[Before we shrug off the latest achievement as just another small
step on a long road, consider the miles we’ve come since the idea of
tapping the power of the sun was first conceived.]
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FUSION SKEPTICISM FOLLOWS A CENTURY OF GENIUS, FRAUD AND HYPE  
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Stephen Mihm
December 15, 2022
Bloomberg.com
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_ Before we shrug off the latest achievement as just another small
step on a long road, consider the miles we’ve come since the idea of
tapping the power of the sun was first conceived. _

, Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

 

This week government scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory achieved a long-sought milestone in developing clean fusion
energy. For the first time, the amount of energy produced by a fusion
reaction exceeded the energy required to produce it.

The press dutifully reported the news, but there has been little
celebration outside of scientific circles. For most people, fusion
remains a futuristic pipe dream, constantly lurking around the corner,
never materializing.

There are reasons for skepticism: Few scientific endeavors have been
dogged by so many dead ends and false claims. But this has blinded us
to the fact that, disappointments aside, scientists have been making
slow but steady progress on fusion far longer than many people
realize.

The ideas behind fusion originated with a paper delivered by British
astrophysicist Arthur Eddington at a conference held in 1920. A devout
Quaker and brilliant scientist, Eddington ventured an answer to an
age-old question: How do stars like the sun generate energy?

He speculated that the immense pressure inside stars fused hydrogen
atoms [[link removed]] together, creating
helium. This "fusion" converted some of the original matter into raw
energy. As Eddington put it: the stars' "sub-atomic energy is…freely
used to maintain their great furnaces…"

Eddington admitted to his listeners that he was more or less
spitballing. But everything he said that day proved eerily accurate,
including his warning that control of this latent power could be used
for the benefit of the human race—"or its suicide."

In the 1930s, chemist Ernest Rutherford and two collaborators began
conducting experiments with a heavy isotope of hydrogen known as
deuterium. In 1934, the team slammed deuterium atoms together, turning
the isotope into helium while simultaneously producing what they
described as "an enormous effect"—a blast of energy.

This was fusion in miniature. Four years later, German physicist Hans
Bethe figured out the precise subatomic sequence of events that
undergird the process. That same year, two young scientists read
Bethe's article on the subject and resolved to put his ideas into
practice.

The eccentric duo, Arthur Kantrowitz and Eastman Jacobs, worked at a
government research facility focused on aircraft performance. Building
a fusion reactor had nothing to do with their jobs, so they dubbed
their creation a "Diffusion Inhibitor," a vague but pretentious phrase
that deterred superiors from asking too many questions.

Their design, foreshadowing later developments, featured a metal
donut, or "torus," lined with magnets designed to contain and control
the reaction. Lasers hadn't been invented, so they opted for radio
waves to superheat the hydrogen. This consumed so much power that they
had to conduct experiments at night to avoid taking down the power
grid.

Ultimately, they flipped the switch and nothing happened. Not long
afterward, their superiors caught on and shut down the project. No one
realized it at the time, but the pair had come remarkably close to
building the first fusion reactor, save for some flaws in the
containment structure.

It wasn't until after World War II that scientists resumed work on
fusion, all too aware of its speculative nature. James Tuck, a British
physicist who had cut his teeth working on the Manhattan Project,
designed an early fusion reactor he dubbed the "Perhapsatron," because
"perhaps it will work and perhaps it will not."

Far less amusing was an episode that helps explain the longstanding
skepticism of the new technology. In the late 1940s, Argentina's
populist dictator, Juan Domingo Perón, funded the fusion research of
an obscure Austrian scientist named Ronald Richter. In 1951, Peron
proudly announced that Richter—who had close ties to former
Nazis—had created the world's first fusion reactor. Subsequent
scrutiny unmasked Richter's research as fundamentally flawed, if not
fraudulent.

The following year, however, two developments underscored why fusion
could not be ignored. First came news that the United States had
detonated the world's first hydrogen bomb—effectively, an
uncontrolled fusion reaction—reviving the suicide-of-the human-race
problem that Eddington originally identified.

No less consequential was the work of theoretical physicist Lyman
Spitzer at Princeton University on how to control the superheated gas,
or plasma, at the heart of the fusion reactor. This state of matter is
like a subatomic orgy, where atomic nuclei and electrons, formerly
monogamous, promiscuously mingle. In order to contain the chaos,
Spitzer sketched out a figure-eight apparatus he called the
stellarator.

An avid mountaineer, the physicist christened his research Project
Matterhorn on account of the long and arduous climb he foresaw in
fusion research. Through the 1950s, Spitzer and his collaborators
built a series of prototypes that marked a giant leap forward. At the
same time, a group of physicists in the Soviet Union led by Andrei
Sakharov and Igor Tamm developed their own model, known as a Tokamak,
a Russian acronym referring to a gigantic magnetic donut, or torus.

So began a new phase in fusion research as scientists built ever
larger stellarators and tokamaks. From the late 1950s onward, fusion
moved from a theoretical, fanciful concept to something concrete.
Unfortunately, these advances also led flamboyant promoters to get
ahead of themselves, imagining a future defined by inexpensive,
limitless power.

Typical of the genre was a breathless article in Popular Mechanics in
1959, "Fusion Power for the World of Tomorrow," predicting, "It may
come sooner than you think!"

This hype proved damaging as well as unrealistic. Many commentators
from the 1960s onward became increasingly disenchanted with fusion.
Though the energy shortages of the 1970s led to more funding and
renewed hopes, these inevitably fell short, bolstering the cynical
view.

Lost in all the hoopla was the fact that scientific teams around the
world continued to make slow but steady progress on turning fusion
into a reality, gradually solving the technical challenges associated
with containment while producing ever larger bursts of energy.

These piecemeal advances, not especially eye-catching when viewed in
isolation, were overshadowed by failures and frauds like the infamous
"cold fusion [[link removed]]" controversy of 1989,
when two researchers erroneously claimed they had created a
stable fusion reaction [[link removed]] at
room temperature.

Fusion skeptics also delighted in pointing out that decades of
research had never managed to achieve a so-called "net-energy gain."
Anytime researchers fired up hydrogen isotopes into a frenzy, they
always ended up with less energy than when they started.

That's why this week's announcement is so critical. No, it doesn't
mean commercialization is imminent. But after many decades of trying,
researchers have finally achieved a critical milestone in their quest
to develop fusion power [[link removed]],
bringing the world considerably closer to the vision Arthur Eddington
first articulated more than a century ago.

STEPHEN MIHM is a professor of history at the University of Georgia,
is coauthor of “Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of
Finance.” @SMihm [[link removed]]

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