Sun in a Bottle (43 page)

That this could be done at all baffled the people who funded the experiments. In a debate in Britain’s House of Lords, one peer asked another how scientists could measure temperatures of tens and hundreds of millions of degrees. The response? “I expect that they use a very long thermometer.”

Physicists use several terms when referring to the color of light:
color
,
energy
,
frequency
, and
wavelength
all essentially refer to the same thing. Visible light comes in a variety of colors: a whole spectrum stretching from red on through orange, yellow, green, blue, and indigo, to violet. It turns out that these colors correspond to light of higher and higher energy. Red has the lowest energy and violet has the highest. Frequency is proportional to energy, so red has the lowest frequency and violet the highest. Wavelength is inversely proportional to frequency, so red has the longest wavelength and violet has the shortest. It can get confusing, but the terms are all trying to describe the same phenomenon in different ways.

Hence the name “laser,” which is an acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.

Thank Edward Teller for this last proposal. In the 1980s, he pushed hard to design a bomb-powered laser that could shoot down enemy missiles; the concept was a big part of Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” plan.

In practice, this usually means the latter rather than the former. In most modern inertial confinement fusion experiments, light heats up the outermost layers of a target capsule, causing them to evaporate. This pushes the rest of the capsule inward and ignites the fuel.

Nuckolls had been involved in Project Plowshare. In the late 1950s, he designed a fusion power plant that heated steam by means of hydrogen bombs.

Other labs, such as Los Alamos, had inertial confinement fusion programs, too. Livermore, however, came to dominate.

Congress also took the opportunity to reorganize its entire portfolio of energy research. In 1974, it eliminated the Atomic Energy Commission and created the Energy Research and Development Administration to take on many of its functions. Just a few years later, ERDA, together with other federal agencies, would become the Department of Energy.

Technically, doubling or tripling the frequency of the light.

As with many of the stories surrounding cold fusion, there are a number of different versions of what happened. For example, some sources say the experimenters (or more precisely, Pons’s son)
reduced
the current rather than increased it. The nasty battle that erupted around the research turned the tale of cold fusion into a scientific version of
Rashomon.

Apparently, the prolific Andrei Sakharov had predicted this phenomenon in the 1940s.

Most physicists who have studied the matter know that a great deal of helium- 3 was trapped in the Earth when it formed, and that a little bit is produced by cosmic rays and by the decay of tritium, not by subterranean fusion reactions.

On an atomic scale, a million electron volts is a lot of energy; it is roughly what you would get if you were to take two electron-size particles and convert their mass entirely into energy. For comparison, the combustion of a molecule of TNT yields about 35 electron volts, meaning you would need to burn roughly 100,000 TNT molecules to get the equivalent energy of a single deuterium fusion.

This is a consequence of the principle known as conservation of momentum, and it’s why a motorcyclist suffers so much more than the driver of a car when the two collide. The lighter object (the motorcycle) gets most of the energy of the collision, while the heavier object (the car) gets less. It is the same with subatomic particles. A helium-3 nucleus weighs almost exactly three times as much as the neutron, so the neutron gets three times the energy that the helium nucleus does.

In fact, a 2.5 MeV gamma ray is obviously wrong. The gamma ray wouldn’t be
more
energetic than the 2.45 MeV particle that produced it.

Peterson made the error of calling it an anonymous gift rather than admitting where the funds came from, and he was forced to step down in the ensuing scandal.

See appendix.

A joule is a measure of energy that is related to the watt, which is a measure of power. A 100-watt lightbulb, for example, consumes 100 joules of energy every second. Ten thousand joules isn’t a lot of energy—the amount consumed by a 100-watt lightbulb in less than two minutes—but poured into such a tiny space and over such a short time it becomes a considerable amount of power. And it takes much more than 10,000 joules of energy to produce a laser beam that powerful.

Some of the support was unwanted. The conspiracy theorist and presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche was a big supporter of fusion power, and founded an organization, the Fusion Energy Foundation, to support the cause. According to LaRouche’s
Executive Intelligence Review
, the foundation was shut down in the late 1980s after a long campaign of harassment by British and Israeli intelligence operatives. According to most other sources, the foundation was shut down when the government went after LaRouche for mail fraud. (He was convicted in 1988.)

The dedication ceremony went on as planned, even though the project had been cancelled weeks before. “I thought I was going to a wake,” said one of the ceremony’s attendees.

Some wags noted that ITER (pronounced “eater”) was a frighteningly apt name for the device.

In 1999, Holt was elected to Congress as the representative for Princeton’s congressional district.

At one point, Holt displayed a graph showing life expectancy and energy consumption: the more energy a society consumes, the longer its people live—implying that societies should boost their energy output. Of course, this is a causation-correlation fallacy. A highly industrialized society consumes more power, and it has longer life expectancies because it has better medical care. The increased power consumption doesn’t
cause
the increased life expectancy, even though the two are
correlated
.

If the fuel is a mixture of deuterium and tritium, the results are even worse; there are more neutrons, and they have more than five times as much energy: 14.1 MeV instead of 2.45 MeV. Advanced fuels, such as ones based on fusing boron-11 with protons or helium-3 with itself, could reduce this neutron problem dramatically, but right now, these are a pipe dream.

That way, when we reported about a manuscript that was appearing in
Science
, as we often did, we would not be influenced by the opinions of the editorial side of the journal. We could criticize an article in our own magazine’s pages or refuse to cover it, regardless of the opinions of
Science
’s scientific editors.

It wasn’t too hard to inquire about the paper without causing any leaks. Just the fact that I was from
Science
meant that reviewers knew I was likely calling about the Taleyarkhan paper, while those who had not heard of the manuscript would assume that I was calling about something else.

Some scientists had a low opinion of Kennedy, a biologist and environmental scientist, long before he arrived at
Science.
While president of Stanford University in the early 1990s, he was pilloried by Congress and the press for an accounting scandal having to do with Stanford’s research accounts. I think that much of the criticism of Kennedy is unfair, but he was forced out as president, and many in the scientific community blamed him for increased government regulations and scrutiny on their funding. A decade had passed since his resignation, but some in the scientific community still bore him a grudge.

Polywater is another notorious case of pathological science from the 1960s. Russian scientists claimed they had found a new form of water, one more viscous than ordinary water. Scientists studied the phenomenon for a while before deciding that the viscosity was caused by contamination.

AAAS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is the scientific society that publishes
Science
.

I didn’t appear on TV. When I got the first call, I contacted Don Kennedy, telling him that I’d be willing to talk about the science behind the papers and what people on all sides had told me, but that it would be inappropriate for me to represent
Science
magazine. I suggested that the editors should handle the television interviews. He agreed, and I was spared the television circuit.

Putterman had not yet published his work on piezoelectric fusion (see appendix), so I was unaware of his research in that area.

Putterman also leveled a charge about using some of the DARPA money for an experiment that was not supposed to be part of the grant.

The panel also found that Taleyarkhan had reused data, that Taleyarkhan failed to acknowledge DARPA funding, and that he manipulated Purdue’s press release about the Xu-Butt paper—but that these actions didn’t constitute scientific misconduct.

A few hawks have pushed for new weapons designs. In the early 2000s, weaponeers were designing a controversial “bunker buster,” the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator bomb, which probably would have needed testing before deployment.

In fact, many fusion scientists believe that even if NIF succeeds, it won’t be a major advance on the path to fusion energy. NIF’s lasers aren’t the most promising candidate for fusion reactors. For one thing, they have to cool a long time between shots. Solid-state lasers, with their faster repeat rates and higher efficiencies, seem a more appropriate choice. Some work is also being done using two sets of lasers, one set to heat and one set to compress the plasma. NIF won’t help much with this research either.

Estimating costs of big projects conjures up all sorts of monkey business. As of 2003, the cost of construction was estimated to be about $5 billion. Inflation raises that cost by about 3 percent per year, but ignore that for the moment; 3 percent is small compared to some other factors that need to be considered. Major U.S. cutting-edge projects require a contingency fund—extra money to deal with unexpected problems that inevitably crop up. This contingency should be 20 percent or more of the construction cost, yet the $5 billion price tag doesn’t include any contingency. So tack on $1 billion right there. That’s just construction costs, assuming everything goes reasonably well. Operating the reactor and decommissioning it once it is done will cost at least as much as construction, so the total reaches $12 billion at a minimum.

The following year, Bush made NASA’s primary goal a return to the moon, in part because it is home to “abundant resources” that can be exploited by humans. Other than water (which does not exist in great quantities on the moon), the main resource is helium-3, which can be fused with itself in a reactor to produce energy without creating many neutrons. The lack of any such device doesn’t seem to trouble lunar-mission advocates, but it did make ITER, indirectly, a justification for an enormously expensive space program.

As this book went to press, things were going wrong on the U.S. side once again. Congress slashed funding for ITER, and while the president attempted to restore those funds, Congress was likely to cut them yet again. The other ITER partners may well have to forge ahead without American support.

There were earlier versions of television that dissected the image with mechanical spinning disks and other nonelectronic means. They were impractical, so Farnsworth’s device was a major leap forward.

Li took second place in the competition, losing to another student who looked into treatments for yeast infections.

This phenomenon is related to the more famous piezoelectricity. A piezoelectric crystal does the same thing—rearrange its charges—because of pressure changes rather than heat changes.