On Deception Watch

by David H Spielberg

  117

  Sylvia Carlyle and Samuel Berman met Rosen and Marshall at the reception area of the old AJC Fusion building. Their move to new facilities was not ready yet, as the building was still under construction. After introductions were made, identification badges were obtained, and the group went through the doors and down the hallway leading to the conference room adjoining Arthur Cranshaw’s office. Sylvia knocked on the door and entered, followed closely by the others.

  Cranshaw rose from the table and walked over to greet Marshall and Rosen.

  “Welcome, welcome Mr. Rosen. So good to meet you. I know of your work, of course. Very interesting. Courageous even, in many cases. Always revealing. I’m counting on that today. And James, always a pleasure to see you. We will be joined as well by Alan Baird, our new director of operations. I believe we will be more comfortable here in the conference room, as we will need some of the audiovisual equipment to assist us with this interview. An announcement, really, rather than an interview. And of course you may feel free to ask questions at any time.”

  The room was spacious, with a large oval table. At the far end of the room, a large, drop-down LCD screen had been lowered form its housing in the ceiling. At the opposite end of the conference table was a built-in keypad and pointing device. Also built in to the surface of the desk was a touch-screen computer monitor. There were suspended speakers at all four corners of the room.

  As everyone sat down, a young man, probably a college intern, Marshall thought, came in, holding a pad. Cranshaw said to his group, as they began arranging themselves around the table, “Drinks, gentlemen . . . and Sylvia. Coffee, tea, lemonade, whatever you desire, just let Charlie know.” Charlie made the rounds taking orders and left.

  Cranshaw, his physical size and proportions still alarming to James, sat quietly, waiting for the drinks to arrive. After a few moments, Charlie returned with a cart holding glasses and pitchers of whatever had been ordered. He quickly distributed the glasses, placing the pitchers in strategic positions on the conference table onto soapstone coasters.

  “Well, I have exciting news to announce to you today. As you know, there has been a lot of, shall I say, noise in the media about the viability of fusion as a practical or even possible source for our future energy needs. I think more people learned about limiting reactant problems than ever learned about that in their high school chemistry class. And, of course, the concern is one well-taken. You may have parts to assemble six automobiles, but if you only have one engine, it doesn’t matter how many other parts you have. You can assemble only one complete car. In this case the engine is the ‘limiting reactant,’ so to speak.

  “Likewise it is true that in our laser-induced fusion reaction the targets we used and the system we announced to the world used deuterium-tritium loaded target pellets. As has been ably pointed out by so many people, in our case, the limiting reactant is the tritium. By now, you all know that tritium does not appear in nature and must be manufactured. The US government manufactures tritium to supply the needs for its thermonuclear arsenal. It does this using an extremely rare isotope of lithium. But that’s okay, because the quantities needed for weapons use is fairly small, perhaps 60 pounds. The process used by the government for weapons use could produce, on a continuous basis, about 30 pounds of tritium a year.

  “However, if we were to use tritium for commercial power generation, the United States alone would require about thirty to forty tons of tritium per year to meet all its energy needs. For the entire earth, one would need about one hundred to one-hundred-fifty tons of tritium per year. Obviously, we cannot depend on the weapons-maintenance process. This is the fuel supply gap between what we can produce and what we need that the media have been so exercised about.

  “As you no doubt by now know, there is another fusion reaction that could also supply the same kind of energy that the deuterium-tritium reaction produces, namely, the deuterium-Helium-3 reaction. This is actually a safer fusion reaction in that no neutrons are emitted, only a common Helium-4 nucleus and a proton which will quickly attract electrons to form a hydrogen atom and a Helium-4 atom. Using the deuterium-Helium-3 reaction, then we can harvest hydrogen for powering fuel cells as well and produce vast amounts of energy in the form of heat. Furthermore, unlike the deuterium-tritium reaction, all the reactants and products are nonradioactive or radioactivity-producing.

  “Again, unfortunately there is only a small amount of Helium-3 present on earth. Again there is a way to manufacture Helium-3 in a nuclear reactor. However, that requires using the extremely rare Lithium-6 isotope. So once again, we are stymied by our limiting reactant problem. So, is there no solution to this dilemma?

  “The answer is that there is a solution and we have taken the first step. We have reprogrammed our target-pellet design for deuterium-Helium-3 and we have, in the last month, using the higher power of the military laser supplied by General Slaider, achieved energies sufficient for ignition. In other words, we have achieved ignition using the Helium-3 as the second component of our fuel mixture instead of tritium. We have a demonstrated process using Helium-3.”

  James Marshall interrupted Cranshaw’s presentation at this point. “That is an amazing achievement, especially because of the higher temperatures needed for ignition with Helium-3. But you still have the limiting reactant problem.”

  “Quite correct, Mr. Marshall. But that problem has been solved and I will tell you how. I will tell you today so that your paper can have an exclusive scoop. I believe we owe you that, Mr. Marshall. President Llewellyn will be making an announcement tomorrow. You will have your story already written and its release will coincide with his announcement so you will not be—how shall I say?—stealing his thunder. We have the approval of the White House for this.”

  “And what thunder is that professor?” Bill Rosen asked.

  Cranshaw smiled a self-satisfied smile and looked about the room slowly savoring the moment. “The thunder is on the moon, Mr. Rosen. It is on the moon.”

  “What do you mean, on the moon?” Rosen asked.

  James Marshall at this point answered for Cranshaw. “Of course. There is a much higher abundance of Helium-3 on the moon. The sun has been raining Helium-3 down on is surface for billions of years as a component of the solar wind. Bill, the sun runs by fusing two hydrogen atoms together to make one normal Helium-4 atom. But about one time out of maybe ten thousand reactions, Helium-3 is made instead. That may not sound like a lot but this has been going on for a very long time. So a lot of Helium-3 has landed on the moon to be trapped in the minerals covering the moon’s surface.”

  “But they’re raining down on Earth too. Why don’t we have all this Helium-3 here?” Rosen asked.

  “Good question,” Marshall said. He turned to Cranshaw. “May I?” he asked. Cranshaw nodded his assent.

  “The Helium-3 coming from the sun is ionized, meaning, it has a positive charge from electrons being stripped from them as they left the blazing vicinity of the sun and hurtled into space. Our earth has a protective magnetic field around it because of its molten core. The magnetic field deflects most of the charged particles from the sun back out to space. They never make it to the surface of Earth. It’s the same principle that’s explains how the Tokamak magnetic confinement is expected to work. The magnetic field forms an invisible shield, protecting the walls of the Tokamak vessel from the superhot plasma, and it protects earth from the solar wind.”

  Rosen interrupted. “And the moon?” he asked.

  Here Cranshaw took over. “The moon has no atmosphere nor does it have a molten core. Without a molten core it has no magnetic field. You see, the magnetic field around Earth and around any other celestial object is created by an internal electric current. That internal electric current is created by the currents flowing in the molten core.

  “So the solar wind is not being deflected from the moon because there is no molten core inside the moon. It’s solid all the way through. The Helium-3 ions from the solar
wind have been striking the moon’s surface for billions of years. It’s estimated that over one million tons of Helium-3 can be found on the moon. In addition, for every ton of Helium-3 extracted, geologists believe that nine tons of oxygen, water and other essentials for life would be extracted as well. And if that is not enough six tons of hydrogen would be collected. This could be used by fuel cells to supply the energy needs for the mining operations and for powering the living facilities for the workers.”

  “How much of this is speculation and how much is fact, Professor?” Rosen asked,

  “That brings me to the ‘thunder’ part. What Mr. Marshall and I have just explained has been known for some time. There are two reasons why nothing was done about any of this. First, no one until now had been able to achieve ignition using a deuterium-Helium-3 fuel mixture. With our proprietary optical system and the advanced military laser we have had access to—thanks to General Slaider—we have solved the ignition problem using He-3.

  “Second, the economics was not favorable. But as the price of fossil fuels has continued to climb the economics has been shifting in favor of alternative sources of energy. So you see wind-energy farms spreading throughout the world and solar farms as well that catch the energy of the sun’s radiation. And generators using tidal energy and geothermal energy. Whatever source of energy that can be exploited is being exploited. But these can only provide a relatively small percentage of the total energy requirements of the United States, much less the world. The reason for this is the energy density of fossil fuels compared to all these alternative energy sources. Everything else but fossil fuels requires using very large footprint-generating stations. They take up a lot of real estate for the equivalent energy of one coal-, oil-, or natural-gas-powered electric generating station. No, there has been no comparable alternative to the high energy density of fossil fuels except for nuclear power.

  “The traditional nuclear power plant uses atomic fission, as you know. Fission is the exact opposite of fusion. With fission we use slow neutrons to break large uranium atoms into two smaller atoms, with some loss of mass in the reaction. That is, the products weigh slightly less after the reaction than the starting weight of the fuel. Einstein’s famous equation tells us that the weight lost was converted to energy, in other words, heat.

  “For the fusion reaction, we go the other way. We start with two smaller atoms and, using very high temperature, smash them together to make one larger atom. Again, there is a difference in the weight of the starting and ending material and that difference is also converted to energy. In either case, the heat is used to make steam to run steam electric generators. The rest of the current electricity infrastructure can remain more or less intact and serviceable.”

  James Marshall raised his hand to speak. Cranshaw nodded, acknowledging Marshall.

  “What about all the technology about methane production and stripping hydrogen from the methane for use in fuel cells? Have you abandoned that strategy?” Marshall asked.

  “Yes. Completely. There is no need to have a separate hydrogen-producing step since the process itself now produces hydrogen. Let me use the wall screen to help explain.”

  Cranshaw got up and walked to the white screen on the side wall of the conference room. Everyone turned so they could see what he was going to write.

  “The deuterium-tritium reaction looks like this,” he said, writing the symbols for the reaction on the board with his finger:

  H-2 + H-3 → n + He-4 + 17.6 MeV

  “What this says is that Hydrogen-2, deuterium, plus Hydrogen-3, tritium, yields a neutron and a Helium-4 atom, the common garden variety of helium, plus 17.6 million electron volts of energy. The neutron is the troublemaker in this reaction, causing other objects to become radioactive. The deuterium-Helium-3 reaction looks like this:

  H-2 + Helium-3 → p + He-4 + 18.4 MeV

  “What this says is that Hydrogen-2, again, deuterium, plus Helium-3 yields a proton, which quickly acquires an electron to become a hydrogen atom, and Helium-4 plus 18.4 million electron volts of energy. This reaction does not produce the neutrons that cause all the radioactivity problems. Instead, it produces even more heat energy than the deuterium/tritium pellets. Plus, it makes hydrogen, which will be harvested as an important by product of the process.

  “Also, using the Helium-3 reaction, there is no need to replace entire power systems, as we are only replacing the part that makes the steam, that turns the turbines in all the existing steam-power electric generating stations. The harvested hydrogen would be used for fueling hydrogen fuel cells. The transition to hydrogen fuel cells can therefore be much more gradual. We will no longer require a crash construction program of entirely new power stations and transmission grids. Only the part that boils the water changes.

  “As far as costs are concerned, the moon is a favorable proposition even with the initial capital investments of setting up operations there. Once set up, it is easier to send ships from the moon to earth than the other way around because of the much lower gravity of the moon. The lower gravity of the moon means it’s easier to escape the moon’s gravitational field when going to earth than it is to escape earth’s gravitational field when going to the moon. Remember too that spaceships going from earth to the moon will be essentially empty, while those from the moon to earth will be loaded with cargo, exactly the way we want things to be.

  “Also, let us understand the energy density we are talking about. To supply the energy needs of the United States for one year would require an amount of Helium-3 occupying approximately the volume of one fully loaded railroad car. For the entire year for the entire country! Think of that, Mr. Marshall, Mr. Rosen. The economics are astounding because the energy density of Helium-3 is astounding.”

  Bill Rosen slumped slightly in his chair. “Whew!” he said. “One railroad car’s worth for the whole damn country. Amazing.”

  Cranshaw added, “And approximately another three railroad cars for the rest of the world.”

  Everyone became silent, allowing the impact of what had been said to sink in. Finally, Bill Rosen found his voice again. “Quite a presentation! What more can there be? What is the ‘thunder’ the president will deliver that you haven’t already told us, Professor?”

  Cranshaw returned to his desk and his chair and leaned back in that pose he struck when Marshall first met him, the one that seemed to indicate he was communing with a higher power. He placed is hands with their pudgy fingers interlaced on his abundant stomach. He closed his eyes as his face gradually pointed upward to a spot on the ceiling in the rear of the room.

  He sat that way for several seconds before he seemed to come back to earth from wherever he had gone and said, “Recently, the United States and the People’s Republic of China have successfully sent teams of geologists and engineers to the moon. Their mission is to design and plan for the establishment of full-scale Helium-3 mining and processing operations on the moon. The plan calls for the initial mining operations to begin within three years and full-scale operations within five years.”

  118

  President Llewellyn continued, “ . . . and it is expected that launches to the moon will continue at the rate of approximately one each per month from the United States and from the People’s Republic of China for the next three years.

  “The People’s Republic of China and the United States have formed a joint venture in the form of a corporation that will exercise sole ownership and control of the material resources of the moon. The name of the corporation will be the World Federation Holdings Incorporated. The corporation will have exclusive and monopolistic control of all lunar Helium-3. If you want to understand how this will work, think of deuterium-Helium-3 fusion reactors as a franchise. Think of the World Federation as the franchisor and think of nations availing themselves of the technology and materials attendant to deuterium-Helium-3 use as the franchisees. The United States and the People’s Republic of China will retain a controlling 51 percent of the shares in the co
rporation. The remainder of the shares will be offered to investors by a mechanism as yet to be determined.”

  The president paused at this point to allow the exclamations and outbursts from the press corps to die down. The prime minister of the People’s Republic of China, standing next to President Llewellyn at the podium, remained calm and said nothing.

  President Llewellyn continued. “The World Federation will work closely with the privately held energy industry in the United States and with the state-run network in the People’s Republic of China to share the technology for (1) converting existing power stations or for constructing new deuterium-Helium-3 nuclear reactors, (2) for harvesting the hydrogen generated by the deuterium-Helium-3 reaction, and (3) for phased integration of fuel cells into the transportation, business, industrial, agricultural, home heating, recreation, appliance, computer, and electronic-energy-use sectors. The sharing of these technologies will be without cost. The planned conversion to and use of these technologies will be mandatory for any nation wishing to have business or trade either with the United States or with the People’s Republic of China. What makes this a credible threat, if I may speak frankly, is that the combined gross national product of the United States and the People’s Republic of China accounts is just short of half of the economic activity of the entire earth. All other one hundred and twenty countries combined providing the balance. The economic incentive to meet these conversion goals is significant, to put it mildly.

  “While the technology will be dispersed without cost, the franchising nations will have to meet certain key requirements for eligibility for a franchise, in addition to a franchise fee that will be based on the energy demands of the franchisee nation. These further requirements, of an economic and social nature, will be explained in detail in the near future by Ranjit Lal, former secretary-general of the United Nations and now chief executive officer of the World Federation Holdings Inc. The thrust of these other requirements will relate to the close relationship between economic and social stability. Countries that are managed poorly, that exploit and oppress their own people, that govern by threat or use of military force or other forms of violence will be ineligible for a franchise, as they will not meet the requirements for policies that promote peace and tranquility among their people. Bad governance is bad economics.