Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [41]
British scientists immediately seized on this effect as a way to confine and heat a plasma until it begins to fuse. Several British laboratories began work on pinch projects, particularly Oxford University’s Clarendon, and neighboring Harwell, a few miles away. James Tuck, a physicist who had been involved with the Manhattan Project, worked briefly on the Clarendon fusion project before returning to Los Alamos, bringing the pinch idea with him.
To Tuck, the pinch method seemed an especially promising way to build a fusion reactor. If you could pump enough current into a plasma of deuterium and tritium, the plasma would heat and compress itself all in one fell swoop—perhaps enough to ignite fusion on a small scale. In 1951, Tuck asked for money to build a pinch machine, and in 1952 he built his first. In contrast to Spitzer’s hubristic name—Stellarator implied a mini-sun—Tuck called his instrument the Perhapsatron.
The Perhapsatron, the Stellarator, and the magnetic mirror all showed great promise. At least on paper, they were all able to contain a plasma in a magnetic bottle. Within a few months, scientists had come up with not one but three containers for an uncontainable substance. The Atomic Energy Commission decided to pursue them all. By the time Richter was finally unmasked as a fraud, the United States had consolidated these three efforts into one project: Project Sherwood.35
At first, Sherwood’s funding was modest, a few hundred thousand dollars or so per year. The budgets would not stay small for long. Though Project Sherwood was classified, it would soon hit the world stage. By mid-1955, rumors abounded that Britain, the USSR, and the United States were all trying to solve the world’s energy problems with fusion—and that U.S. scientists were about to build a prototype fusion reactor. In August, fusion scientists from around the globe met in Geneva for the first UN Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. The conference president, the Indian physicist Homi J. Bhabha, stunned the world with a bold pronouncement. “I venture to predict that a method will be found for liberating fusion energy in a controlled manner within the next two decades,” he said. “When that happens, the energy problems of the world will truly have been solved forever, for the fuel will be as plentiful as the heavy hydrogen in the oceans.” The dream of fusion energy had been officially made public. Within twenty years, humanity would have limitless energy. The energy problems that had plagued civilization would be a thing of the past.
Lewis Strauss, the head of the AEC, was quick to claim a share of the dream. He confirmed that the United States was hard at work trying to build a reactor that would produce energy. The public and the press began to learn about Project Sherwood, if only the gross details. They knew nothing about the problems that were looming.
Fusion scientists started off very optimistic about their designs; on paper, the machines they were building seemed sure to work. In his 1951 proposal, Spitzer estimated his small Stellarator would generate about 150 million watts of power.36 The Perhapsatron looked even more promising. It was technically simpler and thus seemed likely to achieve fusion sooner. Once it did, it would be easy to turn a pinch-type device into a reactor. It could behave like a fusion-powered version of an internal-combustion engine: inject fuel, compress it with a current, ignite it, extract the energy, and get rid of the nuclear “ash.” It seemed almost too easy, and everybody was pursuing the idea. Despite the