Seth Putterman, working at UCLA, came up with an even more innovative way to induce fusion. He and his team created a device whose heart was made of a crystal of lithium tantalate, a compound with a very curious property. It is pyroelectric: when you heat it, electrons in the crystal rearrange themselves so that one side of the crystal is positively charged and the other side is negatively charged.83 Attached to the crystal was a fine tungsten needle. When the researchers heated the lithium tantalate, the crystal’s charges rearranged themselves and ran down the tungsten. The crystal and needle acted as a giant focusing device; all the energy of heating the crystal got turned into an extremely strong electric field right at the needle’s tip.
Putterman and his colleagues put this device—about the size of a coffee can—in a chamber filled with deuterium. When they turned on the heater, the device worked as advertised, creating a huge electric field near the tip of the needle. When a deuterium atom ventured near the tip, the electric field immediately stripped off its electrons and sent the nucleus zooming away at tremendous speed toward a target filled with deuterium. On occasion, the flying deuterium would fuse with one in the target. All in all, the device produced about eight hundred neutrons per second. Again, it was an impressive display and might even lead to a commercial device to produce neutrons; however, it will always consume more energy than it produces. Beams of deuterium nuclei lose energy whenever they strike a target, and on average the amount of energy lost by the deuterium nuclei that don’t fuse will outweigh the energy produced by those that do.
After the cold-fusion debacle, the idea of tabletop fusion seemed impossible—a pipe dream sought after only by cranks. (The first reaction of Michael Saltmarsh, the bubble fusion debunker, upon seeing Putterman’s pyroelectric fusion paper was, “Oh, God, not again.”) But in fact, tabletop fusion—fusion reactions carried out cheaply in a small piece of laboratory equipment—is real, It just isn’t yielding any more energy than it consumes, so it is useless as a source of power.
It is an unfortunate fact of nature: unless you are creating fusion in a hot, dense plasma, you are extraordinarily unlikely to produce excess energy. Too many phenomena conspire against you. Tabletop fusion is an interesting curiosity, but not a path to unlimited power.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have been covering fusion since I began my career as a science jouralist, so it is impossible for me to thank all the people who have helped me understand the physics—and the politics—of the fusion quest. To all of them, even to those who might disagree with the conclusions of this book, I give my heartfelt gratitude.
I would also like to thank my editor, Wendy Wolf, as well as Hilary Redmon and Don Homolka for their help with the manuscript. I’m also grateful to my agents, John Brockman and Katinka Matson. My friends and colleagues in the journalism department at New York University have been wonderful to me, and I am grateful for their support. Finally, my friends and family have helped me tremendously. To my parents Burt and Tama, my brother Mark, and of course my wife, Meridith: thank you for everything.
NOTES
CHAPTER 1: THE SWORD OF MICHAEL
3 “The force from which the sun” Harold S. Truman, “White House Press Release on Hiroshima, August 6, 1945,” in Cantelon, Hewlett, and Williams, eds., The American Atom, 65.
8n “pumpkin field” Argonne National Laboratory Web site, “The ‘Last Universal Scientist’ Takes Charge.”
9 “I’ve done a terrible thing.” Hijiya, “The Gita of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” 150.
10 “He’s a genius” As quoted in Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, 448.
11 “He’s a danger” Blumberg and Owens, Energy and Conflict, 1.
11 “The communists overturned every aspect” Teller, with Shoolery, Memoirs , 13, 15.
11n “In my acquaintance” Time, “Knowledge Is Power.”
13n fellow physicists measured enthusiasm in “Tellers” Goodchild, Edward Teller, 127.
14 “I very soon found some unjustified assumptions in Teller’s calculation” Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, 419.
14n “On Edward Teller’s blackboard at Los Alamos” Serber, The Los Alamos Primer, 4.
14n “I had become a bit annoyed with Fermi” Groves, Now It Can Be Told, 296-97.
15 “Edward first thought it was a cinch.” Serber, The Los Alamos Primer, xxxi.
16 Oppenheimer bet Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, 656, 668. Teller, with Shoolery, Memoirs, 211.
16 “The time will come” Los Alamos Science, “The Oppenheimer Years,” 25.
16 “There was no backing for the thermonuclear work” Teller and Brown, The Legacy of Hiroshima, 41.
17 “Edward offered to bet me” John Manley quoted in Rhodes, Dark Sun, 404.
17 “It is likely that a super-bomb can be constructed” Ibid., 255.
18 “a choice between the quick and the dead,” Baruch, “The Baruch Plan.”
18 “We have evidence” Truman, “Statement by President Truman, September 23, 1949.”
19 “Keep your shirt on!” United States Atomic Energy Commission, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, 714.
19 “We are all agreed that it would be wrong” General Advisory Committee to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Report on the “Super,” 30 October 1949, in Cantelon, Hewlett, and Williams, eds., The American Atom, 120.
19 “A super bomb might become a weapon of genocide,” Ibid., 121.
20 “The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon” Ibid., 122.
21 “The day has been filled, too, with talk about supers,” David E. Lilienthal, The Journals of David E. Lilienthal, Vol. 2, 577 (entry of 10 October 1949).
21 “Now I began to see a distorted human being,” McMillan, The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer, 44-45.
21 “[Scientists] are working and ‘have made considerable progress’” Friendly, “New A-Bomb Has 6 Times Power of 1st,” 1.
22 “It is part of my responsibility as Commander in Chief” Time, “The Decision L Is Yes,” 6 February 1950.
23 “Every day Stan would come into the office,” Rhodes, Dark Sun, 423.
23 “pale with anger.” Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb, 223.
23 “took real pleasure” Goodchild, Edward Teller, 163.
24 “Teller was not easily reconciled to our results,” Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician, 216.
24 “You can’t get cylindrical containers of deuterium to burn” Goodchild, Edward Teller, 166.
24 “[Teller] was blamed at Los Alamos” Bethe, “Comments on the History of the H-Bomb,” 47.
25 “The holiday is over,” Reprinted in Shepley and Blair, The Hydrogen Bomb, 112.
25 “He proposed a number of complicated schemes” Bethe, “Comments on the History of the H-Bomb,” 48.
25n After the Soviets and Chinese Cumings, Origins of the Korean War, 741.
26 “his report was focused on the Super and was so negative” Teller, with Shoolery, Memoirs, 303.
26 “in a very different tone” Teller, with Shoolery, Memoirs, 303.
26 “Edward is full of enthusiasm about these possibilities,” Rhodes, Dark Sun, 467.
26n “Ulam felt that he invented the new approach to the hydrogen bomb.” Ibid., 471.
27 The remaining 25 kilotons Ibid., 474.
27 “Eniwetok would not be large enough” Ibid., 424.
28 “I expected that the General Advisory Committee,” United States Atomic Energy Commission, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, 720.
28 “had created difficulties” Teller, with Shoolery, Memoirs, 327.
28n “technically sweet” United States Atomic Energy Commission, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, 81.
29 “I am leaving the appeasers to join the fascists,” Rhodes, Dark Sun, 496.
30 fourteen buildings the size of the Pentagon U.S. Department of Defense, Defense Nuclear Agency, Operation Ivy, p. 188.
30 When that dot of light Teller and Brown,
The Legacy of Hiroshima, 56.
31 “It is my belief that if at the end of the war” Ibid., 714.
31 “go fishing for the rest of his life” Ibid., 721.
31 “In my new land,” Teller, with Shoolery, Memoirs, 397.
31 “We believe that, had Dr. Oppenheimer given his enthusiastic support” United States Atomic Energy Commission, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer , 1017.
32 “disturbing.” Ibid., 1019.
32 “interchangeable with the conventional weapons” Chang, “To the Nuclear Brink,” 106.
32 “next month or two.” Ibid., 107.
32n “Isn’t it a fair statement today, Dr. Oppenheimer,” United States Atomic Energy Commission, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, 149.
CHAPTER 2: THE VALLEY OF IRON
37 “one of the gravest” Darwin, The Origin of Species, 505.
39n “If belief in the reality of atoms is so crucial,” Blackmore, “Ernst Mach Leaves ‘The Church of Physics,’” 524-25.
55 As early as 1949, scientists realized Reines and Suydam, Preliminary Survey of Physical Effects Produced by a Super Bomb, 910.
CHAPTER 3: PROJECT PLOWSHARE AND THE SUNSHINE UNITS
58 “An underground explosion was indeed carried out” U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States 1964-1968, vol. 11, item 66.
59 “the answer to a dream as old as man himself,” A is for Atom, directed by Carl Urbano.
59 “into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing” Dwight D. Eisenhower, “The ‘Atoms for Peace’ Address to the United Nations General Assembly,” 8 December 1953, in Cantelon, Hewlett, and Williams, eds., The American Atom, 102.
60 “A Higher Intelligence decided” Lewis Strauss, “My Faith in the Atomic Future,” in Cantelon, Hewlett, and Williams, eds., The American Atom, 107.
60 “If your mountain is not in the right place,” O’Neill, The Firecracker Boys, 88.
60n “I had a hand in formulating and popularizing that hope” David E. Lilienthal, Change, Hope, and the Bomb, 109.
61 “So you want to beat” Teller and Brown, The Legacy of Hiroshima, 82.
62 “they shall beat their swords into plowshares” The King James Version of the Bible, Isaiah 2:4.
62 The ideas started coming Teller and Brown, The Legacy of Hiroshima, 80-91; O’Neill, The Firecracker Boys, 26; Seaborg, with Loeb, Stemming the Tide, 310; McPhee, The Curve of Binding Energy, 112-13.
62 “We will change the earth’s surface to suit us,” Teller and Brown, The Legacy of Hiroshima, 84.
62 “One will probably not resist for long” O’Neill, The Firecracker Boys, 23-24.
63 the harbor made little economic sense Ibid., 39.
64 “pinhead-sized white and gritty snow” U.S. Department of Defense, Defense Nuclear Agency, Castle Series, 1954, 210.
64n A Russian soldier died Sakharov, Memoirs, 192.
65 “raw, weeping lesions” Cronkite et al., Study of Response of Human Beings Accidentally Exposed to Significant Fallout Radiation, 3-4.
65 “well and happy” The Atomic Cafe, directed by Jayne Loader and Kevin Rafferty.
65 “Radioactive Fish Sought In Japan” Parrott, “Nuclear Downpour Hit Ship During Test at Bikini—U.S. Inquiry Asked,” 9.
65 “Each nuclear bomb test” Pauling, “Science and Peace.”
66 “It is possible to say unequivocally” Johnston, “No Danger Seen in Nuclear Tests.”
66 “observable fallout on Los Angeles.” Ogle, An Account of the Return to Nuclear Weapons Testing After the Moratorium 1958-1961, 101.
66 “Radiation from test fallout” Teller and Brown, The Legacy of Hiroshima, 180.
66 “Our custom of dressing men in trousers” Ibid., 181.
66 Teller even suggested that the dead captain: Ibid., 173.
66n “The opposition Pauling encountered” Jahn, “Presentation Speech.”
66n “So human samples are of prime importance,” “In the Matter of: Biophysics Conference.” Transcript, p. 8, lines 12-14.
67 “fallout fear-mongers”: Teller and Brown, The Legacy of Hiroshima, 181.
67 “insignificant and doubtful medical considerations” Ibid., 183.
67 “The Administration was bracing itself today” Kenworthy, “U.S. Thinks Soviet Will Pledge Halt In Nuclear Tests,” 1.
67 “cessation of tests of all forms” Associated Press, “Text of Resolution.”
67 “Russia has beaten us on propaganda” Kenworthy, “U.S. Warns Free Nations Not to Be Misled by Soviet,” 16.
67n “Deploring the mutations that may be caused by fallout” Teller and Brown, The Legacy of Hiroshima, 181.
68 “limited war” Ibid., 235ff.
69 “Beat your plowshares into swords,” The King James Version of the Bible, Joel 3:10.
70 “grave consequences” Toth, “Teller Opposes Test Ban Treaty.”
70 “you will have given away” Toth, “Teller Shows Consistency in Opposing Test Ban.”
70 “superfluous and even dangerous” Seaborg, with Loeb, Stemming the Tide, 314.
70n “The Communists might develop Plowshare before we do,” Teller and Brown, The Legacy of Hiroshima, 87.
72 “I’ve never seen [Teller] take a position” Blumberg and Owens, Energy and Conflict, 407.
72 “not acceptable to regional refineries.” Nordyke, The Soviet Program for Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Explosions, 25.
72 the Soviets had to declare Ibid., 39.
CHAPTER 4: KINKS, INSTABILITIES, AND BALONEY BOMBS
74 “Among other bodies” Wilson, Religio Chemici, 264.
75 “The project is still in the early stages,” Warren, “Perón Announces New Way to Make Atom Yield Power,” 1.
76 “Foreign scientists will be interested to learn” Mariscotti, The Secret of Huemul Island, 8.
76 “a totally new way of obtaining atomic energy” Ibid., 9.
76 “several million degrees.” Ibid., 8.
76 “What the Americans get” Ibid., 9.
76 “Yes, sir, for the very first time” Ibid., 180.
77 “Less than that.” New York Times, “Lilienthal Scouts Claim.”
77 “It is strange that the names of eminent physicists” Coseia Ribeiro quoted in Associated Press, “Discoverer of Argentina’s Atomic Energy Method Gives Few Details.”
77 “I know what that other material is” Time, “Perón’s Atom.”
77 “Baloney bomb” Time, “Energy of the Pampas.”
77 “I am not interested” Warren, “Perón Is Scornful of Atomic Skeptics,” 1.
77 “They have not yet told the first truth,” Ibid.
77n “There seemed to be some puzzlement,” Ibid., 11.
78 “so-so” Time, “Energy of the Pampas.”
79 “striking similarity” New York Times, “French Atom Expert Backs Perón Claim.”
79 “Richter admits that his process is not new,” Kaempffert, “Argentina Lacks Development Resources Even If, in Theory, Its Atomic Tests Are Possible.”
79 “said that Dr. Ronald Richter, the former Austrian scientist,” Time, “On Further Examination . . .”
80 “(a) Perón has fallen victim to a crank” Thirring, “Is Perón’s A-Bomb a Swindle?” 2.
80 “The reactor operation crew and I are deeply sorry” Richter, “Argentina Has No Atom Bomb,” i.
80 “It must really have been the deepest degree of secrecy” Ibid., iii.
80 “in full-scale operation” Ibid., ii.
80 “would be able to make convincing new demonstrations” Associated Press, “Argentine Plans Atomic Trade.”
81 He was shocked when Richter Mariscotti, The Secret of Huemul Island, 280ff.
81 The visit was a fiasco. Ibid., 287ff.
88 “I venture to predict” Miyahara, “A Record of the First Five Meetings of ‘The Symposium on Fusion Technology Held between 1960 and 1968,’” 384.
91 “They try to snap inward” Teller
, Energy From Heaven and Earth, 209.
96n pale ale: Carruthers, “The Beginning of Fusion at Harwell,” 1998.
97 “The indications are that fusion has been achieved” United Press, “Britons Report Gain on Fusion Reaction.”
98n “backlog of experimental results” New York Times, “British Deny U.S. Gags Atomic Gain.”
99 “Admiral Strauss’ tactics” Love, “British-U.S. Data on Hydrogen Due.”
99 “90% certain” Love, “Briton 90% Sure Fusion Occurred.”
99 “Gains in Harnessing Power” Finney, “Gains in Harnessing Power of H-Bomb Reported Jointly by U.S. and Britain,” 1.
99 “UNLIMITED POWER from SEA WATER” Carruthers, “The Beginning of Fusion at Harwell,” 1999.
99 “achievement in harnessing thermonuclear energy” New York Times, “Soviet Radio Hails British on Fusion.”
99n “British scientists pointed out” United Press, “Moscow Takes a Bow.”
100 “Britain Indicates Reactor Advance” Love, “Britain Indicates Reactor Advance.”
100 “H-Bomb Untamed, Britain Admits.” Love, “H-Bomb Untamed, Britain Admits.”
101 “It is doing exactly the job we expected” Associated Press, “Fusion Tests Upheld.”
CHAPTER 5: HEAT AND LIGHT
102 “What glory beats” Buch, Richter: Ópera Documental de Cámara.
103 “looks probable as a thermonuclear source.” Finney, “U.S. Experts Hint H-Bomb Control.
103 “We are now prepared to stake our reputations” Time, “On the Way: Genuine Fusion.”
106 “partly as a research facility,” Bromberg, Fusion, 64.
107 “entirely as a research facility,” Ibid.
108 “I was so stunned” Sakharov, Memoirs, 92.
108n “One had only to substitute ‘USSR’ for ‘USA,’” Ibid., 100.
111 One disruption Seife, “At the Going Down of the Nuclear Sun,” 95.
113n “I expect that they use a very long thermometer.” Braams and Stott, Nuclear Fusion, 135.
Sun in a Bottle_The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking Page 25