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to talk about the science behind the papers and what people on all sides had told me, but that it would be inappropriate for me to represent Science magazine. I suggested that the editors should handle the television interviews. He agreed, and I was spared the television circuit.

73

Putterman had not yet published his work on piezoelectric fusion (see appendix), so I was unaware of his research in that area.

74

Putterman also leveled a charge about using some of the DARPA money for an experiment that was not supposed to be part of the grant.

75

The panel also found that Taleyarkhan had reused data, that Taleyarkhan failed to acknowledge DARPA funding, and that he manipulated Purdue’s press release about the Xu-Butt paper—but that these actions didn’t constitute scientific misconduct.

76

A few hawks have pushed for new weapons designs. In the early 2000s, weaponeers were designing a controversial “bunker buster,” the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator bomb, which probably would have needed testing before deployment.

77

In fact, many fusion scientists believe that even if NIF succeeds, it won’t be a major advance on the path to fusion energy. NIF’s lasers aren’t the most promising candidate for fusion reactors. For one thing, they have to cool a long time between shots. Solid-state lasers, with their faster repeat rates and higher efficiencies, seem a more appropriate choice. Some work is also being done using two sets of lasers, one set to heat and one set to compress the plasma. NIF won’t help much with this research either.

78

Estimating costs of big projects conjures up all sorts of monkey business. As of 2003, the cost of construction was estimated to be about $5 billion. Inflation raises that cost by about 3 percent per year, but ignore that for the moment; 3 percent is small compared to some other factors that need to be considered. Major U.S. cutting-edge projects require a contingency fund—extra money to deal with unexpected problems that inevitably crop up. This contingency should be 20 percent or more of the construction cost, yet the $5 billion price tag doesn’t include any contingency. So tack on $1 billion right there. That’s just construction costs, assuming everything goes reasonably well. Operating the reactor and decommissioning it once it is done will cost at least as much as construction, so the total reaches $12 billion at a minimum.

79

The following year, Bush made NASA’s primary goal a return to the moon, in part because it is home to “abundant resources” that can be exploited by humans. Other than water (which does not exist in great quantities on the moon), the main resource is helium-3, which can be fused with itself in a reactor to produce energy without creating many neutrons. The lack of any such device doesn’t seem to trouble lunar-mission advocates, but it did make ITER, indirectly, a justification for an enormously expensive space program.

80

As this book went to press, things were going wrong on the U.S. side once again. Congress slashed funding for ITER, and while the president attempted to restore those funds, Congress was likely to cut them yet again. The other ITER partners may well have to forge ahead without American support.

81

There were earlier versions of television that dissected the image with mechanical spinning disks and other nonelectronic means. They were impractical, so Farnsworth’s device was a major leap forward.

82

Li took second place in the competition, losing to another student who looked into treatments for yeast infections.

83

This phenomenon is related to the more famous piezoelectricity. A piezoelectric crystal does the same thing—rearrange its charges—because of pressure changes rather than heat changes.