Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [48]
There were sly hints, of course. Los Alamos’s Tuck gently implied that Scylla had succeeded where ZETA had failed, but he was much more cautious than the ZETA team had been. There was no press conference, just a scientific paper that stated, blandly, that Scylla “looks probable as a thermonuclear source.” There were to be no adulatory headlines. Even when Tuck finally made a formal announcement—a year and a half later, in March 1960—it was to Congress, not to the press. “We are now prepared to stake our reputations that we have a thermonuclear reaction,” he said. Scylla had done, for real, what ZETA had falsely claimed to do, but this time the world scarcely noticed.
The quest for unlimited fusion energy was in a dramatically different state than it had been a mere two years earlier. The public’s attitude had changed: the ZETA affair and the growing concern about nuclear fallout had soured people’s perception of fusion scientists. The scientists themselves were even growing pessimistic. Gone were the heady days of the 1950s when a working fusion reactor seemed to be just a few hundred thousand dollars away. Plagued by problems and instabilities, Project Sherwood seemed to be stalling. Congress, impatient with fusion scientists’ broken promises, began to pull the plug on magnetic fusion research. Physicists raced to make some kind of discovery that would keep their quest for fusion energy alive. In 1958, the road ahead seemed dark.
In fact, there was a new reason for hope. The year brought a new and powerful idea into America’s quest to tame fusion reactions—a novel Russian design that combined the advantages of the pinch and the Stellarator. It also saw the invention of a revolutionary device, the laser, that could bottle a tiny star in an entirely new way. The magnetic bottle was no longer the only game in town. A new set of hopefuls would soon sally forth to tame the power of the sun, only to be battered by the quest.
If there was one thing that scientists at the 1958 UN conference could agree about, it was that plasmas were proving very tough to control. In part, this was because plasmas were like nothing else scientists had encountered in nature. Plasmas behaved something like fluids, but unlike standard fluids, they interacted in extremely complex ways with magnetic and electric fields. Because of that electromagnetic component, understanding plasmas was becoming an entirely new discipline vastly more complicated than the hydrodynamics field that dealt with the behavior of ordinary fluids. Plasma physicists were charting new territory in a brand-new subject: magnetohydrodynamics. Even the simplest-sounding problems with a plasma turned out not to be simple at all.
What happens, for example, when you expose a plasma to an electric current, as in a pinch machine? The laws of electromagnetism say that electrical currents spawn magnetic fields, and magnetic fields spawn electrical currents. This means that an electrical current traveling down the plasma will generate magnetic fields that generate electrical currents that generate magnetic fields, and so forth—and all these effects change the motion of the particles in the plasma, forcing them toward the center of the cloud. This is why a current causes a pinch, confining the plasma and squeezing it into a tight thread. But this pinch has secondary effects, such as causing