Forget solar power, forget fuel cells!! Here's the future, from Drudge:
observer.co.uk
A machine called Z
Under a ring of water in a sealed
chamber in the middle of the New
Mexico desert lies the heart of a
machine that could change the
world
Michael Paterniti
Sunday December 31, 2000
It is never night inside the Machine. Even
after the sun has set on the mesa and
Jimmy Potter and the frogmen and the
men in white jumpsuits and the men in
blue jumpsuits have showered, packed
up, and gone home; even as yawning,
befuddled scientists - with names like Jim
Bailey and Mark Derzon and Melissa
Douglas - sit in offices in a nearby
building, trapped by their own reflections
and in the blackened windows; and even
as this oesophageal dark falls over coyote
and jackrabbit and moves everything
towards sleep and dreams, towards the
deepest centre of the night, the Machine
is awake.
Its 36 Marx generators are set in a ring
like a metallic Stonehenge. The 20
Rexolite disks of the vacuum chamber
look like flying saucers. Its vast,
concentric pool of five-weight oil and
deionized water seems bottomless - real
oil and real water, in half-million-gallon
tanks that sit one inside the other like a
wheel within a wheel. Even now, there are
depths in the Machine, invisible worlds
revealing themselves, the secret body of
the universe floating up. Deuterium,
tritium, helium.
It begins with the flip of a cyber switch in
the control room at the north end of the
hanger. Before a bank of computer
screens, a man clicks a mouse, and then
electricity, quietly sucked off the
municipal power grid in Albuquerque,
floods into the outer ring of Marx
generators. Which is when the Machine
takes control. A siren sounds, red lights
flash, doors automatically lock. The
frogmen and the white and blue jumpsuits
clamber over the high bay, down metal
steps, and retreat to a copper-coated
room behind a foot of cement.
Another switch is flipped, another mouse
clicked. To the piercing sound of an
alarm, a countdown in the Marx
generators ensues, or rather a count up,
in kilovolts, comes in a monotone, almost
hollow voice beneath the frantic alarm.
The man in the control room on a tinny
loudspeaker, the Machine speaking
through the human.
'Twenty kV...'
'Thirty kV...'
'Forty kV...'
At 90, the floodgates open: a pulse of
electricity surges out of the Marx
generators toward an inside ring of giant
capacitors and then through a series of
gas switches. The current is compressed
by the Machine into a wild whitewater of
electricity that charges toward the vacuum
chamber at a speed of 60 million feet per
second. On its way, it passes through
painted sharks' mouths, drawn there by
the men in white and blue jumpsuits in the
way that fighter pilots sometimes draw on
their warplanes to show their prowess - or
hide their misgivings. The electricity pours
past the sharks' mouths, is redirected
downward, along the Z axis, into the
vacuum chamber, blitzing and bombarding
from all sides a three-dimensional target
in a gold-plated can, a delicately strung
array of tungsten wires the size of a spool
of thread, hanging in black space like a
tiny chandelier.
Driven so furiously in the Machine, and
then storming the array, the pulse of
electricity - enough juice now to light up
America like a birthday cake - instantly
vapourises the tungsten wire into plasma,
a superheated ion gas. The ions hover and
dance along the invisible circumference
once described by the array, while a
relentless magnetic field keeps pressing
on them, shoving them from behind.
Thrusting and squeezing and ramming
until the ions can no longer resist, the
centre cannot hold, and in that hot
nanosecond - Boom ! Everything becomes
one.
This is not a gentle conjunction but a
Pandora's box suddenly ripped open by
nuclear passion, an orgy of ions. Boom !
Lightning fills the Machine, veins out over
the surface of the water. Temperatures
flare to those inside the sun. The earth
rocks once again. And in few billionths of
a second, 290 terawatts - 80 times the
power generated on earth at any given
time - roar to life inside the Machine.
Watching it through a Plexiglas window,
you might as well be watching the
beginning of the universe. Or the end of it.
Contained in that single flash of white
light, when the Machine holds the heat
and the power of the sun, when the room
fills with lightning, there is everything we
know - and everything we may become.
The 21st century. A world covered by
rooms of little suns, generating intense
energy and, with it, the possibilities of
time travel and galaxy hopping. Peace
among nations. Or the end of time as we
know it, a hole ripped in the universe by
the Machine, something many
doomsayers predict, and the earth sucked
into oblivion. Our downfall or salvation. A
fusion machine they call Z.
The magic bean; the Holy Grail: fusion.
The idea is to take two isotopes of the
hydrogen atom - deuterium and tritium -
and mash them together with a little
energy, which in turn releases enormous
amounts of energy in the form of a single
neutron. Contrarily, fission, the method
widely employed by today's nuclear
reactors, splits heavy uranium and
plutonium atoms, creating lots of energy
but also tons of dangerous and everlasting
radioactive waste. Fusion offers a clean
source, borne out of the material of
roughly a handful of water and a handful of
earth, with its only by-product being an
easily disposable helium-4 nucleus.
What would fusion mean? Endless, cheap
energy. Amazing Star Trek , space-travel
possibilities. Fame, fortune, and
undoubtedly a Nobel or two for the lucky
scientists. For the better part of five
decades, the race has two separate
approaches: magnetic confinement and
inertial confinement. Most researchers -
those from Japan, Russia, Europe and
America - focus on the former: big
accelerators called stellarators,
spheromaks, and tokamaks (a machine
designed partly by Andrei Sakharov) use
huge magnets to contain and compress
hydrogen isotopes that hover in a kind of
reddish-blue plasma inside the huge
torus-shaped tubes until implosion.
On the other hand, the idea behind inertial
confinement is that tiny fuel pellets of
deuterium and tritium are bombarded by
lasers or X-rays. In the case of the Z
Machine, the explosion that occurs when
ions are released by the vapourised wire
array, and then when ions are pinched
together, creates a huge X-ray pulse, one
that scientists hope can be used to heat
the tiny pellets and, in turn, create a small
thermonuclear explosion. As it is, fusion
has never been achieved for an extended
time outside the explosion of a hydrogen
bomb.
The first time scientists attempted to
shoot an early incarnation of the Z
machine, in June 1980, there was bravado
and false bravado and downright fear. At
Sandia National Laboratories on Kirtland
Air Force Base, in the same New
Mexican high-desert landscape of
America's greatest, most frightening
nuclear discoveries, they'd been working
on the Machine for four years. Yet there
were still unknown variables, a scientist's
nightmare. First, it was so much bigger
and more powerful than any of its
predecessors. What if the Marx
generators blew up before it could be
shot? What if residual X-ray radiation
contaminated people in the area? Or a fire
destroyed the complex? And what if
everything worked perfectly and they got a
huge energy release that blew up
Albuquerque itself? It was a scenario that
had been considered at the highest level.
As had something worse: what if people
later wished that it had been only
Albuquerque that blew up?
The shot - Sandia shorthand for the firing
of the Machine - was scheduled for a
Friday night. But then the machine blew a
fitting. The technical crew - the frogmen,
as well as the men in white and blue
jumpsuits - worked feverishly, and by
Saturday noon the Machine was ready
again. 'No one knew what to expect,'
remembers Gerry Yonas, 58, an engineer
and physicist and one of the founding
fathers of the Z Machine. They took all
necessary precautions, charged the Marx
generators, and crossed their fingers. A
switch was flipped, electricity pulsated
into the Machine, ripped through the
switches, stormed on to the wires. There
was a wicked jolt, and... silence. Sweet,
beautiful silence. Everyone was still on
earth; everything seemed to work. The
feeling was surreal. 'I felt the ground
shake,' says Yonas, grinning at the
memory, 'and everybody said: "Let's do it
again!" Nobody wanted to go home. I had
to kick them out. There was nowhere else
in the world to be. This was the
beginning.'
The scientists, at that time a group of 20
or so men, threw high fives and drank
beer. Pure, silly jubilation. Only later,
photographs of what actually had occurred
inside the Machine made them gasp:
huge dragon snorts of fire filled the
hangar. Apparently, plumes of oil had
sprayed skyward in the instant of
explosion, flamed, and then flamed out
before the men returned inside the
Machine. They had nearly blown
themselves up. By the grace of some
benevolent god, or the Machine itself, they
were allowed to return to work on Monday
morning, giddy limbs intact.
Over the next 15 years, the Z Machine
gradually improved its output, packing an
astonishing wallop - 20 trillion watts' worth
of electrical output, as compared with the
mea gre 100,000 amps of the first
machine - but it wasn't enough. Scientists
and theoreticians estimated that for
high-yield fusion to be achieved inside the
Machine, it would need to generate
something over 1,000 trillion watts. A
factor of at least 50 of Z's output.
Which is when the men in suits and ties
tried to kill the Machine. It was a
dinosaur, they argued, no longer useful.
They felt Z-pinch technology could not
yield the mother lode. By 1995, even
Yonas, who was about to become a
grandfather, was acutely feeling the
passage of time. He sadly had to admit
that maybe he should sacrifice Z and all
the optimism that had driven the project.
Perhaps achieving high-yield fusion,
something scientists compare to the
invention of the lightbulb for its potential to
change the world, did indeed belong to the
other fusion machines, the stellarators
and spheromaks and tokamaks. To the
Russians or the Japanese or the British or
the confederate nerds at Princeton or
Lawrence Livermore or Oak Ridge. And
maybe Sandia National Laboratories - over
time, a place known more for its secretive
mystique, its downright weird
nefariousness, dating to the
cloak-and-dagger days of Little Boy and
Fat Man - would have to sit on the
sidelines while someone else gave the
world perhaps its greatest legacy. |
