the meeting of the Ten Mill Committee in Japan, because hopefully out of that, there will be some initial contracts awarded. Q: Is there a possibility that the projected power plants in Southern California would be nuclear rather than coal or steam-powered? A: I've got a kind of split personality here because of interest in both uranium and coal, but I think that the answer to that would certainly be yes. I think that it is fair to say that, and it is our belief, that both of these things are going to develop. I think that the coal is quite likely to come first in the area that we are talking about, but we are also hopeful, because of our stake in uranium, that the nuclear plants will make great progress and will be commercial for certainly a large section of the country where fuel costs are relatively high, much earlier and in a much greater quantity than we had originally anticipated. But nuclear is under active consideration and that's been more true, I would think, in Northern California, perhaps, than in Southern California. For requirements after 1975, I think both coal and nuclear will be increasing. I think that the rate of increase for nuclear plants will be very high after 1975. Q: Would you comment more specifically on the competitive difference between the cost of electricity generated by nuclear power and by steam power? A: Well, I have tried to get an answer to that one myself, but I'll be perfectly frank, I'm a little bit confused. The Oyster Creek situation, as you know, has been debated by those who are much closer to utility costs than I am, and I think that one of the differences is that in the Far West, the construction of rights-of-way for ultra high voltage transmission lines is nowhere near as expensive per mile as it is here in the heavily populated east where your property values are much higher. I honestly don't know the answer to that one, and some of the figures, frankly, that I have had from the nuclear side, don't make very much sense to me when I see the seriousness of negotiations on coal. There are so many variables they throw at you, like what the load factor is going to be, that no simple answer is possible. The bigger the plant is, the lower the cost of producing nuclear power, and I think it goes down even faster than the economies achieved in 14 large scale thermal plants. But it is pretty hard to answer that one precisely. I wish I could. Q: Would you comment on the expectation of fiscal 1964 earnings in view of the first half results? A: That's kind of an embarrasing question, because we are within almost 30 days of our closing and the answer that the president of the company would have to give you, and it is a very honest answer, indeed, is I don't know. The reason that I don't know, I would expect the second would have to be better than the first half, but it so happens that we have a combination of timing factors that are really impossible to evaluate at this time. One is the size and timing of the adjustment we would expect on the construction contract that we mentioned earlier. We also have hanging fire some fairly substantial land sales prospects and whether those close before October 31st or close afterwards will have a material effect. So that as of this moment, and I tried to get an answer to that one myself before I left, if they all break favorably, I think we might approach perhaps our last year's results. If any one of them does not, because of the magnitude of them, we'll be behind last year's results. Q: Is there any consideration to listing the stock? A: Well, that's a question that we have debated among the directors for some time. We frankly found it very hard to get an answer that satisfies us because the people we've asked for advice seem to all have a bias to one direction or the other, so finally we have joined with a group of other companies having a similar problem and are participating in a study by an independent agency that is studying the question of whether companies like ours should or should not list, based on the recent experience of others. So that finally we decided to spend some money to find out from someone other than ourselves, what they thought the answer was. Whether this will be any better answer than we have had before remains to be seen. Q: When would you expect the answer to the survey? A: I would expect the report, if I could distinguish that from the answer, I would expect we would get the report in the first quarter of 1965. How long it will then take to be convinced one way or the other, I really don't know until I see what's in the report. 15