Sun in a Bottle

Table of Contents

 

 

 

VIKING
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First published in 2008 by Viking Penguin,
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Copyright © Charles Seife, 2008

All rights reserved

Insert illustration credits
Page 1 (two images), 4 (top), 6 (top left and bottom): United States Department of Energy ■
2 (left), 3, 6 (top right): Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory ■ 2 (right): DigitalGlobe ■
4 (bottom): Federation of American Scientists ■ 5 (top and bottom left): AP/Wide World
Photos ■ 5 (bottom right): Lynn Freeny/United States Department of Energy ■ 7: ITER ■
8: Randy Montoya

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Seife, Charles.
Sun in a bottle : the strange history of fusion and the science of
wishful thinking / Charles Seife.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-0-670-02033-1

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Circe warned me to shun the island of the blessed sun-god, for it was here, she said, that our worst danger would lie.

 

 

T
he dream is as ancient as humanity: unlimited power. It has driven generation after generation of scientists to the brink of insanity.

In 1905, after centuries of attempts to build perpetual motion machines, scientists discovered an essentially limitless source of energy. With his famous equation,
E
=
mc
²
, Albert Einstein discovered that a minuscule chunk of mass could, theoretically, be converted into an enormous amount of energy. Indeed,
E
=
mc
²
is the equation that describes why the sun shines; at its core, the sun is constantly converting matter to energy in a reaction known as fusion. If scientists could do the same thing on Earth—if they could convert matter into energy with a controlled fusion reaction—scientists could satisfy humanity’s energy needs until the end of time.

For the past half century, legions of physicists have been trying desperately to create a tiny sun in a bottle, trying to bring the stellar power of fusion to Earth. The quest for fusion is the story of scientists weaving an increasingly tangled web of secret, crazy, and brilliant schemes to harness the power of the sun. They are caught up in a complex tale that includes classified government experiments, billion-dollar scientific projects, and byzantine conspiracy theories. The quest for fusion is a tale of genius physicists who have changed the world forever—for better and for worse—and of secret-spilling whistleblowers, jealous researchers, brilliant tinkerers, and backstabbing politicians.

The stakes are enormous—and they are getting higher by the day. The world’s supply of oil is no longer assured to meet humanity’s energy needs; worse yet, the threat of global warming is forcing governments to find sources of power other than fossil fuels. In the long term, fusion is the only option. Humanity will suffer if researchers don’t solve its problems.

Scientists have broken under the pressure. Others have been forced to make a heartwrenching decision to give up their dreams and disavow their work or to be driven from the fold of mainstream science. Over and over again, the dream of fusion energy has driven scientists to lie, to break their promises, and to deceive their peers. Fusion can bring even the best physicists to the brink of the abyss. Not all of them return.

He took not away the pillar of the cloud by day, nor the pillar of fire by night, from before the people.

 

 

T
he fires were still burning over Hiroshima, the charred and faceless victims were still slouching toward Asano Park, when President Harry S. Truman told the world about a new weapon. “The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East,” the announcement read. Mankind had unleashed unheard-of energy from deep within the atom and used it to destroy a city.

From the very beginning of the atomic age, Americans were enthralled and frightened by the prospect of this inconceivable power. By splitting uranium and plutonium atoms, scientists had made a weapon by using the very same principle that made the sun shine:
E
=
mc
²
.

The scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, the super-secret program to build the first atom bomb, looked back on their achievement with a mix of awe and horror. To J. Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the Manhattan Project, the atom bomb represented a loss of innocence, a fall from grace that could mark the end of civilization. Others, however, such as the Manhattan Project physicist Edward Teller, saw that the atom bomb was just the beginning of a nuclear arms race. And just over the horizon, Teller realized, was a much greater weapon than even the atom bomb, one thousands of times more powerful.

This new weapon, the “Super,” would unleash a power not yet seen on Earth: fusion. Instead of breaking atoms apart to release energy (
fission
), the superbomb would stick them together (
fusion
) and release even more. While this might seem to be a subtle difference, fusion, unlike fission, had the potential to produce weapons of truly unlimited power. A single Super would be able to wipe out even the largest city—a task far beyond even the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A fusion bomb would be the ultimate weapon.

It would also split the scientific community in two and would drive humanity to the brink of ruin. The quest to unleash the power of the sun upon the Earth had an inauspicious start, to say the least.

 

 

The atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fission, not fusion, weapons. Fission and fusion are siblings. Both get their power from converting the mass at the heart of the atom into energy.

Scientists got their first taste of that power in 1898, when the husband-and-wife team of Pierre and Marie Curie discovered a substance with a curious property. Radium, as they called it, seemed to produce energy from nothing. This was, of course, impossible. The most rigid laws of physics, the laws of thermodynamics, seemed to forbid the spontaneous creation of energy. But the Curies were quite certain of what they were observing. A hunk of radium constantly produced heat like a little oven; every hour, a chunk of radium generated enough heat to melt its own weight in ice. It would do this, hour after hour, day after day, and year after year. No chemical reaction could possibly sustain itself for so long and generate so much energy. Whenever the Curies cooled a piece of radium, it would heat itself back up. Indeed, the radium would always be hotter than its surroundings, even though there were no external sources of heat. Marie Curie herself was baffled. She suspected that some sort of change was happening at the center of the radium atom, but she didn’t know what it could be—or how such a tiny chunk of matter could produce so much energy.

The answer would come a few years later when the young Albert Einstein formulated his theory of relativity. The theory revolutionized the way scientists perceive space, time, and motion. One of the equations that came out of the theory was
E
=
mc
²
, the most famous scientific equation of all time.
E
=
mc
²
showed that matter,
m
, could be converted into energy,
E
. This was the secret to the seemingly endless fountain of energy coming from radium.

If you put a gram of radium in a sealed ampule, over many, many years the radium (a whitish metal) will gradually disappear. In fact, the atoms of radium spontaneously split apart and vanish from view. But they don’t disappear entirely. When an atom of radium breaks apart, it tends to split into two smaller pieces. The heavier of the two is a gas known as radon; the lighter is helium, and the Curies detected both helium and radon emanating from their radium sample.

Radium—a big heavy atom—breaks up into helium and radon, and when scientists looked carefully at the weights of those atoms, they realized the source of the heat. Some of the mass of the radium was missing. If you add up the mass of one atom of radon and one atom of helium, they make up 99.997 percent of the mass of the radium atom from which both sprang. The other 0.003 percent simply vanishes. When radium breaks apart, the parts are lighter than the original atom.

Here was the answer to the puzzle of excess energy. The whole atom weighed more than the sum of the parts. When the radium atom spontaneously broke apart, some of its mass changed into energy, just as Einstein’s equation allows. The
m
had become
E
. The missing mass was only a tiny fraction of what made up the atom, but even tiny chunks of mass are converted into enormous amounts of energy. It was energy on a scale much, much greater than humans had ever accessed before.

As World War II loomed, scientists began to realize that this energy could become a potent weapon. Less than a month before Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Einstein warned President Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the possibility of a bomb made from uranium, a metal that, like radium, releases energy when it breaks into pieces. Such a bomb would be extremely powerful—and there were ominous signs that the Nazis were already on their way to building one. For example, Germany had halted the uranium trade in occupied Czechoslovakia.