Tag: The Dragon's C.L.A.W.

Truth versus Fiction

On By gyonas11 Comments

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

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

Russia’s 1975 electron beam fusion reactor

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

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

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

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

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

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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