The Russians are coming… or maybe the Chinese… or maybe Amazon?

On By gyonas4 Comments

On May 16, I will release my first novel, The Dragon’s C.L.A.W. The book is fiction, loosely based on my more than 50 years of my real-life experiences related to the quest for the ultimate energy source. The scientists in the novel are striving to create a clean, affordable, inexhaustible commercial energy source using a fictitious technology. In real life, I spent my career pursuing the dream of creating fusion energy through applications of high power particle beams and pulsed power technology.

I was first introduced to the concept of using a focused high-current electron beam to ignite fusion burn in 1967 when I started work a small company called Physics International in San Leandro, California. The company was a spin off from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a nuclear weapons lab. The small company had created a program to use advanced pulsed power technology to create radiation sources for weapons effects testing. During my interview, the Livermore scientists told me about their work on the Electron Lighted Thermonuclear Explosion, or ELITE, and their quest to create, control and focus a multimillion ampere relativistic electron beam.

In 1971, I attended an international conference on fusion and happened to meet a Russian scientist named Lyonid Rudakov. I soon learned that Lyonid seemed to know a lot about both beams and fusion.  His lab, the Kurchatov Institute in Russia, was a recognized leader in fusion research and scientists there were already engaged in electron beam applications.  Lyonid and I formed a working friendship as we shared a vision of creating fusion in the lab. 

The following year I joined Sandia National Laboratories with the goal of pursuing the ELITE concept. I started a small program taking advantage of Sandia’s existing pulsed power technology. Within a year, I was applying my electron beam experience to the challenge of beam focusing. With the foolishness of youth and the support of Sandia Vice President Al Narath, who became my long-term mentor and friend, I advocated for a $14 million investment in a Sandia fusion program facility. In my previous post I described the Sandia fusion program that began in 1972 and is ongoing; however, I neglected to describe the vital importance of the cooperation and competition with the Russians, and that must be included in any review of my Sandia work.

It looks now as though the Russians probably understood the real requirements for pulsed power-driven fusion all along, and I learned a lot about science and marketing from my Russian colleagues. My first introduction to their specific predictions was at a conference in Moscow in 1973, where Rudakov presented a concept for a high gain fusion explosion driven by a 10 million joule electron beam. At the time our estimates for fusion ignition were much lower, and we pressed on to get funding for our first big machine, the Electron Beam Fusion Accelerator, EBFA. 

Scientific American article on EBFA.

My imagination was way ahead of real physics, and, in 1975, I even received a patent on an e beam fusion reactor concept. Since the patent expired in 1992, anybody is free to go ahead and use it to solve the world’s energy problems. In 1978, I published an article on particle beam fusion in Scientific American magazine.  I also invented an international electron beam conference that I hosted in Albuquerque and began a tradition of international cooperation and competition. I even had conference pins made up for all of the attendees following the tradition that the Russians followed in their conferences. Even though we had connections with many research groups including Japan, England, France and Israel, our strongest alliance in our fusion quest was from our technical colleagues and Cold War adversaries, the Russians.

With the help of Sandia management and funding from Congress, we broke ground for EBFA in 1977 and began operation in 1980. At the same time the Russians continued with their electron beam approach. In 1979, a New York Times front page article quoted Rudakov announcing that Russia’s new pulsed power machine, Angara 5, “would produce more energy than it consumes… and demonstrate that an industrial pilot plant can be built.”

Competition with the Russians helped me get funding for continued operation of EBFA and allowed our team to respond to new theoretical discoveries with ion driven rather than electron beam targets. As usual in the fusion funding business, getting funding consumed my attention, and we created support for the program by emphasizing use of ions and proposing a new machine, the particle beam fusion accelerator, PBFA. I predicted that PBFA would produce a 100TW output by 1984. I even got away with telling decision makers that I was negative on electrons and positive about ions. I recall the day when I took down the EBFA sign and put up the PBFA sign, abruptly switching from electrons to ions. This change turned out to be the key not just to getting continued funding, but to ensuring program survival.  There were many people, not just at Sandia but other labs around the world, who had invested their time and effort in electron beams who were upset with me. The head of the Soviet electron beam research at the Lebedev Institute began referring to me as “Lysenko,” an infamous Russian scientist known for his dangerous pseudoscience ideas. But the Russians were doing more than insulting my work, they were studying it and considering how they could compete with us and win.

I was a total amateur in the business of selling fusion funding to decision makers, but I learned that the Russians were already way ahead in this vital aspect of fusion research. On my first visit to the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow 50 years ago, was shown their world-famous fusion device, the Tokamak. Their experiment demonstrated real fusion output and became the world leader in fusion research as well as the first of hundreds of claims from all over the world of fusion breakthroughs since then.  I remember the comment from my guide, Lev Artsimovich, considered as a founder and leader of their Tokamak program.  I asked him what is the most serious problem with the Tokamak, and he replied that the “real problem with achieving fusion with my Tokamak, will be how to convince the bureaucrats to continue to spend so much money for me to satisfy my own curiosity.”   The Tokamak concept went well beyond Artsimovich’s curiosity when Reagan and Gorbachev agreed at their summit meeting in 1985 at Reykjavik to a cooperative international fusion reactor program that actually began construction in 2010 with a goal of beginning real fusion operation in 2035 and achieving practical energy gain possibly sometime after that. This method of creating a joint program to sustain investment in a long-term program was not a new idea and was employed in the funding of the 1975 U.S. /Russian Apollo-Soyuz program. This joint activity was part of the Cold War transition to a relationship of détente, which characterized my interactions with Rudakov and other Russians.

Albuquerque Journal reports on Soviets’ 1975 visit to Sandia.

At some point in the evolution of Tokamaks, some Russians, with I suppose weapon lab connections, began to think the way to achieve a large fusion gain in the lab was to use high power lasers as well as pulsed power. The Soviet scientists I knew played a great deal of attention to our research, and one of these was N.G. Basov, the 1964 Nobel Prize winner (shared with Townes and Prokhorov) winner for their original contributions to lasers.  Basov was the father of their giant but mysterious missile defense pulsed laser program called Terra 3.  We learned much later that in 1963 Basov had proposed a missile defense approach using a nuclear explosion pumped laser with an output of 10 million joules, and he was very aware of the United States’ work in our weapon labs.  Interestingly, he was way ahead of the U.S. program championed by Edward Teller in 1983 to use nuclear explosives to excite X-ray lasers. The Russians were building enigmatic, giant facilities and spending lots of rubles. Russia received lots of misguided attention for these efforts in Aviation Week magazine. Basov was also the first to admit that such efforts were futile. After he canceled their program he stated, “Well we made sure that nobody can shoot down a ballistic missile by a laser beam.”

I had many interactions with leading Russian scientists, including Valentin Smirnov, who I invited to attend our Albuquerque conference and to be the first Soviet to visit Sandia in 1975. I recall when I invited him to be the first, his reply, with a bit of a smirk on his face, was “that you know of.” Smirnov worked with Rudakov on their own version of PBFA called Angara, received awards for his pioneering pulsed power-driven z pinches and went on to head the Nuclear Fusion Institute at the Kurchatov Institute. My frequent contact in Moscow was his boss Evgeny Velikhov, who became the science adviser to Gorbachev during the 1980s arms control talks. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the application of pulsed power to fusion ignition, was anxious to stimulate the competition and cooperation with Rudakov and was my host when I attended conferences as a guest of the Soviet Union.  On one of these visits, he had been told we had made a secret fusion breakthrough with PBFA, and he met me at the door of my arriving flight and with a worried look on his face asked me if the rumor was true that we were first to achieve fusion ignition. I assured him that the race was still on and noted his immediate sense of relief.

I also vividly recall my conversation in Moscow after the end of the Cold War in the office of Viktor Mikhailov, Russia’s head of their nuclear weapons programs, and close follower of our work. In that meeting he offered to join with Sandia on the pulsed power approach to fusion ignition. He told me that ignition would require a 10 million joule pulse and 1000 trillion watts, and that would require a machine several times or maybe 10 times more powerful than what we had at Sandia. He offered to build that giant machine in a joint program, but with our money. He offered the use of an existing Russian facility, and he said our cost would “only be $30 million.” I gasped and gulped and almost spit out from my glass of tea, but made no other response. I soon found out that Department of Energy was almost instantly informed by the State Department representative who witnessed the offer, and to say the least, was greatly disturbed that I even listened to his proposed initiative.

The emergence of increasing international competition is accelerating every day. The parallel to the Sandia program, but this time with no cooperation, appeared a few years ago when the Chinese nuclear weapons lab announced they are building their version of Z that is “designed to produce about 60 million joules… 22 times that generated on the Z machine at Sandia.” They claim “it will dwarf the machine in Sandia.” The Chinese don’t seem to be short on cash. They have paid close attention to our publications and they really understand pulsed power technology. This is obvious from many of their publications, including the details on the operation of their electron beam accelerator called Dragon, the name I chose in my novel for the fictitious accelerator in the secret underground Chinese facility.

Basov scowls at EBFA

So, the competition for more funding and more fusion ideas continues and there are even now, not just governments, but also several fusion research entrepreneurs and private investments of several billion dollars. The media is filled with the ever-present announcements of yet another “fusion breakthrough” and certainly, this is just the beginning of increasing investments in fusion research with new ideas emerging every day. Recently, the Chinese announced a new world record with “plasma confinement of 403 seconds” and announced they are aiming to build the world’s first fusion demonstration reactor. They are probably not aware that Rudakov’s promises for a demo reactor preceded theirs by over 40 years.

Government funded programs may benefit from the increasing publicity, and should be able to sustain wide spread public interest in fusion research. For example, one privately funded company is building a “scalable Z-pinch energy system… a seriously cheap, compact, scalable fusion core with the shortest path to commercially viable fusion.”   With international competition as well as large private investments, we should see the rate of breakthrough announcements escalate rapidly and start a cycle of more and more private competition, but don’t count out the role of politics.  As usual, congressional leaders will be enthusiastically emphasizing the “safe and clean” fusion energy payoff, with a subtle inference that nuclear power based on fission does not have those attributes. They often emphasize the benefits of fusion based power plants since this appears to be a goal the public will support.

My soon to be published novel, The Dragon’s C.L.A.W. captures the behavior of decision makers, the politics and economics of fanciful science and the frequent exaggerated claims of one more fusion breakthrough.  Examples of recent not too specific but often hyperbolic government fusion statements are “a game changer” and “new ways to power our homes and offices in future decades.” When I read such announcements, I remember Reagan’s Star Wars speech in 1983 that the goal of his missile defense program would make “nuclear weapons obsolete.” As it turned out, one of the only other people who wanted to eliminate nuclear weapons was Mikhail Gorbachev, but the military industrial complex in both countries was totally opposed and the nuclear arms race continues and escalates every day.  My point is that exploration of science and technology and its application is not just a technical exercise, but also an activity that depends on politics driven by human imagination, fear, greed and belief in what can and should be accomplished.

Truth is stranger than fiction. You can preorder The Dragon’s C.L.A.W. now and purchase it starting May 16, 2023. https://projectzbooks.com/books/#preorder

Sandia’s fusion program

On By gyonas5 Comments

When I was working at Sandia National Laboratories, my fusion research began with a concept of highly-focused, high-current electron beams. After a few years, my colleagues decided that the energy deposition of ions would be more favorable than electron beams for target coupling and implosion. This changed our approach to ion beam focusing. It also led us to propose construction of a new pulsed power machine, which we decided to call Particle Beam Fusion Accelerator or PBFA.

In addition, the researchers emphasized the use of radiation coupling, which years later would become the key to the recent fusion breakthrough at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility. We thought radiation coupling would be essential to driving a spherically symmetric implosion.

In our original plan, we thought we would need an electron beam pulse of 100 trillion watts, which was 100 times more than what we had in the lab at that time. As it turned out, that tremendous increase was still not enough. My colleagues at Sandia went through many iterations struggling to get to the 100 trillion-watt level. After many experiments, many decisions and several critical government reviews, we felt convinced that the ion approach was going nowhere. In the mid 1990s, our program was on the edge of termination. 

Then a technical miracle happened. We discovered a more promising approach to creating the radiation source. We could use a multiple wire Z pinch. We redirected all of our resources to the Z pinch. In 1998, I wrote about this effort in a Scientific American article entitled “Fusion and the Z pinch.” 

To succeed with this approach, it seemed that a much higher current pulsed power machine would be needed. I proposed a new machine called X-1, which meant yet another large increase in funding. The Department of Energy was not entirely amused, but agreed to upgrade the Z machine. With the upgrade, the program continued with improved computer simulations, diagnostics and machine performance all focused on radiation-driven targets.

Recently, Steve Slutz, a Sandia scientist, and his colleagues, came up with a theoretical breakthrough. They suggested using the Z pinch to directly compress the fusion fuel embedded in a strong magnetic field. To lower the power requirement for ignition, a laser is used to achieve the pre-heat needed to start the burn. Aided by the applied magnetic field, the laser preheats the cold fuel. The next step will to achieve ignition and then high gain. We are unsure how much energy will be needed to get a successful high gain from the fusion explosion. There are several theoretical estimates, and Sandia is now considering building a next generation Z machine to deliver 10 megajoules to a fusion target.

The quest for fusion represents decades of research. In my next post, I will discuss the contributions the Russians made to fusion research. For now, I’ll conclude by pointing out how the path to scientific breakthroughs is often littered with false starts, setbacks, disappointments and then startling breakthroughs. I describe this process in my new science fiction novel, The Dragon’s C.L.A.W., which will be released May 16, 2023. Like the fusion researchers at the real national laboratories, my characters are seeking the ultimate clean, safe, unlimited energy source. Will they succeed? Preorder the first novel in this series to find out.

Fusion: fact or fiction

On By gyonas2 Comments

With the advent of the Covid lockdown in 2020, I decided to try my hand at writing science fiction, as an activity to maintain some semblance of sanity. Based on my experiences in the Pentagon, national labs, and consulting for the government, I wrote about the fictitious discovery of an unlimited, cheap, safe energy source. The result was a series of technothriller novels, called the Project Z series. The first book, The Dragon’s C.L.A.W., will be published this May.

Now, you may ask, how much of this series is based on reality? How close are scientists to creating the ultimate energy source? Recently, as my book headed to print, scientists achieved a major fusion breakthrough at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  This fusion research program exists to support the nation’s nuclear weapon program, but the breakthrough made headlines because of the potential to use fusion as an alternative energy source.

On Dec 13, 2022, Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm, announced an outstanding scientific and technical achievement. Lawrence Livermore’s device, called the National Ignition Facility (NIF), had demonstrated “fusion ignition” in a laboratory for the first time. The machine had created a nuclear reaction that generated more energy than it consumed.

Construction on NIF began in 1997 and the device started operating more than 10 years ago. The machine takes energy from a giant capacitor bank, as large as an apartment building, and transforms that energy into 192 pulsed laser beams focused onto a very complex, tiny fusion capsule.  The facility is as long as three football fields and 10 stories tall, but the final energy output comes from a tiny sphere you can barely see in the palm of your hand. Does this sound like another of those government exaggerations, maybe similar to Reagan’s “Star Wars” program he announced in 1983? Indeed, achieving fusion ignition is an incredible achievement. Let’s take a look at what happen on that fateful day at NIF.

To begin with, there was an incredible amount of stored energy in the capacitors, namely two million joules in each of 192 capacitor banks, to excite the lasers. Next the laser energy entered a 1 centimeter-long cylinder through holes on the ends and heated the inner surface of the tiny cylinder. One of the first technical challenges was that the laser pulse had to be tailored to the right shape over time. The laser light had to be precisely injected into small holes on the ends of the cylinder, and the energy had to be directed and precisely absorbed in a predetermined pattern on the inner wall of the cylinder. Both of these goals were achieved. That exquisitely tailored and perfectly focused energy was absorbed and a fraction of that energy was converted into a hot ionized gas, called a radiating plasma, expanding from the heated cylindrical target’s inner wall.

Inside the cylinder sat a tiny sphere, only 2 millimeters in diameter. Using a microscopic tube, the hollow, flawless, gold-plated diamond shell had been filled with fusion fuel. When the lasers hit the cylinder creating the hot ionized gas, radiation flowed around the sphere and heated its outer surface. This made the outer wall of the sphere explode, causing a violent implosion. A small fraction of that implosion energy compressed to heat a tiny, high density, high-temperature spot at the center of the fuel. This triggers the fusion reaction. The energy released by the fusion reaction heated a fraction of the surrounding compressed fusion fuel releasing more energy.

This was the miraculous achievement of creating a burning fusion fuel using NIF. The compression and heating of the fuel was not the really significant result, the true breakthrough was creating a small hot spot that ignited adjacent cold material. Hot spot ignition is the event that may open the way to the future. There were many tradeoffs of nonlinear variables that had to be adjusted after years of very complex experiments and calculations. And repeating the achievement is still yet to come.

Frankly, before NIF was approved by congress, I had my doubts that such a complex process based on hot spot ignition would ever work, and my skepticism did not please my friends on the NIF team. It is still very hard for me to comprehend the entirety of what happened. The sustained investment of so much money and many years of total dedication in the face of repeated failures is remarkable. The complexity of the concept, and brilliance of the scientific and engineering team, as well as the enormous difficulty of the achievement contributed to this historic event, but it is natural to question the result.

However, based on an extensive array of diagnostic sensors backed up by modeling and simulation of the complex physics, we know it really happened. There were so many incredibly challenging engineering requirements, and so many interdependent very nonlinear physical phenomena that could only be modeled on giant computers. I was skeptical at first, and I am now totally impressed that the NIF team accomplished this remarkable result.  Although the phenomenon may be rather hard to duplicate, it happened once, and that makes all of the difference in the long and arduous journey of fusion research. It is just one more of those miracles of engineering and physics!

But what about my attempt at inventing a fictional engineering and science breakthrough in my soon to be published novel, The Dragon’s C.L.A.W.  I imagined my story and began writing it several years before this real miracle occurred. In my futuristic technical mystery novel, a low energy nuclear reaction is triggered by an intense relativistic electron beam. The beam triggers a transmutation of the target material into rare earth elements, and the energy output in the form of an electromagnetic pulse is thousands of times greater than the input. No question. This is pure fiction physics, but it draws on some real research I conducted during my career. In 1972 I initiated a fusion program at Sandia National Labs, even applied for and was awarded a patent on an e-beam fusion reactor concept with construction of what I called the Electron Beam Fusion Accelerator. I’ll discuss my fusion research journey in my next post.

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Fiction may be the answer

On By gyonas10 Comments

In 1985, the magazine “Science Digest” featured a debate between me and Hans Bethe, the 1967 Nobel Prize winner in physics and my former Cornell University undergraduate quantum mechanics physics professor. The question was whether President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI, could be effective against nuclear tipped Soviet missiles. Bethe’s answer was a definite, “No.”

Bethe’s most persuasive argument was, “The entire system could never be tested under circumstances that were remotely realistic.” He did not wish to tackle the psychology of deterrence. He focused on the technical issues instead.

The United States was already living with the concept of mutually assured destruction, which I knew could not be tested either. I argued it was too soon to discuss the effectiveness of any hypothetical defense system. I believed a research program was justified and would be needed in order to influence the perception of a new and safer approach to strategic stability.

There was one area of technology development that concerned me––the requirement that the split-second events in a war would have to be managed by computer software. Back then I was basically Reagan’s Ray Gun Guy, and I did not know anything about testing software. Today, it looks like Bethe was right about the importance of testing. But there’s still something he missed.

Here’s where I think Bethe went astray: testing is all about technology, but deterrence is far more complicated. The vital issues in creating a credible deterrent are not just technology, but economics, social issues, political arrangements and psychology. I learned over the years that such problems really have no final solution, and continuing to pursue the answer often leads to alternating periods of hopeful optimism and depressing pessimism… and sometimes, but not always, real progress. My published opinion was that the outcome of the SDI program would “depend not only on the technology itself, but also on the extent to which the Soviet Union either agrees to mutual defense agreements and offense limitations…no definitive predictions of the outcome can be made.”

My feelings were ambivalent. I struggled to communicate the complexity of the issue to my scientific and political colleagues. I found it even more difficult to explain the questions surrounding SDI to the news media. But one person got it. He was a cartoonist.

In the 1980s, Berkeley Breathed, the cartoonist behind the series Bloom County, created a cartoon about me, the Chief Scientist of Reagan’s SDI, aka Star Wars program. He depicted me as a chubby penguin named Opus, who claimed that enormous sums of money would be needed to develop a “space defense gizmo.” When Opus learned that the unlimited money was not forthcoming, he screamed, “Physicists need Porsches too,” and then mused that maybe “the days of wines and roses are over.” Breathed understood the reality of my job.

I had been challenged with helping to put together a $25 billion, five-year plan for a research program to accomplish Reagan’s goal of “rendering nuclear weapons obsolete.” After the plan was finished and delivered to the Secretary of Defense, I wrote that even if the research was wildly successful, any workable missile defense would have to go along with a comprehensive arms control treaty that greatly reduced our own offensive capabilities as well as the threat. In spite of my published doubts, the following year I was asked by the newly chosen program’s manager, General James Abrahamson, to be his deputy and chief scientist. We brought together a distinguished advisory group including Edward Teller, the “father of the H bomb”, Bernard Schriever, retired four star general and the father of our nation’s first ballistic missiles that responded to the Soviet threat posed by Sputnik in 1957, Simon Ramo, the father of the engineering behind that first ballistic missile technology, Fred Seitz, former head of the National Academy of Sciences, and me.

During my two years in the Pentagon, I was faced not only with many serious detractors, but also with many incidents that could have been the source of high anxiety. I realized the contradictions, irony and exaggeration in the program were inescapable. I managed to approach the many stressful moments with humor that I often expressed in satirical memos and comments that were not always appreciated by my boss. But when dealing with complicated issues, there are no simple solutions. The best you can do is hang on to your sense of humor and keep trying to help other people understand your point of view.

As a cartoonist, Breathed understands that. His fictionalized depiction of the Star Wars dilemma summed up the situation succinctly. Reflecting on his cartoons years later, I wondered if perhaps Breathed had the answer to explaining the ambivalence that I faced during my time in the SDI program. In fact, the contradictory issues related to nuclear deterrence are something all scientists working in national defense face.

So, taking my inspiration from Breathed’s penguin, I have decided to try my hand at writing fiction. This spring, I will launch the first in a series of novels about the complex interaction between science and politics. Stay tuned for more information in future posts.