srnvc !ojiw. this ono appears bo soluble. Ptvause our .oumry's mineral develop-Seif! develop-Seif! is so important ami "he immediacy of that de- rlo; motH so essential, I ave decided to devote this v?port and the next one as e ol t to a discussion of I'nit- d States minor.il policy. 'tab incidentally, is one of ; 1o nation's richest areas in Mineral resources. VMost of us, I think, are r.illy quite unaware of how .1 1 a 1 minerals are to our lives. Fvervone can easily appreciate die importance of food, of water, and of clean air, but the warning of ,n Stanford lYofessor of Mineral Fit.neering, Charles Char-les F. Park, Pr., probably comes as a surprise to many. He says that mineral shortages short-ages may eventually prove to be a bigger bottleneck to universal prosperity than the need for food. How can such a warning be pronounced, pronounc-ed, and how can such a prediction pre-diction be kept from coming to pass? These two questions ques-tions I shall try to deal with. We in the United Stato3 enjoy the highest standard of living in the world a standard featuring the consumption of an extraoid-iiwiry extraoid-iiwiry volume of minerals and their products. The average av-erage American, having witnessed such marvels as the flight of Apollo 12 on television. believes that technology can do anything, lie does not realize that wliut he sees on that electronic elec-tronic screen represents a technology that consumes raw materials, or that the technology t hat produces them is far from being up to the conflicting demand being be-ing made on it. We are called an afflent Sieiety, and we want to believe be-lieve it; but is it really true? Our ability to handle some of our greatest present threats war, poverty, crime, urban crowding and ugliness, growing damage to our environment is seldom sel-dom thought of as resource-limited. resource-limited. Whatever material resources we need to solve those problems, almost everyone ev-eryone apparently assumes are already here at hand or if not, don't worry: the economics of the market place will soon provide them! But, a requisite for affluence, afflu-ence, now or in the future, is an adequate supply of minerals fuels to energize our power and transportation: transporta-tion: nonmetals, such as sulfur sul-fur and phosphates to fertilize fer-tilize farms; and metals, steel, copper, lead, aluminum, alumin-um, and so forth, to build our machinery, cars, buildings, build-ings, and bridges. These are materials basic to our economy, ec-onomy, the multiplies in our gross national product. But the needed materials which can be recovered by known methods at reasonable cos's from the earth's crust are limited, whereas their rate of exploitation and use obviously ob-viously are not. Our mineral requirements in the United States have been growing ten times faster fast-er than our population, but our mineral development, instead of progressing, has actually declined in the past decade. We have allowed mines to fall into disuse; we have been very casual in our encouragement of mineral exploration, mineral miner-al technological research and mining education; and while doing this, we have allowed the United States to become dangerously dependent depend-ent on foreign mineral supplies. sup-plies. Some changes must be made immediately before we irreversibly )ose the ability to meet our countrs needs. The Assistant Secretary of Jnterior for Minerals Resources, Re-sources, Hollis M. Dole, ha3 indicated recently that we are not running out of minerals min-erals in this countryv but we are running out of mineral min-eral technology. There are enough undiscovered minerals min-erals in America to provide for our needs far into the future, but at this time, we lack the know-how to go and find them and the exploration ex-ploration incentives to locate lo-cate them and develop a way to get them out. Unfortunately, mineral production cannot be turned turn-ed on like a faucet. St-stantial St-stantial capital (hundreds of millions of dollars per venture) and substantial time (often 5 to 10 years) are required to complete a new mincraliproducing facility. fac-ility. Because of these facts, we cannot sit back and reasonably rea-sonably expect our economy to stimulate the required investment, in-vestment, when it should be made now! As things stand, most U. S. companies find it more profitable to invest capital overseas and to import minerals andor finished products than to develop our internal mineral resources. The peril of this course was all to vividly demonstrated in 1967 during the Middle East conflict when our domestic do-mestic oil industry was barely bare-ly able to meet our requirements require-ments for the short duration durat-ion of the crisis. We saw then how dangerously dependent de-pendent we wore - on other sources for materials vital to our country's existence and security, but unfortunately, unfortun-ately, we did not learn a les son from this deprivation; ns a matter of fact, we have allowed our country to b wiiii1 inure dependent on other countries fur vital materials ma-terials since then. Obviously, this dependency dependen-cy .should ml be allowed to ciinlinue, and It is time fur our counlry to develop It: own resources. What we lieiil to do to overcome the mineral resource problem faeing our Million, and to take iidvanlagf of the opportunities op-portunities that the fulun: holds, Is first and foremost to develop a National mln- erals policy. What Mieh a i policy can do for our country, coun-try, wilh Utah taking on ',! the prime re;;pofi:;ibi)iJ I will discus; in rny next re-jort. |