Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [109]
There’s something uniquely powerful about the promise of fusion energy. It harks back to the ancient quest to build a perpetual motion machine, but this time the source of unlimited energy doesn’t violate the laws of physics. To anyone who could harness the energy of a miniature star, fusion promised power. Not only would it give the world endless electrical power, it would give power to its inventors. To some scientists, this meant financial power. Still others sought the power of fame. Some saw military and political power. The rewards are so great that they can blind the scientists on the quest.
This is not to say that fusion science is worthless. Far from it. Plasma physicists have figured out the inner workings of distant stars—how they live and die. It is no coincidence that some of the world’s leading experts in stellar dynamics and supernova explosions are at Los Alamos, Livermore, and Princeton. Furthermore, fusion physicists are exploring new territory—they are looking at hotter, denser matter than anyone has yet examined—and scientists learn interesting things whenever they expand the boundaries of a field. Apparently, a pinch machine at Sandia Natural Laboratories has recently created a plasma hotter than a billion degrees. If true, it is a tremendous achievement that opens a new regime—much hotter even than the center of a star—to experimenters. That is an accomplishment in itself, but whenever physicists talk to the public about Sandia’s Z machine, fusion energy madness seems to grip them. A 2007 Sandia press release promised that “fired repeatedly, the machine could well be the fusion machine that could form the basis of an electrical generating plant only two decades away.”
It seems the wishful thinking is as strong as ever.
The promise of a fusion reactor a few decades away has been a cliché for a half century. Every time it is repeated, it just illuminates how generation after generation of scientists, drunk with the promise of personal glory and unlimited energy, keep forgetting the hard lessons learned by their predecessors. The quest to put a star in the bottle is intoxicating. Fusion might be the energy source of the future. If fusion scientists are unable to rid themselves of their intemperate self-deception, it always will be.
APPENDIX: TABLETOP FUSION
Thiago Olson was an ordinary teenage boy, for the most part. He had one oddity. There was something mysterious about what he did after school. The seventeen-year-old’s friends had nicknamed Olson “the mad scientist.” For good reason: in his basement, he was building his own fusion device.
On June 20, 2006, Olson told his fellow fusion enthusiasts about his homemade “fusor,” cobbled together from parts taken from a defunct x-ray machine. “Yesterday I input power into my fusor for the first time,” he wrote, adding that he was happy to see “the familiar purple plasma” glowing away through a viewing window. Over the next weeks, Olson steadily improved his six-foot-tall device, upgrading the system that handles the deuterium gas in the machine. Three months later, Olson was making national news. “Michigan Teen Creates Nuclear Fusion,” the headlines blared.
Olson had, in fact, done it. A neutron counter implied that Olson’s fusor was producing about 200,000 neutrons a second. And though a fusion device might seem like a scary thing to keep in one’s basement, the fusor was perfectly safe. Once the headlines broke, two government radiation-safety officers and a fire marshal visited his home and gave the fusor a clean bill of safety.
On the surface, it seemed that Olson had succeeded where Pons and Fleischmann had failed. He had come up with a cheap “tabletop” device that actually achieved nuclear fusion. The public reacted with astonishment, because the cold-fusion debacle seemed to prove that