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. 

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.

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.

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