Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [1]
The stakes are enormous—and they are getting higher by the day. The world’s supply of oil is no longer assured to meet humanity’s energy needs; worse yet, the threat of global warming is forcing governments to find sources of power other than fossil fuels. In the long term, fusion is the only option. Humanity will suffer if researchers don’t solve its problems.
Scientists have broken under the pressure. Others have been forced to make a heartwrenching decision to give up their dreams and disavow their work or to be driven from the fold of mainstream science. Over and over again, the dream of fusion energy has driven scientists to lie, to break their promises, and to deceive their peers. Fusion can bring even the best physicists to the brink of the abyss. Not all of them return.
CHAPTER 1
THE SWORD OF MICHAEL
He took not away the pillar of the cloud by day, nor the pillar of fire by night, from before the people.
—EXODUS 13:22
The fires were still burning over Hiroshima, the charred and faceless victims were still slouching toward Asano Park, when President Harry S. Truman told the world about a new weapon. “The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East,” the announcement read. Mankind had unleashed unheard-of energy from deep within the atom and used it to destroy a city.
From the very beginning of the atomic age, Americans were enthralled and frightened by the prospect of this inconceivable power. By splitting uranium and plutonium atoms, scientists had made a weapon by using the very same principle that made the sun shine: E = mc 2.
The scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, the super-secret program to build the first atom bomb, looked back on their achievement with a mix of awe and horror. To J. Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the Manhattan Project, the atom bomb represented a loss of innocence, a fall from grace that could mark the end of civilization. Others, however, such as the Manhattan Project physicist Edward Teller, saw that the atom bomb was just the beginning of a nuclear arms race. And just over the horizon, Teller realized, was a much greater weapon than even the atom bomb, one thousands of times more powerful.
This new weapon, the “Super,” would unleash a power not yet seen on Earth: fusion. Instead of breaking atoms apart to release energy (fission), the superbomb would stick them together ( fusion) and release even more. While this might seem to be a subtle difference, fusion, unlike fission, had the potential to produce weapons of truly unlimited power. A single Super would be able to wipe out even the largest city—a task far beyond even the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A fusion bomb would be the ultimate weapon.
It would also split the scientific community in two and would drive humanity to the brink of ruin. The quest to unleash the power of the sun upon the Earth had an inauspicious start, to say the least.
The atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fission, not fusion, weapons. Fission and fusion are siblings. Both get their power from converting the mass at the heart of the atom into energy.
Scientists got their first taste of that power in 1898, when the husband-and-wife team of Pierre and Marie Curie discovered a substance with a curious property. Radium, as they called it, seemed to produce energy from nothing.