Heraclitus, QMU, and Laser Fusion

On By gyonas8 Comments

Heraclitus had many famous quotes, but the one I often remember is, “No man ever steps in the same river twice. For it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” My take away from this is relevant to many of the complex problems I have worked with over my 50 odd years of dealing with various science and technology problems. Also, I can claim without contradiction that my career has never been blemished with even a single success.

For some reason, I always seemed to be interested in really challenging problems that were limited by not just engineering and physics, but also by constraints of politics, economics, and human decision making. I have written about this general class of problems that are best described as “wicked.” They are characterized as not having any closed form solution. Working on such problems provides the participants with alternating experiences of euphoria and utter depression. Maybe that is why poor Heraclitus had a problem crossing a river.

People in charge of maintaining the United States’ nuclear weapons stockpile are facing a particularly wicked problem. Their job is to assure that the weapons are safe, secure, and reliable… but without the ability to fully test them by detonating any of these weapons. This approach is called Quantification of Margins and Uncertainty (QMU).  It is a process of highly diagnosed but sub critical experiments and comprehensive computer simulations to allow decision making about the risk involved in the performance and reliability of the stockpile.

An extremely important and challenging aspect of this program is the use of lasers to ignite fusion ignition in the laboratory. The recent experiment at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) recently demonstrated fusion ignition with more energy output than delivered to the target by the lasers. This is the first time that actual “fusion ignition” has been achieved in a lab.

In my Feb.23 post “Fusion Fact or Fiction,” I explained the seemingly “miraculous” achievement involving many tradeoffs on nonlinear variables adjusted over years of complex experiments and calculations requiring continuing political support with ever-increasing budgets. I stated then (and as far as I know now) the achievement has yet to be repeated. The lab director explained recently, “We haven’t had the kind of perfect capsule that we had in December.” Perfect capsules will require a “perfect” budget.

An additional issue is the performance of the laser. Pushing the laser to its limits causes damage to the optical system that is expensive and time consuming to fix. There is also the political pressure created by the association of fusion research with the desire to develop the ultimate clean, cheap, unlimited source of energy.  

So, how can leaders deal with this wicked problem? I think the methodology that will be useful is QMU that focuses on establishing the needed margins of performance of all the components of NIF experiments that will have uncertain outcomes. Each experiment will be a different man stepping into a different river.  Heraclitus would certainly get his feet wet, but he might get swept away.

Truth versus Fiction

On By gyonas11 Comments

Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction is more fun.

At the end of 2022 when Lawrence Livermore Laboratory achieved a major fusion breakthrough, my novel, The Dragon’s C.L.A.W. was already at the printers.  This struck me as amusing, since the book tells the story of a fictional clean energy breakthrough. In the novel, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory create a compact clean low-cost energy source using electron beams to trigger a Low Energy Nuclear Reaction that generates electromagnetic energy and then directly convert that into electricity.

Russia’s 1975 electron beam fusion reactor

The fictional breakthrough discovery is an accident that generates one thousand times more energetic output.  In addition to intended entertainment, my book’s basic messages are first that surprises happen in research when one’s imagination, creativity and enthusiasm is as important as careful well-founded analysis. My second theme is that discovery of new science is like a knife. A knife can be used to butter your bread or slit someone’s throat. Technology is a literal double-edged sword. I believe that there will always be applications of scientific achievements that are both civilian and military—that can be used for peaceful innovation or for weapons of war. I also believe that there will always be people who can invent and stimulate ideas as well as people who know how to stand in the way of progress. The path to scientific innovation often involves the sort of characters that appear in the pages of The Dragon’s C.L.A.W. 

I spent much of my career striving to achieve a breakthrough that could lead to clean, unlimited energy. Now, as an author I have created a fictional breakthrough that reaches that goal. So, naturally that begs the question—will scientists achieve that fusion goal in real life? When it comes to recent fusion breakthroughs, the rhetoric is exciting and invigorating. Examples of recent not too specific government fusion statements are “a game changer for efforts to achieve President Biden’s goal of a net-zero carbon economy,” and “new ways to power our homes and offices in future decades.” When I read such announcements, I cannot but help remembering Reagan’s Star Wars speech in 1983 that the goal of his missile defense program would make “nuclear weapons obsolete.” The outcome of the Reagan initiative was not technical but a strategic/political event that took place at Reykjavik Iceland in 1986 as told in my Potomac Institute article, It’s Laboratory or Goodbye.

Another famous president’s call for action was Kennedy’s 1962 challenge to “land a man on the moon” by 1970. In my first year as a grad student, after I listened to a detailed Caltech colloquium after the Kennedy speech, I was convinced that the technology was already well developed, the achievement was not that far off and a race with the Soviets would provide plenty of political support for the program. Kennedy’s words shaped public enthusiasm for the space program. Words can change the way people think about science. Words can change the way governments fund science.

This approach to imagining and planning for a very distant future suggested to me a story that begins with “it was dark and stormy night.” The story is about two cave men who sat in the cold, dark, dampness of their cave when a bolt of lightning struck and ignited for the first time in the history of human development, a pile of wet branches at the mouth of their cave. The pile of wet wood was ignited into a growing fire rather than just a thin whisk of smoke they had previously experienced.  One cave man could hardly believe that a lightning bolt could create a roaring fire in wet wood. He was astonished, warm, happy, and started to roast a small rodent on a stick, but the other, probably one of the first human engineers spoke up, “What if the lightning bolt ignited a new reaction that transformed the wood into new materials and created a way to make cheap, clean, inexhaustible energy?”

If you want to spend more time thinking about the scientific process, the quest for inexhaustible energy and the unavoidable connection between peaceful innovation and military applications, pick up a copy of The Dragon’s C.L.A.W. at your local bookstore or order online: