21st CENTURY SCIENCE &TECHNOLOGY SUMMER 2009 www.21stcenturysciencetech.com $5.00 Fast Path to Fusion Power • Interview with Fusion Pioneer Richard Post • Is the Fear of Radiation Constitutional? • DDT to Combat Dengue 21st CENTURY SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Vol. 22, No. 2 Summer 2009 Features News 74 NUCLEAR REPORT SCIENCE FOR LEGISLATORS Downwinders Deluded Is the Fear of Radiation Constitutional? And Waiting to Die 12 Daniel Miles Laurence Hecht Excerpts from Miles’s book, The A primer to help the present majority of misinformed policymakers Phantom Fallout-Induced Cancer and citizens to learn the truth about radiation, and the wonderful Epidemic in Southwestern Utah power for good that it holds out for mankind. 29 Thoughts on Fusion Energy Development Departments After a Six-Decades-Long Love Affair 2 EDITORIAL Richard F. Post Mars: The Next 50 Years Marsha Freeman A fusion pioneer reviews 60 years of fusion history, and proposes the axisymmetric tandem mirror as a fast track to achieving ignition 5 LETTERS with magnetic confinement fusion, bypassing some of the problems 7 RESEARCH COMMUNICATION with large tokamaks. The Secret of the Supercentenarians INTERVIEW: RICHARD F. POST Rick Sanders 36 A Fusion Pioneer Talks About Fusion 9 VIEWPOINT And How to Get There Malaysia Is Going Nuclear! Mohd Peter Davis Laser Fusion: ‘Yes We Can’ 11 CONFERENCE REPORT Laurence Hecht American Chemical Society: SPECIAL REPORT Milking Soy Beans for Sunbeams Gregory Murphy With DDT Spraying, Malaysia Can Show the World 53 BOOKS How to Control Dengue 78 Krafft Ehricke’s Extraterrestrial Mohd Peter Davis Imperative by Marsha Freeman A Malaysian scientist proposes a pilot project to test a program using DDT to control dengue. Reviewed by Oyang Teng, 81 Sun in a Bottle: The Strange 61 The True Story of DDT History of Fusion and the Przemyslaw Mastalerz Science of Wishful Thinking A chemist looks at the voluminous scientific literature, and concludes by Charles Seife that DDT is not hazardous to human health. Reviewed by Marjorie Mazel Hecht 83 Sunken Realms: A Survey of Underwater Ruins from Around A plasma formed inside a vacuum the World and a Complete chamber, showing a fan shape Catalog of Underwater Ruins caused by the field of a magnet by Karen Mutton similar to that of the Mirror Fusion Reviewed by Charles Hughes Test Facility. 84 Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World by Tom Zoellner LLNL Reviewed by Glenn Mesaros ON THE COVER: The Tandem Mirror Experiment (TMX) in construction in the late 1970s. 86 GLOBAL WARMING UPDATE Photo courtesy of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; cover design by Alan Yue. Compiled by Gregory Murphy EDITORIAL STAFF EDITORIAL Editor-in-Chief Laurence Hecht Managing Editor Marjorie Mazel Hecht Associate Editors Mars: Elijah C. Boyd David Cherry Christine Craig The Next 50 Years Marsha Freeman by Marsha Freeman Colin M. Lowry Gregory B. Murphy KEPLEROPOLIS, July 20, 2059— team working in the Lab in Kepleropo- Richard Sanders Today is a day of joyous celebration on lis. Now it was time see if the system Charles B. Stevens Mars. As the citizens of Kepleropolis could deliver. Books look back 90 years, to commemorate Just as those who came before them David Cherry the historic first steps of human explor- nervously watched the first satellite Art Director ers on the Moon, their eyes are fixed launch, in 1957; the first manned mis- Alan Yue on the imminent launch of their new- sion, in 1961; the first human footsteps est spacecraft, Kepler II. This will be on the Moon, in 1969; and the first Advertising Manager the first craft to use the revolutionary manned landing on Mars, in 2048, Marsha Freeman new, and still-experimental, anti-mat- these young pioneers paced back and SCIENTIFIC ADVISORY BOARD ter propulsion system. If successful, the forth, waiting for lift-off. Francesco Celani, Ph.D. spacecraft will reach neighboring stars, Finally, the moment arrived, chosen Hugh W. Ellsaesser, Ph.D. comfortably within the lifespan of the to coincide exactly with Neil Arm- Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. scientists who are anxiously awaiting strong’s first step onto the Lunar sur- Wolfgang Lillge, M.D. the discovery of new worlds. There Ramtanu Maitra is great excitement that Kepler II will Thomas E. Phipps, Jr., Ph.D. open up the universe to mankind, just EDITOR’S NOTE B.A. Soldano, Ph.D. as 90 years ago, Apollo opened up the We have excerpted here a very Solar System. small portion of Associate Editor While Kepler II will not be carrying a Marsha Freeman’s article, which is 21st Century Science & Technology human crew, its mission is to visit Earth- posted on the 21st Century web- (ISSN 0895-6820) is published 4 times a like planets orbiting distant stars, once site, and we encourage readers to year by 21st Century Science Associates, 60 Sycolin Road, Suite 203, Leesburg, thought to be impossible to reach in a read and distribute the entire piece. Va. 20175. Tel. (703) 777-6943. human lifetime. Over its five-year mis- See www.21stcenturysciencetech. Address all correspondence to 21st sion, its predecessor, Kepler I, launched com/ Articles_2009/Mars_50-years. Century, P.O. Box 16285, Washington, into Earth orbit in March 2009, had pdf. We also recommend readers D.C. 20041. 21st Century is dedicated to the identified hundreds of target solar sys- to view the LaRouche Youth Move- promotion of unending scientific progress, tems to explore. Johannes Kepler (1571- ment video, “From the Moon to all directed to serve the proper common 1630), who determined the laws of our Mars: The New Economics,” avail- aims of mankind. Solar System, would undoubtedly be able at http://www.larouchepac. Opinions expressed in articles are not necessarily those of 21st Century Science pleased that our scientific instruments com/node/11573. Associates or the scientific advisory will soon be looking for planets around A review of Marsha Freeman’s new board. other stars. book, Krafft Ehricke’s Extraterrestrial We are not responsible for unsolicited While everyone in Kepleropolis is Imperative, appears on page 78. manuscripts. Electronic subscriptions are $25 for anxiously awaiting today’s Kepler II 6 issues or $48 for 12 issues. Back launch, pausing to follow the minute-to- issues (1988-2005) are $5 each ($8 minute progress of the launch prepara- face, now almost a century earlier. The foreign). Electronic issues from 2006 on tions on large screens placed through- booster engines ignited, and Kepler II are $5 each. Payments must be in U.S. currency. out the city, researchers working in the was easily carried aloft. Once in Mars Advanced Propulsion Laboratory are orbit, the anti-matter drive sprang to Copyright © 2009 especially anxious. life. Kepler II was on its way to discover 21st Century Science Associates The revolutionary new anti-matter new Earths. ISSN 0895-682 propulsion drive that will take Kepler II Very few people living on Mars today www.21stcenturysciencetech.com to the stars began its development more were alive when Neil Armstrong spoke than 20 years ago on Earth. But it was those first words from the surface of the brought to realization by a scientific Moon. But no one here can forget on 2 Summer 2009 21st Century Science & Technology EDITORIAL overall global economy. One immediate task was turn- ing what could have been an ugly, violent mob-reaction to the collapse, and descent into a New Dark Age, into a renewal of the letter and spirit of the first Ameri- can Revolution. Great projects of infrastructure building got under way on Earth, in the footsteps of the first U.S. Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, who had designed and implemented the credit policies that built the economic infrastruc- ture of a young United States. The first task in 2010, was the rebuild- ing of a planet devastated by dis- ease, starvation, and war, and to reverse the decades of accumu- lated physical decay. But as space visionaries insisted at that critical moment, only a multi-generational great project could challenge and mobilize the long-dormant creative resources of the human mind. The scien- tific discoveries of such a project would unleash the next revolu- tionary generations of technology, and drive economic growth on JPL/NASA Earth. Before men are sent to Mars, in 2024, an international robotic mission will be deployed to The politicians reluctantly return samples of rock and soil to be intensively examined in laboratories on Earth. In this came to agree. And so, in that artist’s drawing, an ascent vehicle is taking off from the Martian surface, to deliver its cargo. spirit, the project to build a sci- The rover, which collected the samples and delivered them to the vehicle, takes shelter be- ence city on Mars came into fo- hind a rock. cus. The cultural pessimism that had taken hold in the late 1960s, whose shoulders he stands. However, and outright stealing, in order to “make and kept its grip on much of the what is very difficult for citizens of Keple- money,” finally collapsed. Commerce, world’s population for 50 years, began ropolis to understand, especially those production, and life itself came to a to disappear. who did not witness or participate in the standstill. Here was the opportunity to In fact, the natural optimism of hu- Second American Revolution of 2010, is start over, sweep away decades of pes- manity had not been extinguished dur- how it was that so many decades could simism and failed policies, and return ing the dark decades of economic de- have been wasted. to the principles which today, on Mars, cline, only submerged. With the focus For years after the abrupt end of the seem like common sense.