Tag: fusion

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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Looking ahead to the tricentennial

On By gyonas6 Comments

Make America Warm Again

It occurred to me that since our nation’s 300th birthday party is just over 50 years away, it is not too early to speculate about what things might be like in the future. I thought one way to go about this speculation would be to go back 50 years and consider the thinking about the future at that time, and then project forward into 50 years in the future. The issues I considered were the subjects that are very prominent in current concerns and worries: global climate, the economy, science and technology and war. My goal in this exercise in speculation is to encourage others to join in and share ideas and help us all think more clearly about preparing for the future.

So, let’s turn the page back 50 years. The climate was a serious source or worry in the 1970s. I remember that in my hometown, Cleveland, Ohio, where my parents still lived, the blizzard of January 1977 hit. The high winds and rapidly dropping temperatures suddenly swept across Ohio. On Jan. 28, the temperature dropped from 20 degrees to 10 below zero during the day, and wind gusts of 60 mph created huge drifts and zero visibility. Stores, factories and the government facilities were closed. The National Guard was called out to rescue hundreds and carry them to safety.

In the 70s, it was an accepted reality that the world was getting colder. A widely publicized article in “Newsweek” magazine captured the thinking at that time. The story complained about the “most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded … and fundamental changes in the world’s weather” and claimed that “after three quarters of a century of extraordinary mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down … climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action.” The author was right about the lack of political action, since the inclement weather was often temporary and people forgot about temporary shivers and went back to a normal life. In fact that period was followed by a warming trend that continues to this day and there was no political action of any kind.

As many sources of data reveal, there has been a rise in temperature of roughly 0.5 degrees centigrade in the last 50 years. If that trend continues, another increase of 0.5 degrees would be a reasonable assumption of a continuation of the trend with no prediction of a catastrophic result caused by burning fossil fuels.  To the non-expert observer like me, a continuation of the past trend seems reasonable.  But according to the “climate experts,” if greenhouse gasses continue to rise at the present rate, the global temperature will increase by another 2 or even 3 degrees and the result will be “an existential threat to human civilization.” A contrarian view was presented by Steve Koonin, who I have known over the years and I consider to be a reputable scientist. His book “Unsettled” considers multiple climate drivers and presents the case that warming is not necessarily caused by human burning of fossil fuels.

Although I agree with that a large increase in global temperature would be catastrophic, my opinion is that the global climate is so complex that predictions about the future are not credible. What the data has convinced me is that for the last 40 years, the global temperature has shown oscillations of a fraction of a degree every few years. I expect that to continue. It is likely that as warming continues, the available energy in the environment and both the frequency and consequences of extreme weather occurrences will increase. I am certain that there are many coupled nonlinear climate processes with many feedback loops that lead to these oscillations and short term violent weather phenomena. This complexity makes predictions unreliable and calls for the need for more data in order to generate scientifically valid computer simulations. 

So for now, my prediction is there will be a continuation of large oscillations with a slow increase in temperature, and that political leaders will have little effect on the outcome. Nevertheless, politicians will continue to take advantage of the media to modify public opinion in order to impact the investment in sources of energy. For practical reasons, however, the economy will nevertheless continue to rely on fossil fuels for practically everything we do.

There are many politicians using the fear of the “coming climate catastrophe” to strengthen their support. I expect that the combination of fear of the “future disaster” and greed for new sources of political power and profits will lead to many new investments that may impact on the economy over a long period of time, but I don’t expect any big changes based on climate running amok.  The one thing that seems likely is that just as there are many nonlinear variables that are important in climate. This multiplicity of variables is also true with the economy, which is also driven by the nonlinear effects of human behavior including fear and greed that can result in large oscillations. Too much of a good thing is going to always lead to an overreaction followed by a correction, but the economy will eventually smooth out the oscillations and a slow and steady increase in economic health will continue. So in 50 years, because of the flexibility and freedom in our economy as well as checks and balances in our political system, there will be self-corrections and modifications in investments leading to a general improvement in the health, welfare and wealth of the average American.

The sources of energy are liable to follow the market forces that will continue to support investments in fossil fuels without any major changes. I predict there will be increased investments in small modular nuclear reactors for remote applications and to supplement the grid to deal with climate oscillations assuming the problems of nuclear waste disposal will be solved.

But what about the revolutionary changes caused by the deployment of the clean, cheap, safe inexhaustible fusion power sources that have always been “only 20 years in the future”? It is often said that the 20 year prediction will always be true, and I agree with that. There may be a method to use fusion as a method for a safe and low cost way to treat nuclear waste, but this will require a new discovery of a practical, affordable and reliable fusion reactor, and that seems unluckily even though scientists and engineers will claim frequent breakthroughs to keep the continuation of funding. The most likely application of fusion, assuming many of the material survival problems are solved, is likely to be in combination with a growing reliance on small modular nuclear reactors. I, however, see the real 50-year advances from science will not be with things but with people.

In the next 50 years, I believe there will be real changes in the science and technology in regard to the way people think, learn, remember and behave. This will happen because we will learn how to measure in detail how the brain works, create computer simulations of those data and learn how to use electrical neuro technology to enhance the brain features we like and discourage the features that are not so useful. In a previous post about “brain zapping,” I explained that the key will be brain wave entrainment using closed loop feedback control to improve the single most important problem us old folks will face–the deterioration of brain function with age. Rather than advances in use of drugs to deal with neurological problems, I believe that brain treatment and enhancement will be electrical, and productive lifelong learning and contributions to society will dominate health and welfare. We will have to learn to accept a lot of really smart old people making decisions and running things.

The danger in such a successful widespread use of brain enhancement will be the problem of addiction to these methods and misuse that are likely to occur, so we need to prepare for not just the benefits of enhanced brain functions, but the need for controls that will have to be provided by our methods of government. As long as the government is honest, fair and well behaved, the use of brain enhancement should be primarily beneficial … except bad actors may emerge and lead to conflict, and the deployment of brain weapons will be a problem of new and dangerous methods of war.

As I explained in my post, “The Fallacy of the Last Move,” there will always be people who use fear and greed to create an arms race, and this will include brain weapons and counter brain weapons. This could lead to a real, not an artificial catastrophe, and there will need to be societal agreements to limit the undesirable aspects of brain enhancement. I think the benefits to society will be so great that wisdom will emerge and prevent future brain wars.

But I guess there will be other ways to wage wars based on infection of people and computer software. It is likely that there will continue to be both natural variations of airborne viruses and eventually their use in military actions. This will result in the deployment of facility and human sensors along with vaccines to manage the spread of disease. Computer software will continue to be hacked by criminals, but my concern is the self-evolution of computer viruses as a result of automated software created methods. Maybe Hal will tell us, “I am sorry Dave, but I’m afraid I can’t do that.” What do you think? Comment with your predictions for 2076. 

Russian Scientist Reveals Secret of H Bomb Part Three

On By gyonas8 Comments

In 1977, our Sandia team responded to the competition with Russia with our own claim of successful e beam driven fusion only one year after Rudakov’s announcement. Our concept was called “magnetic thermal insulation,” and our experimental result called “the Phi target” was announced to have produced a similar number of neutrons as the Rudakov claim one year earlier. The basic idea was not amenable to simple analysis, since it involved extremely complex physics of the plasma stability of thermal insulation. At our annual review from the government and outside experts we learned it was not favorable to the plasma physics theory community, but is in fact a key attribute of today’s Sandia inertial confinement fusion program. We made no mention of the so-called Rudakov secret target, and both groups went different directions. An article in “Physics Today” helped to excite the feeling of competition between the two groups with a title: “Sandia and Kurchatov groups claim beam fusion” and we were happy to receive continuing funding, in no small part due to the “help” from our Russian friends.

Those of us with weapons clearances were sworn to protect the radiation drive concept, but this left room for speculation by the media. For instance one story claimed, “The Soviets are nearing a breakthrough in developing nuclear weapons 100 times more powerful than the largest current weapon–a gigaton hydrogen bomb–a doomsday bomb that could destroy the world in one blow.” Two prominent U.S. weapons physicists argued in private over whether to acknowledge the revealed concept and eventually the weapons community acknowledged that there was no longer a secret to protect. Both countries were off and running in a race to be the first to prove the concept that was called the hohlraum secret, except by then the very concept of radiation coupling to a fusion target had disappeared from any public discussion, and the concept no longer seemed to exist in the Soviet Union, or at least no more was said about it. 

The technical problem we both faced became how to get enough energy into the hohlraum fast enough to do the job. Our simple calculations showed that would require 1000 TW, and that was almost inconceivable. We thought maybe the combination of radiation drive and magnetic thermal insulation might permit ignition at 100 TW.  At an international fusion conference in 1975, Rudakov had already published a concept for an e beam fusion reactor and the e beam was certainly not in the 1000 TW class.  Rudakov was not alone in rather wild extrapolation, since in 1974 we had already applied for a U.S. patent on an e beam fusion reactor concept and the patent was award in 1975 and expired in 1992, so I never got any royalties. I did publish a “Scientific American” article in 1978 entitled “Fusion Power with Particle Beams” and similar to the continuing saga of fusion “breakthroughs” claimed frequently, success was only 20 years away. 

By 1979, the Soviets announced that they were operating the first module of their machine called Angara 5, and they claimed as reported in “Pravda,” “When it is completed we hope to obtain a controlled thermonuclear reaction…producing more energy than it consumes … demonstrate that an industrial pilot plant can be built.” The “New York Times” picked up the story with a front page article “Soviet Reports Major Step toward a Fusion Plant.” The article went on to say the similar facility at Sandia is expected to start operation in a year and cited “the middle 1980s as a possible time when researchers may achieve a breakeven point … and another before a fusion reactor produces more power than it uses, opening the way for the production of a useful energy source.”

In 1981, the U.S. Department of Energy advertised their inertial confinement fusion program as proceeding toward a 1987 goal when, “ignition experiments at Sandia and at the Lawrence Livermore Lab, provided a simultaneous evaluation of trade-offs between lasers and particle beam drivers.” The Kurchatov group continued to innovate ideas for electron beams, and our group changed the focused beam approach from electrons to ions that could provide a more certain method to heat a thin shell. We pressed ahead with construction plans. Our timing for the change to ions was rather fortunate, because the Department of Energy had already decided our electron beam approach was a dead end, but I convinced the head of energy research that I was also “negative on electrons and positive about ions.” The race was on, and the participants believed the outcome was certain to be resolved in only a few more years.

By 1983, Rudakov’s group was silent about any more hohlraum ideas, and for the next 10 years I was not involved in the Sandia program.  After Ronald Reagan’s famous speech on March 23, 1983, to embark on a fundamental change in our strategic weapons investments from offense to defense, I was asked by former Los Alamos lab director Harold Agnew to work for three months with a team of experts from the labs and industry to put together a five-year Pentagon directed energy weapon plan. One concept was that a low altitude space-based constellation of powerful chemical lasers could attack and destroy the giant SS 18 boosters as they slowly rose above the atmosphere. There were many other concepts that were “imaginative.” After only a short time, Agnew told me he had become convinced there was “no pony in that pile of horse droppings,” and he became uninvolved in the process. 

We did complete a plan that we delivered to the president in the fall of 1983, and it became part of the $25 billion five-year proposal that went to the congress and Secretary of Defense Weinberger was dedicated to make it a reality. By then I was sure the entire venture was going nowhere, but the president had decided that missile defense could make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete” and few people realized that he hated nuclear weapons as much as he disliked Soviet communism.  A few months later, I was chosen by General James Abrahamson as his acting deputy and the Chief Scientist for Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, AKA Star Wars program, with an assignment to help make the president’s vision a reality. 

Much of my two years in the Pentagon involved defending the program that I claimed was research to resolve the enormous number of questions about technology that the president claimed was almost ready for deployment. He repeatedly said he wanted to share everything we learned with the Russians if they would agree with us to give up all our nuclear weapons.  The scientific community, including many of the people I had worked with, were inclined to accept Agnew’s opinion, but one MIT professor advocated that we keep very secret anything we learned of value, but that we share everything that did not work. It seemed to me two years later that the technology was no closer than when we had started. The advances in offensive countermeasures moved ahead much more rapidly than the defense technologies. There were, however, actually two true believers that did remain, and one was the Ronald Reagan and the other was Mikhail Gorbachev, but that is yet a different story I published in an article entitled “Its Laboratory or Goodbye.”

After I left the Pentagon, and after a three years trying to manage defense contracts at a private sector defense contractor, I conclusively demonstrated my inability to manage cash flow. When I learned that Al Narath, who had hired me at Sandia in 1972 had returned to Sandia after a stay at Bell Labs, I decided to rejoin him at Sandia. Eventually I was reassigned back to the fusion program, and Narath, who had supported me in my early quest based on the promise of pulsed power engineering 20 years earlier, was becoming “a bit impatient.” Our work at Sandia had gone from the initial electron beam work in 1972, then on to EBFA, to the transition to ion beams on PBFA I, then the larger PBFA II that fired its first shot in 1985. The pulsed power technology was a success, but the problem was that the ion beam generation and focusing research was in a rut, and now a miracle was needed to get to 100TW and even the more daunting challenge of 1000TW.

Then the brilliant discovery involving many very creative scientists at several labs was that a pulsed power driven Z pinch could produce levels of radiation above 100 TW to drive a fusion capsule. The basic idea of the Z pinch is to slowly build up the power in a magnetic field that compresses and heats a plasma that implodes to high density and temperature, and then becomes a powerful source of radiation as it collapses on itself. The PBFA II sign came down, and the machined was renamed Z. The ion beam approach was discontinued in a burst of enthusiasm for the new way ahead.

After the demonstration of what I claimed was “the most powerful X-ray source in the world,” my marketing juices were flowing again. I proposed to use a two sided Z pinch hohlraum concept with an even larger machine I called X-1 that probably would require a $1 billion investment.  I advertised this idea in 1998 in my second “Scientific American” article entitled “Fusion and the Z Pinch” 20 years after my first installment in that magazine article on particle beam fusion.

The basic idea was to employ two identical Z pinches to drive a hohlraum at radiation power levels approaching 1000TW and with a pulse duration of 10 billionths of a second that could deliver 10 million joules to a target. That appeared from calculations to be the right amount of energy to ignite fusion burning and obtain high output gain. I was convinced we could reach our goal before the laser program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory could get there, but that competition did not make the Department of Energy happy since they had already decided that the National Ignition Fusion (NIF) laser approach was the right way as they brilliantly demonstrated last year, over 20 years after they convinced the DOE that I was wrong, as they achieved fusion burn demonstrated with NIF and two sided irradiation using 192 laser beams delivering almost 2 million joules to the hohlraum. 

My marketing activity, however, resulted in my permanent removal by DOE from the program in 1998. My Russian friend also departed from their ICF program and he left the Kurchatov Institute and immigrated to the United States. His colleague Valentine Smirnov became the head of the Russian program that was concentrating on the Z pinch approach. The Sandia pulsed power program continued and prospered without my further interference, with an upgrade leading to improvement in machine performance and diagnostics leading to several scientific discoveries related to materials at extreme temperatures and pressures.

Now the Sandia program has changed course again and is focusing on a new concept called MagLIF for ignition based on a Z pinch to implode a magnetic thermally insulated and laser preheated cylindrical target. Ironically, the use of magnetic insulation in a pulsed power driven target was what I had proposed with electron beams in the Phi target. 

The hohlraum is essential to the NIF laser fusion approach, but is no longer part of the chosen concept at Sandia.  I would, however, not be surprised if the advantages of trapped and symmetric radiation-driven implosion may be reinvented someday, possibly in China.  The history of foreign competition seems to be repeating itself as the Chinese have claimed to be building a machine “20 times more powerful than Z,” which is probably an exaggeration, but I am sure it will be in the 1000TW range–that is if it really is funded. Their publications demonstrate a thorough knowledge and ability to harness the needed modern pulsed power technology. 

It has been 25 years since the Sandia approach became the use of the Z pinch, and to celebrate that event, the seven Sandia pulsed power directors who have provided leadership for the pulsed power science program since 1978, came together last year to share their memories and provide the incentive to continue the journey on a path I started over 50 years ago. The advance of science and technology continues, but sadly it seems that human behavior has not improved that much. It seems now that Reagan and Gorbachev had a rather good idea about eliminating nuclear weapons after all. 

Russian scientist reveals the secret of H bomb, Part Two

On By gyonas5 Comments

Let’s return to the story of the Russian scientist who revealed the secret of the H bomb. In an earlier post, I explained how, in 1976, “The New York Times” reported that Soviet scientists had made a fusion breakthrough using electron beams. None of the physics of this Russian breakthrough had been revealed. The scientific community was anticipating some sort of an announcement at an upcoming conference; however, the big disclosure actually began on a beach in Santa Barbara, California three months after “The New York Times” ran the story. Lyonid Rudakov, my colleague and friend from the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, and I sat on the sand in a hastily arranged, totally private and completely unexplained meeting at high noon.

Rudakov had asked me to meet him. On the way to “the secret meeting,” I wondered if this was some scene from one of those spy movies. We sat there in silence, and then Rudakov reached for a twig and drew a simple figure in the sand beginning with an empty cone, much like an ice cream cone without ice cream. Then he added a thin curved layer. He explained that the drawing was of a conical indentation in a lead plate. Then he explained that there was an outer shell composed of a thin gold layer, curved in a spherical shape. Inside of that was a thin plastic shell containing thermonuclear fuel. The outer shell was heated by the tightly-focused electron beam and when it became sufficiently hot, the inner shell was heated by radiation. The thin inner shell then imploded into the conical shape, compressing and heating the thermonuclear fuel and producing a reaction output consisting of a pulse of about 1 million fusion neutrons.  My jaw fell open. My friend, a Soviet scientist, was revealing the secret and extremely closely-held concept of radiation-driven fusion weapons.

That evening Rudakov was scheduled to give a paper describing his work, and I, representing the competing U.S. program, was to introduce him at the after-dinner meeting at the Gordon Conference. Conferences such as that were low key opportunities for scientists to share unpublished work. The conference rule was that the information shared be held until a real publication was released. Rudakov must have known that what he planned to share was certain to shock many of the attendees who were from nuclear weapon labs, and I guessed that he did not want to surprise me that evening in front of the crowd.  For some reason I never understood, Rudakov had received permission to reveal this radiation-driven concept as essential to his use of electron beams to ignite a fusion reaction. He was prepared to share his results widely during his visit to the U.S.

In the following days, Rudakov went on to visit U.S. nuclear weapon labs and deliver the same talk, but by then, the government had warned anybody involved not to repeat anything. The FBI followed up by confiscating the blackboards used in the presentations. Rudakov was rather casual about the entire episode, but he did make one serious request during his visit to the United States. He wanted me to know that I needed to help him with a desperate problem. I wondered if that scene from that imagined spy movie was about to take place. I was in for a shock.

Rudakov explained that he wanted to buy a pair of blue jeans. He could not return to Moscow without the garment that was impossible to get in Russia.  I was relieved that I was not involved in some mystery, and took him to the local shopping mall. We went to several stores, with a variety of options and different prices.  Rudakov looked confused. He asked me why there was not just one price determined by the government. He could not cope with the free market concept and went away empty-handed. He was obviously disturbed by this interaction with the American economy.

At the same time, Rudakov never seemed to realize the swirling controversy he had created in the nuclear weapons community. His disclosure was a major development in fusion research. The fact that the Russian experiment had been revealed, but not explained, caused quite a stir. Earlier, “The New York Times” had only whetted the appetite of its physics readers, but nobody knew about the use of a radiation-driven implosion. A few months later, the entire event became the talk of the physics world. One widely accepted science magazine ran the headline: “Thermonuclear Fusion: U.S. Puts Wraps on Latest Soviet Work.”

Rudakov was anxious to spread the word that they were going ahead with building a giant electron beam machine that would cost 50 million rubles and would supposedly achieve fusion ignition. Scientists who did not know the secret of the H bomb were bewildered. The reason for the secrecy was not that the U.S. government was worried about classified information leaking out to the Soviets, but that the Soviet secrets would leak out to others. One scientist commented, “The work at Sandia was classified but the same work in the Soviet Union was unclassified.” Everyone involved was faced with mind numbing contradictions.

One thing was clear however: the Soviets were ready to race with us. I knew that their creation and advertising of a competition would help them enhance the credibility of their program help them obtain funding for further research. Of course that would not be so bad for us either.  The race really had become well-known three years before at the fusion conference in Moscow. At that 1973 meeting, Rudakov had announced they were embarking on a program to achieve fusion using electron beams to heat a BB sized spherical pellet filled with thermonuclear fuel. He neglected to mention the radiation drive. He claimed then that a few million joules would have to be deposited in the heavy metal shell of the pellet in a pulse of a few nanoseconds. The requirement was for a beam of 1000 trillion watts, and the highest power machine that they had was only 1 trillion watts. Their plan was to build a machine only in the 100 trillion watts range. Now, the use of a radiation-driven thin shell seemed to explain the contradiction. The breakthrough was the radiation-driven implosion.  It now appeared that the much lower power level would be useful using a low density, thin-walled target driven by radiation. They had neglected to mention that in 1973.

I should point out that was more to this competition than innovative physics, but in the U.S. we had the advantage of our ability to rapidly exploit modern technology that was driven by our free market economy and development of technology. Rudakov had an economics lesson trying to buy jeans, but he was not alone in learning about the economics of his competing country. The Moscow meeting was held at the giant Moscow University built in Stalinist style in the 1950s. I will never forget the giant ornate auditorium where I made my presentation. I also remember the food at the cafeteria.  I never resolved the mystery of that strange fruit-like liquid substance. I ate it, but I still wonder what it was.

I was staying at the enormous, slightly rundown Rossiya hotel overlooking Red Square, advertised as the largest hotel in the world. It was a fairly cold June and they had disconnected the heat for the summer. The hotel’s elevator operator, a nice old Russian grandmother who spoke no English, seemed rather disturbed when I complained to her in my version of broken Russian/English about the temperature in my room. I rubbed my body to demonstrate how cold I was. Apparently, she didn’t conclude I wanted an extra blanket, but rather another, more intimate, source of warmth. I tried not to feel insulted when she laughed vigorously in response.

I also had time to walk over to the giant Gum department store looking for some souvenirs to take home. I found long lines of depressed looking, shabbily dressed people and totally empty counters. I also found a nearby store for tourists that only accepted American money. The so-called Beryozka had a fantastic collection of Russian folk art including beautiful amber jewelry and the obligatory Matryoshka dolls. I discovered a fine woven tapestry that cost $73, the equivalent to 150 rubles. It hangs on my wall today and is pictured in the image accompanying this blog post. I was continually impressed with the creativity, the culture and the scientific discipline of the Soviets, but found their ability to develop commercial products and technology applications seemed to be frozen in the past, just like the architecture of Moscow University.

At the meeting in Moscow, we announced the results of our similar electron beam fusion program and claimed ignition would be possible at only 100 trillion watts based on our concept of an electromagnetically stopped relativistic electron beam. We were planning to build a machine we called the Electron Beam Fusion Accelerator or EBFA. When I told my Russian colleagues that the machine was called EBFA, they intentionally mispronounced the acronym to sound like a Russian insult that went with the Russian word for mother.

Nobody had a clue for a concept of a 1000 trillion watts electron beam accelerator, so both teams worked on other ideas for power multiplication or new ideas to reduce the theoretical power requirement. The threat of violating classification rules in effect put a break on not just implementing, but even thinking about any concepts involving radiation-driven implosions. I wondered if we had already lost the race. As it turned out, we responded with our new invention that I will explain in my next post, part 3 and the last installment of this true story.