The Fusion Illusion Max Schulz

o hear President Barack that power our lives. Moreover, the Obama tell it, we need to renewable energy technologies that Tfundamentally overhaul the the president prefers—like wind, way we produce, deliver, and con- solar, and biomass—now make up sume energy. After the House of only three percent of our electricity Representatives passed the Waxman- use, and an even smaller share of our Markey cap-and-trade bill in June, overall energy consumption. This the president said negligible por- it would “spark a Sun in a Bottle: tion of America’s clean energy trans- The Strange History of Fusion and the energy economy Science of Wishful Thinking formation in our comes despite the By Charles Seife economy. It will Viking ~ 2008 ~ 304 pp. fact that many spur the develop- $25.95 (cloth) $16 (paper) tens of billions of ment of low carbon dollars in state and sources of energy— everything from federal subsidies have been pumped wind, solar, and geothermal power to into renewables for roughly three safer nuclear energy and cleaner coal. decades. It will spur new energy savings, like It is these sources that the presi- the efficient windows and other mate- dent proposes should overtake and rials that reduce heating costs in the replace the fossil fuels that dominate winter and cooling costs in the sum- our current energy economy. He is mer. And most importantly, it will engaged in a staggering exercise in make possible the creation of millions wishful thinking. The limitations of of new jobs.” He repeated those senti- these technologies and fuels are well ments before the G-8 in Italy several known by now: they are prohibitive- weeks later when he stated, “One of ly expensive, they are intermittent my highest priorities as president is power providers, and they have a low to drive a clean energy transforma- energy density compared to fossil tion of our economy.” fuels. Renewables will one day play a That’s pretty ambitious, if not somewhat larger part in our energy audacious. Transforming our ener- economy—a majority of states have gy economy would require replac- passed laws in recent years mandat- ing the massive infrastructure and ing that utilities supply power from production and supply mechanisms them, costly as they are—but because

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Copyright 2009. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. The Fusion Illusion of their severe limitations, the contri- usion has been the Holy Grail of bution from renewable sources will Fenergy since long before anyone be marginal. ever worried about global warming Curiously, the Obama administra- or strategic dependency on OPEC. tion has been lukewarm in its sup- Since the dawn of the atomic age, posed support for nuclear energy, armies of scientists and researchers which is the one proven technology and government officials have invest- capable of generating large supplies ed billions of dollars and countless of reliable power while emitting no hours of toil and labor to replicate, in greenhouse gases. For instance, the a controlled environment, what the president appears to be pulling the sun is constantly doing: converting plug on the proposed Yucca Mountain matter into energy through a fusion nuclear waste repository, without reaction. To figure this out would providing an alternative method for be to solve humanity’s energy needs dealing with spent nuclear fuel. For once and for all. The development of all President Obama’s talk about a successful fusion power plants would post-carbon society, there appears put an end to all the economic, envi- to be little place in his thinking for ronmental, and foreign policy trou- nuclear power. bles that plague the current global Is it really possible that we can trans- energy regime. Unlike windmills and form our energy economy, phasing solar panels, the potential of fusion out the system that has grown more energy is virtually limitless. or less organically over the course of This vision has spurred a move- a century and replacing it with one ment of would-be discoverers light- powered by the clean, green sources ing out for the fame and glory that the president endorses? We would be would accompany the breakthrough wise to consider a similar exercise in of controlled fusion. A recent book wishful thinking about energy that chronicles this wild, oft-contentious has frustrated scientists and dream- scientific pursuit. Charles Seife, a ers for more than half a century. The former Science magazine writer and pursuit of fusion energy— essentially, the author of the heralded 2000 harnessing the force that powers bestseller, Zero: The Biography of a the sun—provides a cautionary tale Dangerous Idea, has written a live- for those who would remake today’s ly account of the history of fusion energy economy. It should be heeded research—“a tragic and comic pur- by those who so casually put their suit that has left scores of scientists faith in government’s ability to fos- battered and disgraced.” ter scientific breakthroughs that will Sun in a Bottle is an engrossing, render the current global energy accessible work that tells a fascinat- infrastructure obsolete. ing story about the quest for fusion.

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It is a story that covers the heights of supplies would be as inexhaustible as man’s knowledge of physics as well the oceans. as the depths of his vainglory—a Enrico Fermi conducted the first tale of great scientific achievement as self-sustained nuclear fission reaction well as the maneuverings of charla- in December 1942 under a squash tans, frauds, cranks, and modern-day court at the University of Chicago. alchemists. And it is a story of false Both the bombs at Hiroshima and hopes; the promise of fusion has for- Nagasaki were fission devices, and a ever been just a decade or two away. fission bomb turned out to be rela- Yet today the faith in fusion is, in tively simple to build; the key is just some quarters, as strong as ever. having enough fuel. A fusion reaction Fusion is, essentially, the opposite would be far trickier, both to start of nuclear fission, which is the pro- and to keep going for more than an cess used by our commercial nuclear instant. But if a fusion reaction could power plants to generate electric- be sustained for just a few fractions ity. With fission, atoms are split of a second, it was soon realized, the and energy is released. With fusion, energy it could produce would be atoms are made to stick together, and immense. the process converts a tiny portion In just seven years, researchers had of the mass of these atoms to pro- figured out how to build fusion bombs duce gargantuan amounts of energy. dwarfing those that ended the war That’s what happens on the sun, with Japan. The Ivy Mike blast on where hydrogen nuclei in the very the South Pacific island of Elugelab hot plasmas that make up its center in November 1952 was ten megatons, constantly slam into each other to or roughly the equivalent of explod- produce helium as well as energy. ing seven hundred Hiroshima bombs. This is the nuclear furnace at the In 1961, the Soviets detonated a heart of any star. It’s what makes the weapon (the “Tsar Bomba”) that was sun shine, and also threatens to blow five times more powerful than Ivy it up, but the sun does not explode Mike. “With Ivy Mike and its succes- because the intense force of its own sors,” writes Seife, “the fusion bomb gravity holds it together. scientists had succeeded at creating a While science and industry have tiny star on Earth.” been successful at producing power Uncontrolled nuclear fusion had from fission, fusion appeals to us been achieved. The challenge was because it is quite a bit more powerful to figure out how to produce a con- than fission. More than that, fission trolled and sustained fusion reaction. requires rare plutonium or uranium The energy potential from fusion for for its fuel, while fusion requires com- civilian purposes promised to dwarf mon atoms like hydrogen. Fusion’s civilian fission power just as the

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H-bomb had dwarfed Fat Man and material they were using was “balo- Little Boy. ney”; the New York Times dubbed it This material is well-plowed the “Baloney Bomb.”) It soon became ground, though Seife does an excel- apparent even to Perón that Richter lent job distilling complicated ques- had not produced a controlled fusion tions of physics into something the reaction. He was a crank who had lay reader can easily understand. The conned Perón into believing they real value of Sun in a Bottle begins had saved the world—a huge inter- at this point, when Seife takes read- national black eye for Perón and ers on a journey over the numerous Argentina. attempts to create that sustained, Meanwhile, real physicists were controlled fusion reaction. It is a pursuing fusion with great zeal. story that goes to the heart of how Lyman Spitzer worked on a figure- science is done, and it drips with eight shaped reactor at Princeton drama, double-dealing, and politics. he called the Stellarator that would exploit the properties of plasma (a n early 1951, Argentine President hot phase of matter that makes up IJuan Perón made a startling the sun’s core) rather than trying to announcement: he claimed to have exactly replicate the hydrogen fusion solved the world’s energy prob- of atomic weapons. The trick was to lems. A group of scientists under his confine the plasma yet still get it hot sponsorship, headed by the Austrian enough. Scientists at the Lawrence Ronald Richter, had supposedly cre- Livermore National Laboratory ated controlled nuclear fusion in their began work on a “magnetic mirror” lab on the island Huemul. Perón’s fusion reactor that used a straight announcement touched off an inter- tube for its magnetic bottle to con- national frenzy, but the physics com- tain plasma. British scientists, mean- munity was rightly skeptical. It was while, toyed with a similar device clear that Perón had no idea what that would “pinch” the plasma—a he was talking about when he said so-called “pinch machine.” A visit- the Huemul discovery might lead ing Los Alamos physicist took this to energy being sold in liter-sized idea back to the United States and bottles similar to milk bottles used built a device cheekily dubbed the by Argentines. Attempts to validate “Perhapsatron.” the experiment independently were Despite the Argentine farce, legiti- met with stonewalling, and what mate scientists believed that the details did emerge convinced the fusion breakthrough was just around international scientific community the corner. In 1955, the president of that the claim was fraudulent. (One the United Nations Conference on Manhattan Project physicist said the the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy

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Copyright 2009. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. Max Schulz said, “I venture to predict that a American scientists finally were able method will be found for liberating to produce a tiny controlled thermo- fusion energy in a controlled manner nuclear fusion reaction with a pinch within the next two decades. When machine called the Scylla. But nobody that happens, the energy problems noticed. It was not announced to great of the world will truly have been fanfare, or even officially announced solved for ever, for the fuel will be at all until 1960, when it was buried as plentiful as the heavy hydrogen in in a government report to Congress. the oceans.” Still, the research continued. Soviet It looked to have happened not in scientist Andrei Sakharov made two decades, but two years. In 1957, breakthroughs with a donut-shaped British scientists appeared to have machine called a tokamak, which won the race with a machine called combined features of the Stellarator the Zero Energy Thermonuclear and pinch machines to contain plas- Assembly, or ZETA. Several weeks ma. Collaborating with British and later Japanese researchers made the American researchers, Sakharov same claim. The media was wild began to apply light from lasers, with claims about “unlimited energy which could concentrate an incredible from seawater” and an end to wor- amount of energy into a tiny space. ries about energy supplies. The Brits The tokamak represented a great announced plans to build on the advance over the earlier Stellarator, success of ZETA by constructing a and reinvigorated the fusion commu- reactor that would heat plasmas to nity. By the early 1970s, government a hundred million degrees and, most scientists from a number of countries importantly, would produce more were routinely achieving small-scale power than it consumed. That, after fusion with lasers. all, was the ultimate goal for civilian These efforts, however, all con- nuclear fusion. sumed vastly greater amounts of But these researchers had miscalcu- energy than they were yet capable of lated. They had not achieved fusion. producing. Fusion would be a point- Within a year of their announce- lessly expensive proposition if it ran ment, they were forced to retract an energy deficit. But in 1974, a pri- their claim, suffering a humiliation vate company called KMS Industries, similar to that of Richter and Perón. headed by a man named Keeve M. After several false starts, public Siegel, claimed to have demonstrated cynicism began to grow, including “laser fusion.” He promised to deliver among the government officials who efficient fusion power “within the held the purse strings that had sup- next few years.” ported so much fusion research. In He didn’t, of course; in fact, he died 1958, not long after the British fiasco, of a stroke in 1975. Still, news of

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Copyright 2009. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. The Fusion Illusion his announcement helped persuade But like the Brits in 1957, and Congress to ramp up federal spend- Richter before them, Fleischmann ing on fusion. In the late 1970s, and Pons hadn’t achieved what they Livermore scientists were talking said they had. Within two months, about having a workable fusion they were a laughingstock, their rep- power plant in operation by the early utations in tatters. 1990s. In the decade and a half after The ensuing years would reprise Siegel’s celebrated announcement, this familiar storyline: Researchers government scientists would spend would make a grand announce- hundreds of millions of dollars on ment heralding a new advance in laser fusion research, none of which fusion, potentially solving many of really seemed capable of solving the the world’s energy-related problems, most pressing dilemma of fusion: only to have their claim wither under how to ignite and sustain a fusion the harsh light of rigorous scientific reaction that would produce more scrutiny. Japanese researchers in the energy than it consumed. mid-1990s insisted they had achieved Then came a stunning announce- “break-even plasma conditions” and ment from the University of Utah that their tokamak was producing in 1989. Two chemists, Martin five watts for every four that it con- Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, sumed. Turns out it was not. About announced that they had figured out the same time, researchers manning how to generate a fusion reaction at JET, a large tokamak operated by a room temperature: “cold fusion.” They European consortium of research- were claiming to have made an end ers, gained attention for their bid run around everything the scientific to achieve break-even conditions. In community knew about fusion. Their reality, they were only producing six announcement sparked a huge media watts for every ten put into it. Writes storm, fueled in part by boosterism Seife: “It was a record, and a remark- from the president of the university, able achievement, but a net loss of 40 who said their discovery “ranks right percent of energy is not the hallmark up there with fire, with the cultivation of a great power plant.” of plants, and with electricity.” In 2002, scientists at the Oak Ridge Curiously, Fleischmann had made National Laboratory in Tennessee his mark in the 1970s with a scientif- claimed to have created fusion in ic discovery regarding the detection beakers of acetone at a temperature of trace amounts of a chemical on of tens of millions of degrees. This silver that the conventional wisdom “bubble fusion” approach was sched- held was impossible. He had defied uled to be announced in Science, the the scientific consensus before, and prestigious journal that was then had been proved correct. Seife’s employer. In the run-up to

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Copyright 2009. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. Max Schulz publication, it became clear there carried out cheaply in a small piece were real problems with bubble of laboratory equipment—is real. It fusion: several other Oak Ridge sci- just isn’t yielding any more energy entists were convinced that their than it consumes, so it is useless as a colleagues had failed to produce a source of power.” fusion reaction. Oak Ridge officials ordered other scientists to attempt to he future of fusion now seems replicate the experiment; that effort, Tto lie with the International using more finely tuned equipment, Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor evinced no sign of fusion. An internal (ITER), an enormous long-term mul- tug-of-war broke out at Science over tilateral effort to build a tokamak whether or not it should publish the reactor in Cadarache, France. The paper. Ultimately the journal did, ITER idea has been around since giving its imprimatur to the Oak Mikhail Gorbachev proposed it at a Ridge claims even as those claims summit in 1985. These efforts went were being disproved. Seife was in nowhere until the United States took the curious and uncomfortable posi- an active lead during the administra- tion of being a reporter covering the tion of George W. Bush, and con- bubble fusion story that intimately struction on the massive reactor is involved his employer; his detailing slated to begin soon. of the awkward controversy is among Will it work? It will still take the real treats of Sun in a Bottle. decades to find out. Though gener- Despite the cold fusion and bub- ally optimistic about ITER, Seife is ble fusion debacles, not to mention still skeptical that it will ever achieve Richter’s fraud, there actually have ignition and sustained burn. But that been a number of successful table- sort of skepticism is the exception top fusion reactions. When teenager among fusion enthusiasts, despite the Thiago Olson made a homemade numerous setbacks over the years. tabletop fusion device in his Michigan “The fusion community clings to the basement in 2006, he became the eigh- hope that fusion energy is just thirty teenth amateur to pull off the stunt. years away—and that it will solve all (The first to accomplish it, strangely our energy problems,” Seife notes. enough, was Philo T. Farnsworth in “The promise of a fusion reactor a the 1960s; Farnsworth is much bet- few decades away has been a cliché ter known as one of the inventors for a half century.” of television.) Seife notes that the And it will continue to be so. After idea of tabletop fusion would seem all, says Seife, “there’s something “impossible—a pipe dream sought uniquely powerful about the promise after only by cranks....But in fact, of fusion energy. It harks back to the tabletop fusion—fusion reactions ancient quest to build a perpetual

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Copyright 2009. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. The Fusion Illusion motion machine, but this time the carbon-based sources, no matter how source of unlimited energy doesn’t much money we throw at them. violate the laws of physics.” We would be wiser instead to turn Which brings us back to today’s to the technology we know can pro- energy debates, and how and wheth- vide such reliability and capacity, and er we can reduce or eliminate the that we already have: nuclear fission. carbon emissions produced by our But if we insist on looking to the primary energy sources. President horizon, let us focus our hopes and Obama would have us do so with our investments not on the wind- renewables; for him, to believe we mills and solar panels that we know should is to believe we can. But as will always remain a small part of the story of fusion shows, wishing our energy supply, but on the fusion a project’s success is not enough reactors that at least hold the poten- to make it so. The laws of physics tial for unlimited power. make it very unlikely that renewable sources will ever provide the reliable Max Schulz is a senior fellow at the power needed to replace our current Manhattan Institute.

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