The Boy Who Played with Fusion

by Tom Clynes

  Again, the progression of his experimentation was following roughly the same path that particle physics itself had followed: from the discovery of x-rays and radioactive compounds to the use of alpha particles to induce nuclear reactions to the development of electrostatic accelerators and artificial radioactivity to, finally, nuclear fission and fusion.

  As the science fair approached, Taylor experimented with different amounts and combinations of thorium, natural uranium, and depleted uranium compounds and metals. The data showed that the multiplication effect he’d predicted was indeed taking place and that it increased as he upped the voltages.

  “That was actually quite significant,” explains Phaneuf. “He systematically developed that concept of multiplication by starting with a fusor and combining technologies, which was a novel idea.”

  Taylor had found a way to multiply the neutron output of a fusor. And he had found the focus of his first science-fair project, which he called Subcritical Neutron Multiplication in a 2.5 MeV Neutron Flux.

  But the week after he came up with his project’s title, Taylor came home from the lab with his shoulders slumping.

  “What’s wrong, Tay?” Tiffany asked.

  “We got shut down,” Taylor said. “The university shut us down.”

  “Safety concerns,” Taylor told his parents and Ikya and Sofia. “That’s all they said, safety concerns. Beyond that, I don’t know anything—just that I can’t go in there and we can’t do any more work on it.”

  With Phaneuf out of town, Brinsmead called an emergency meeting at the Hub coffee shop, though when Taylor got there, Brinsmead had yet to arrive. He sat down at an outdoor table near the street with physics department technicians Wade Cline and Andrew Oxner. Cline and Oxner sipped coffee; Taylor drank hot chocolate.

  “I think it was Winterberg,” Taylor said. The eccentric German who had made no secret of his initial opposition to the project had followed up with regular and repeated warnings during faculty meetings that it was a bad idea to have a child anywhere near the radiation-producing machines in the department’s basement, let alone building a reactor that would produce lethal levels of x-rays and neutrons. But with Phaneuf serving as chair of the university’s radiation safety committee, and with the rest of the faculty quickly becoming an enthusiastic fan club for Taylor, Winterberg’s protests had been acknowledged and noted, but never acted on.

  “I think he’s crazy,” Taylor said, getting keyed up on sugar and indignation. “Basically, he’s just a crank.”

  “I wouldn’t consider him a crank,” said Cline. “Although he is cranky, and he will argue with anything and everything. Probably his biggest contribution to the department is scaring off prospective physics students.”

  “I’m not so sure it’s Winterberg,” said Oxner. “I haven’t seen him downstairs in a while. He’s theoretical only. If he gets into anything applied, he gets into trouble. Remember the time he was using a Mixmaster to show that mechanical energy could be turned into heat? That’s why he stays with theory now.”

  As they talked, a 1973 Cadillac hearse slipped down the street, soundless as a ghost, and parked in the no-parking zone directly in front of the café. Brinsmead opened the car’s door and was immediately accosted by two guys leaving the café who wanted to know all about his electric Caddy. “I bought a bunch of buses in Santa Barbara and towed them to Reno to get the NiCad batteries out and put ’em back there where the casket would go,” Brinsmead said. “It cost more to build than it cost to buy my Nissan Leaf. But it only costs ten cents a mile to run it.”

  Brinsmead finished showing off his hearse, then walked toward the table, pulling his phone out of his pocket. “It’s my mom,” he said. “She’s ninety-four, and I got her a phone. Now she’s fallen in love with text­ing.” Brinsmead sat at the table, and within moments his coffee appeared (all the other customers had to fetch theirs at the counter).

  “Ron’s down at Lawrence Berkeley and I haven’t been able to reach him, but I don’t think it was Winterberg,” Brinsmead said, responding to Taylor’s earlier texts. “Although you’re right, Taylor, he is crazy, and eccentric as hell . . . or maybe just senile. He’s always suing someone, for age discrimination or something. The last one was for ‘stealing’ his ideas—but you can’t patent gravity, if you know what I mean.”

  So who shut down Taylor’s fusion project?

  “I think it was a gang of university administrators,” Brinsmead said, naming three people who, he said, were irked by the fact that Taylor’s high-profile project was bringing recognition to the wrong people—in particular, to Bruno Bauer, “who they’re always trying to sabotage.

  “I heard they came in after hours,” Brinsmead reported, “with some sort of trumped-up fake safety inspection. They knew Ron wasn’t in town and nobody was there. There was a gaggle of about six and they must have found some things to nitpick about.”

  “I understand why Bill thought that,” Phaneuf tells me later, “because he’s been on the wrong side of a lot of some very dubious politics. But most of the people in the administration supported the project. Of course, you’re always going to have some people who are enforcers rather than enablers, so you learn to avoid them. But you can’t always.”

  When Phaneuf got back to town, he found out that university administrators had halted the project because of something that had happened a week earlier.

  “Ah yes,” Taylor would later say, “the infamous pulser incident.”

  In their quest to multiply the neutron output of the fusor, Taylor and Brinsmead continued to bring up the power. That put stress on the fusor’s reaction chamber, which incorporated a cooling jacket that they hadn’t yet needed to use. When it got hot enough to cause the refractory metal to glow, they installed and tested the cooling system. But the neutron output was still limited by the amount of power coming out of the wall plug. In an effort to boost the peak voltage and increase neutron output, Taylor got ahold of a capacitor called a pulser that could store electric current as it charged over time and then discharge it very rapidly in ultra-high-voltage bursts.

  Phaneuf was skeptical. “You’ll get a larger burst,” he said, but by pulsing every ten or twenty seconds in intense bursts, the average power won’t change, and so the total number of fusion reactions and resulting neutrons will work out to pretty much the same. “Plus, you’re going to put a lot of stress on your materials,” he told Taylor.

  Though Phaneuf was dubious that pulsing the fusor would result in any additional neutron multiplication, he thought it wouldn’t hurt for Taylor to try, if only to prove the point. Once Taylor hooked the pulser up to the fusor, Taylor and Brinsmead were able to greatly increase the peak voltages. They started making test runs, bringing the pulses progressively higher, to fifty thousand volts and beyond.

  One day, they pushed the voltage up further than they’d ever gone before. With the increased fluxes there was more fusion and consequently more fission; the instruments were picking up much higher neutron output from the surrounding materials. Taylor urged Brinsmead to let him nudge it up another notch.

  “I don’t know, Taylor,” Brinsmead said, sniffing as he picked up the telltale kitchen smell of overheated stainless steel, “we’re really hammering it. That pulser’s really well insulated, but if we push it too far . . .”

  Suddenly, the pulser’s capacitors started arcing.

  “This is getting a little scary,” Taylor said.

  “Let’s back it down!” Brinsmead yelled. “I’m worried the grid might blow up.”

  As Taylor was reaching for the voltage dial there was a bang; it sounded like a rifle shot. Up and down the hallway, panicked professors and postdocs came running out of offices and laboratories. Among the first to arrive was physicist Jonathan Weinstein, who worked in the lab next door.

  “He ran in completely freaked out,” Brinsmead says, “and he said that one of his lasers had just fired.”

  In addition to blowing a hole in the pulser’s large
, expensive ceramic insulator, Taylor and Brinsmead had overloaded the physics lab’s electrical circuits and caused Weinstein’s laser to spontaneously fire.

  Weinstein was afraid that, in addition to causing electrical safety issues, Taylor and Brinsmead could be irradiating the department—which wasn’t irrational, given that the laboratories were separated only by a Sheetrock wall.

  University officials halted the project to allow a thorough assessment of the situation. Meetings were called; inspections were ordered. Administrators and the university’s radiation safety officer came through the lab with radiation detectors and checked everyone’s dosimeter.

  They found no signs of dangerous radiation exposure. Taylor’s growing cadre of supporters in the physics department, including Weinstein, whose laser had fired, were in favor of letting Taylor continue with his project. Nevertheless, the UNR administration remained skittish. It wouldn’t be good for the university, or anyone, if a fourteen-year-old boy was fried in the physics lab. At a meeting with Davidson Academy Director Harsin, university officials expressed their reluctance to let the project go on—even though, as Harsin made clear, the science fair was quickly approaching.

  After the meeting, Harsin got on the phone with Kenneth, and Bob Davidson. Davidson drove down from Lake Tahoe and met with the university administrators. He listened, heard everyone’s concerns, and asked questions.

  And then he walked over to the university president’s office.

  Within a couple of days, Taylor was back in the lab preparing for the Western Nevada Regional Science Fair. Bringing a nuclear reactor to a regional science fair was, as Judy Dutton put it in her book Science Fair Season, “like bringing a Ferrari to a go-cart race.” Taylor’s first-place prize qualified him for the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), the largest precollege science event in the world.

  Coincidentally, the science fair was in Reno that year—but there would be no hometown advantage. ISEF is the Super Bowl of youth science endeavors. Taylor would be competing against fifteen hundred über-geniuses from fifty countries.

  Brinsmead and Taylor put the fusor in the back of Brinsmead’s electric van and brought it over to the convention center.

  There were no baking-soda volcanoes or potato clocks in the hall. Strolling through the aisles, they saw a kid with five patents and twelve million dollars in venture capital presenting a nanotechnology project; a kid who had come up with a new way to clean up oil spills; a kid who had developed an anti-tsunami device to break up waves before they reached the shore; a girl who had genetically engineered “smart worms.”

  George Ochs had coached Taylor on how to prepare his supporting materials and how to interact with the judges—who, he said, would question Taylor rigorously about his project. “At first, he’d ramble, and he wouldn’t get to the point about the project,” says Ochs. “But we practiced and role-played, and he got pretty good at answering concisely.”

  Taylor’s fusor was a big hit, but his presentation materials were a bit rough, which cost him. Still, his project came in fourth in Physics and Astronomy and second in Vacuum Technology. His invention also caught the attention of Intel CEO Paul Otellini. Hearing that a kid had brought a nuclear reactor to the fair, Otellini grabbed a colleague by the sleeve and made a beeline for Taylor’s exhibit.

  “The first thing he wanted to know,” says Taylor, “was how a fourteen-year-old could get his hands on all the stuff to build a nuclear reactor.”

  Taylor explained everything. A few minutes later, Otellini was seen walking away open-mouthed and shaking his head in what looked like disbelief. Later, I would ask him what he had been thinking.

  “All I could think was, I am so glad he is on our side.”

  PART V

  25

  * * *

  A Field of Dreams, an Epiphany in a Box

  THE MORNING AFTER our Bayo Canyon expedition near Los Alomos, we pick up Willis at his hothouse for a final day of atomic adventuring. Willis directs Tiffany past the Albuquerque International Sunport (the airport) then along a dirt track that crosses a mesa south of the runways shared by the civilian airport and Kirtland Air Force Base.

  The U.S. Food and Drug Administration had cracked down on radioactive quack cures before World War II, but after the war, a new kind of nuclear miracle-mongering sprang up, this time with the government playing lead salesman and dream merchant for atomic schemes that promised to do anything and everything. There was Project Plowshare, which proposed using nuclear explosions to excavate a sea-level waterway through Central America (nicknamed the Pan-Atomic Canal). There was Gas Buggy, which envisioned a sort of nuclear fracking to coax natural gas out of the ground. Project Chariot would have used hydrogen bombs to create a harbor at Cape Thompson, Alaska. The radioactive fallout from Project Chariot’s proof-of-concept test, which blew a massive crater in the Nevada desert, contaminated more Americans than any other nuclear event.

  Spurred on by patriotic PR campaigns, big boys with big bombs and big budgets used the desert landscapes of the Southwest as their experimental playgrounds. As the strategy of nuclear deterrence catalyzed a frightening, paranoia-driven arms race, the bombs got bigger and more numerous, and the number of Broken Arrows—incidents in which nuclear weapons were accidentally lost—began to grow. A lost nuke is unsettling enough; even more unsettling is the fact that it happened so often that the armed forces actually needed to coin a term for it. By the military’s own admission, there have been at least thirty-two Broken Arrows since 1957 and many other “oops” incidents with extreme-calamity potential. (As recently as 2007, nuclear cruise missiles were accidentally loaded on a B-52 and flown across the country.)

  Taylor, fascinated by some of the more bizarre and little-known events of the Cold War era, began filing Freedom of Information Act requests. He learned that in 1958, off the coast of Georgia, a B-47 carrying a 7,600-pound hydrogen bomb collided with another plane in midair, and the bomb was jettisoned. It sank into the ocean and was never found. In 1965, an A-4 Skyhawk jet rolled off the side of the USS Ticonderoga and sank, with its hydrogen bomb, sixteen thousand feet down into the Pacific Ocean; it too was never recovered. In 1968, a B-52 carrying four nukes contaminated a large strip of sea ice and snow when it crashed near Thule, Greenland. The seven-hundred-person cleanup operation was nicknamed Dr. Freezelove.

  Considering the lack of consistent safety standards during the early years of the arms race, it now seems remarkable that there was never an inadvertent nuclear detonation. According to the military, only two accidents resulted in widespread dispersal of nuclear materials. But as Taylor would discover, this was either wishful thinking on the military’s part or an intentional fib.

  One night, as Taylor was reading through a partially redacted Pentagon accident report, he came across an incident that stood out for its disturbing similarity to the absurdist fiction of Dr. Strangelove. What also stood out was its location. Taylor immediately picked up the phone. “Carl!” he said. “There’s a Broken Arrow right in your backyard!”

  On May 27, 1957, a ground crew at Biggs Air Force Base in Texas loaded a bomb into the bay of a B-36 Peacemaker bomber headed for Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque. The Mark 17 was the largest bomb the United States ever made, seven hundred times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb and so heavy that the B-36 was the only aircraft capable of lifting it.

  As the plane made its final approach to Albuquerque, a crew member went back to check the bomb’s locking pin. To this day, it’s not exactly clear what went wrong (the last paragraph of the Pentagon document was redacted), but the airman most likely pulled a lever in the wrong direction, causing the forty-ton bomb to drop from its mounting slings and smash through the bomb-bay doors.

  The crewman lunged for a handhold and managed to avoid his own Slim Pickens moment as the Mark 17 plunged seventeen hundred feet down to the mesa. Though the bomb’s plutonium core hadn’t been inserted, it contained a spark plug made of conventional exp
losives and either plutonium or enriched uranium. The conventional explosives detonated on impact, taking out a grazing steer and creating a fireball that was seen and heard throughout Albuquerque.

  Tiffany parks the SUV among the mesquites. Willis has visited the site several times now, and Taylor has been here twice before. We unload metal detectors and Geiger counters, and Tiffany grabs her coffee cup. Then we fan out across the mesa.

  “This,” Tiffany says, smiling, “is how we spend our vacations.”

  According to the cleanup report, the crater was filled and the contamination completely removed. “You kinda gotta read between the lines,” Taylor says. “Completely removed means something like ‘We bulldozed most of the stuff into the crater, covered it, then took a cursory look around.’ Unrecovered means they decided it wasn’t worth the effort. There’s an unrecovered reentry nose cone from an ICBM that went off course and burrowed into the ground somewhere in New Mexico. Carl,” Taylor says. “We should definitely go there.”

  We search near ground zero and find nothing. Then we spread out to the north and east. After nearly an hour, our detectors begin to beep. We find bits of charred white plastic and chunks of aluminum—one of which is slightly radioactive. These are fragments of the hydrogen bomb. I uncover a broken flange with the screws still attached, and Willis digs up a hunk of hot lead.

  “Got a nice shard here,” Taylor yells, finding a gnarled piece of metal. He scans it with his detector. “Unfortunately, it’s not radioactive.”

  “That’s the kind I like,” Tiffany says, smiling.

  We keep walking east, closer to Sandia National Laboratories Area 5, with its Annular Core Research Reactor and Plasma Materials Test Facility. “You can’t see it,” Willis says, “but over there is Kirtland’s underground munitions storage area. There are more nukes there than anywhere else on earth.”