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 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:
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.
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.
SDI Guy 