Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [47]
The method he came up with was analogous to what the Columbus scientists had done several years before: he would look at the symmetry of the system. Rose ran the ZETA machine twice, once in its normal operating mode and once with magnetic fields and currents reversed. If the neutrons were coming from a true thermonuclear reaction, the neutrons would have the same energies, no matter whether the machine was running normally or in reverse. The reaction should be symmetrical. It wasn’t. The neutrons generated by normal ZETA had energies different from those produced by reverse ZETA. The neutrons weren’t coming from thermonuclear fusion. They, too, were false neutrons.
As soon as Rose published his results in Nature—on June 14, a month after Britain revealed its plans for the ZETA II—it became obvious that scientists at the Harwell lab had deceived themselves. John Cockcroft immediately regretted his “90% certain” remark and assured the public that ZETA was a success even though it hadn’t achieved thermonuclear fusion. “It is doing exactly the job we expected it would do and is functioning exactly the way we hoped it would,” he sheepishly explained. However, the damage had been done.
Like Richter before them, the British had gotten burned for crying fusion. Driven by their optimism and goaded by their egotistical desire for glory, the ZETA scientists had humiliated themselves in front of the world. The stakes of fusion energy were so high—virtually unlimited power to the nation that controlled it—that scientists couldn’t resist staking an early claim in achieving that lofty goal.
ZETA was a public relations disaster. For years, the cloud of ZETA hung over fusion scientists all over the world. In America, Project Sherwood physicists, despite their relief at not losing the race to the Brits, were despondent about what had happened. Fusion scientists were beginning to realize that fusion energy would be much more difficult to harness than they had thought. Fast pinches were not enough. There was no easy road to building a power plant with a magnetic bottle.
Even as scientists learned more about fusion, the dream of unlimited power seemed to slip further away. Another contender, though, was on the horizon, another way to confine a plasma and initiate a fusion reaction that would ignite another race for fusion energy.
CHAPTER 5
HEAT AND LIGHT
What glory beats in this idea:
Artificial suns on the earth,
Under controlled conditions.
—RICHTER: THE OPERA
Shortly after the ZETA defeat came a measure of victory. Unfortunately, nobody cared.
In 1958, not long after the British scientists at Harwell retracted their claim of generating thermonuclear fusion, American physicists finally put a tiny fusion reaction in a magnetic bottle. It was not a very large reaction, and starting the fusion consumed many times more energy than the reaction produced, but they had managed to initiate fusion in the laboratory. The neutrons they detected were from thermonuclear fusion.
The machine that did it was a pinch machine, not dissimilar to Columbus or the Perhapsatron, but its pinch was arranged slightly differently. Previous devices simply zapped an electric current down the length of the plasma. The new device, Scylla, ran a current around the circumference of the tube of plasma instead. It was just a variant on the existing pinch machines, but the change made a big difference. Scylla was able to heat deuterium to more than ten million degrees. Scientists began to detect all the expected products of deuterium-deuterium fusion: protons, tritium nuclei, and neutrons. Tens of thousands of neutrons. With a few months of tinkering, physicists were getting roughly twenty million neutrons every time they ran the machine. It was a stunning success after so much failure.
It was just