Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [75]
The arbitrator’s words echo those of the cold-fusion community. Small-minded physicists are trying to suppress research that would take money away from their own endeavors. Valone got his job back along with back pay.
The second Conference on Future Energy, with its lightning-bolt BioCharger, its talk about antigravity stealth bombers, and its whole-hearted embrace of cold fusion, was Valone’s victory celebration. It represented the defeat of the forces trying to suppress his views and the comeuppance for the physicists who had hounded Pons and Fleischmann abroad and driven cold fusion to the fringe. It was 2006, nearly two decades after the two chemists had been ridiculed by mainstream scientists, but the gathering proved cold fusion was still alive. The dream of unlimited fusion energy in a room-temperature test tube was too powerful for mere science to destroy.
CHAPTER 7
SECRETS
Everything secret degenerates, . . . nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.
—LORD ACTON
The cold-fusion affair captured the imagination of the public. Two chemists, two outsiders, claimed to have succeeded with a cheap, tabletop experiment where legions of physicists with hundreds of millions of dollars had failed.
Fusion energy is hard. Even if you manage to get a fusion reaction going in a small device—and a number of people have succeeded in doing just that59—“tabletop” devices all consume more energy than they produce. The more researchers experiment with fusion, the more most of them are convinced that the best—if not the only—way to create a fusion reactor is with a hot plasma, confined and compressed by some powerful force. Nowadays, that leaves only two realistic options: big, expensive magnets or big, expensive lasers.
Both approaches require billions of dollars and thousands of scientists. And both have secrets. Laser fusion’s secret is a matter of national security; magnetic fusion’s secret is a matter of some embarrassment. Both secrets threaten the future of fusion energy.
In the late 1970s, before Shiva came on line, laser scientists at Livermore were extremely confident that they were on the fast track to fusion energy. They believed that Shiva, with its twenty beams, would likely achieve breakeven: the machine would produce as much energy in fusion as was poured into the system by its lasers. They were sure that they would produce a fusion reactor by the century’s end, and they were not ashamed to tell the press about it. In 1978, shortly before all the Shiva experiment’s lasers were all turned on, Livermore’s physicists were talking to the press about having a fusion power plant working in the late 1980s or early 1990s.
Despite the numerous problems that the physicists were encountering with laser fusion—the loss of energy to electrons, the Rayleigh-Taylor instability, and numerous other effects that made it harder than expected to compress and heat a deuterium pellet—they felt that they had good reason for optimism. It was called LASNEX.
LASNEX is a very intricate computer program meant to simulate what happens in the heart of a laser fusion experiment, and though the computer program is still classified, a few details are available outside the fusion community. Scientists apparently began working on it in the late 1960s or early 1970s. When Livermore’s John Nuckolls wrote about laser fusion in Nature in 1972, he referred to an early version of the code, and even then it was relatively advanced. LASNEX described every possible interaction of light, electrons, and nuclei that the designers could imagine. It told them how a cold pellet of matter begins to compress under laser light or x-ray emissions, how hot electrons bleed off energy, how fusion in the belly of the pellet causes it to expand. Physicists could tinker with various conditions, changing the size or contents of the pellet, the color and intensity