Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [34]
Project No. 7 had a little more success than Project Plowshare. After the creation of Lake Chagan, the Soviets briefly experimented with nuclear excavations of lakes and dams, but the results were disappointing. The Russian efforts to turn on gas and oil wells with bombs were more successful than the American tests. Production often increased dramatically. But reports indicate that at least one oil field is contaminated with radioactivity, and its oil is “not acceptable to regional refineries.”
In 1966, the Soviets used a nuclear bomb to shut off a gas well and snuff a runaway fire. They also used nuclear explosives to make underground caverns for storing toxic waste, to break up mineral ores, and to create seismic shockwaves to aid in the exploration for natural resources. Sometimes accidents happened: the Kraton-3 explosion, a seismic experiment, vented so much radioactive steam into the Siberian tundra in 1978 that the Soviets had to declare a two-kilometer exclusion zone around the site.
All in all, Project No. 7 consisted of 122 nuclear explosions between 1965 and 1988. Their results were mixed at best. Hydrogen bombs, it turned out, did not give humanity the power to move mountains or to reshape the landscape to suit its fancy. What they provided was a far cry from a fusion-crafted utopia.
Fusion bombs were just that—bombs. They were swords too crude to be shaped into plowshares, unable to benefit humanity in any tangible way. Scientists would have to come up with entirely new ideas if they wanted to harness the power of the sun without getting burned.
CHAPTER 4
KINKS, INSTABILITIES, AND BALONEY BOMBS
Among other bodies which the alchemists of the middle ages thought it possible to discover, and accordingly sought after, was a Universal Solvent, or Alkahest as they named it. This imaginary fluid was to possess the power of dissolving any substance, whatever its nature, and to reduce all kinds of matter to the liquid form. It does not seem to have occurred to these ingenious dreamers to consider, that what dissolved everything, could be preserved in nothing.
—GEORGE WILSON, RELIGIO CHEMICI
The sun itself needs no bottle. It is held together by its own gravity; the mutual attraction of all its atoms is able to keep the fusion engine in its belly from blowing itself apart. But any lump of material smaller than a star does not have enough gravitational force to counteract the enormous pressure of an expanding fusion reaction. For humans to succeed in making an earthbound sun, scientists would have to figure out how to contain the fusion reaction with an external force—figure out how to bottle it up.
The Teller-Ulam design used atom bombs to create a temporary bottle. Pressure from the radiation of a fission bomb squashed the fuel from the outside; pressure from the explosion of a fission “spark plug” compressed the fuel from the inside. Caught in between these two nuclear anvils, the deuterium and tritium fuel was crushed, heated, and bottled up for a fraction of a second. The result was a brief burst of fusion energy: an exploding sun. However, the brevity and violence of the explosion made it suitable only as a weapon of war. To harness the power of fusion for peaceful purposes, scientists needed a much subtler kind of bottle.
In the early 1950s, the need was growing urgent. In the past, the United States had always produced more energy than it needed, but that trend was rapidly changing. Economists and scientists knew that by the end of the 1950s, America would have to begin importing fuel—oil—to keep its economy going. In Britain, the situation was even worse; dependent on oil imports, the United Kingdom was embroiled in a spat with its main supplier, Iran.30 The West was getting its first taste of oil addiction, and it wasn’t pleasant. Fusion energy—if scientists could design a bottle to contain it—could prevent a future where the Western world was kept hostage to a dwindling and increasingly expensive supply of foreign oil.
On March 25, 1951, Argentina