Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [55]
Lasers produce particularly intense and yet easily controlled light beams. You can point a laser with great precision and make it dump an enormous amount of energy in a very tiny space. To Andrei Sakharov, this suggested that laser beams could be used to heat and contain a plasma of hydrogen. If it worked, laser fusion would be an even more straightforward method than that using magnets. One could simply shine laser light on a pellet of deuterium fuel from all directions: the beams would heat and compress the pellet, creating a tiny fusion reaction—a miniature sun girdled on all sides by light. The plasma would be compressed not by magnetic fields but by particles of light (or by atoms that had been heated by the beams of light).47 This was the birth of inertial confinement fusion. The Americans, too, immediately saw the potential of lasers for inducing fusion. At Teller’s Livermore laboratory, physicists like Ray Kidder, John Nuckolls, and Stirling Colgate set to work designing laser fusion schemes soon after the first laser was built.48 Their calculations seemed to show not only that laser fusion was possible, but also that it might be relatively easy to achieve breakeven. Livermore scientists began building laser bottles intended to ignite and contain fusing plasma.49
The first big one, built in 1974, was known as Janus. Two-faced like the god it was named after, Janus had two laser beams that shot at a tiny pellet of deuterium and tritium from opposite directions. It was more a test of the laser system than a concerted attempt to initiate fusion reactions. A true laser-based bottle would require laser beams to hit the target from all sides at once to fully confine it, but Janus’s lasers only struck from two sides, allowing the plasma to squirt out in various directions. Nevertheless, the Livermore scientists were soon detecting tens of thousands of neutrons coming from the pellet. They had achieved thermonuclear fusion, even though it was on a tiny scale. It was a success, but it was not the first.
The Russians and French had already detected neutrons from pellets hit by lasers, but the American press, skeptical of the foreigners’ claims, did not give them much attention. The press did have a field day, though, with the curious tale of a rogue company—KMS Industries, Inc.—that had built its own laser system. By May 1974, KMS, named after its physicist founder and president, Keeve M. Siegel, reported that it was producing neutrons from laser fusion.
Within two weeks, the story was plastered all over the newspapers. The New York Times touted KMS’s achievement as “a significant step toward the long-range goal of nuclear fusion as a source of almost limitless energy.” The Atomic Energy Commission was less thrilled, because a private firm was doing an end run around the government. If the KMS claims were true, an AEC statement read, it would be “a small but significant initial step toward the achievement of fusion power.” Siegel was making the AEC look bad—and fusion energy look good.
Not only was Siegel using lasers to ignite fusion, but he was doing it as the head of a private company, not as a scientist in a government laboratory. The public took this as a sign that private industry was embracing fusion reactors as a viable source of energy. Siegel, the entrepreneur, exuded confidence in public. He was sure, he said, that he could turn lasers into “efficient fusion power” within “the next few years.” After false starts and two decades of struggle with magnetic bottles, the era of fusion finally seemed at hand.
The timing could scarcely have been better. The United States was just getting through its first oil crisis. Because of American support for Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Arab members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) cut off oil supplies to the U.S. Gas prices skyrocketed. It was