Fusion article, Part 2:
But a funny thing happened on the way to
the chop shop. Maybe it was 11th-hour
desperation, or some invisible bolt of
providence visited on a few overworked
scientists, a couple of whom lit on the
simple idea of stringing the wire array, the
spool-sized target at the centre of the
Machine, with double, then triple, the
tungsten wire. All of a sudden - Boom !
Forty trillion watts! No one believed it.
They reconfigured the Machine, boosting
its X-ray production. Then someone,
Melissa Douglas, thought to stack the
arrays. Boom ! Two hundred trillion watts
in a single pulse! Short of a nuclear blast,
it was the most energy ever released on
earth, and suddenly, in 1998, after five
decades of chasing the illusion of
high-yield fusion, of regarding it as some
far-off Atlantis or dark galaxy's edge, the Z
Machine was a third of the way there.
In science, if you do something once
that's never been done before, it's
considered a mistake. Do it twice, and it's
simply a mirage. But the third time it
becomes the truth. With Z's new,
seemingly impossible results came the
first flickering sign that some deep,
unknowable power resided in the
Machine. And so today, the Z Machine is
considered one of the world's best hopes
for achieving fusion. 'We may not
understand how we get these huge pulses
of power, the meaning may still elude us,'
says Yonas. 'But it's still a fact.'
One that Yonas himself, at first, had a
hard time grasping. After he was handed
the results, he remembers squinting at
them, and sitting back at his desk as if
blown by a solar wind. 'My God,' he said
in a small voice. 'This could work. This
could really work.'
Listen to the Z scientists, to their best
idea ('The use of stark-shifted emissions
to measure electric-field fluctuations and
acceleration gaps'), and their dream ('To
remedy plasmic instability and create
higher temp- eratures'), and you enter a
kind of friend country that becomes an
Andean prison from which it gets harder
and harder to escape. The scientists
admit that, at moments, their whole
selves are inseparable from the Machine,
that the pull of the Machine is so great
that re-entering normal life can be nearly
impossible.
Jim Bailey, a handsome, soft-spoken,
loafer-wearing plasma physicist whose
conversation is peppered with references
to spectroscopy and 'the visible regime',
says sometimes it's even hard to go to a
neighbour's barbecue - can't make small
talk, can't communicate what you do - let
alone talk to your wife. Mark Derzon, a
boyish, bearded nuclear physicist, says
he works a system with his wife: when he
walks through the door at the end of a
day, he says green light ('Yes, everything
is fine, I'm ready for the kids'); yellow light
('Give me 15 to decompress'); or red light
('I need time'). Melissa Douglas says that
there's no line drawn at all between the
Machine and her private life - that the
Machine, her place inside of the Machine,
studying something called Rayleigh-Taylor
instabilities, is her private life. And now, at
the age of 36, she's watched her friends
get married, have families, settle, and on
occasion she's wondered to herself: 'what
am I doing? Can we really make fusion
work?'
Since the 1950s, the US government has
invested nearly $15bn to find out, always
with the promise that fusion is just around
the corner - two, three, five years away -
and, with it, a fusion revolution that would
hurtle us to the centre of the earth, the
deepest trenches of the ocean, and the
farthest reaches of space. A revolution
that would morph the Third World into the
First World until we are simply One
World.
After all, how many wars have been fought
over oil? And then, with oil reserves
expected to reach full depletion by 2050,
how many more will be? Remove oil as a
vital component of our speed-driven,
chip-fitted age and, sure, people would
find things to brawl over, but energy
wouldn't be one of them.
And with limitless, cheap energy, the
development of poorer nations wouldn't be
one of them, either.
And with development, the have-nots and
pariahs of the world would theoretically
join the haves, and so food and housing
and education wouldn't be one of them.
And with a higher standard of living would
come a new freedom for humanity. For at
its heart, fusion, as a Utopian ideal, has
always symbolised freedom; freedom from
the mistakes and waste of our past, the
Hanford Reservations and the Savannah
River Sites - those vast, spooky, radiating
underground storage facilities chambered
with containers of plutonium and iodine
waste, on top of which America is built.
Though left unsaid, the race for fusion has
always been about democracy or a
democratic alternative.
And yet one of the biggest threats to
fusion comes from the same group of
people responsible for the Hanford
Reservations and the Savannah River
Sites: the US Government. Recently,
Congress and various federal agencies
have become disenchanted by the fusion
dream. Critics have lambasted it as a
waste of time and money. If we haven't
achieved it in the last 45 years, they
argue, we never will. The US has dropped
out of a proposed $10bn international
fusion project called ITER, leaving the
facility in doubt of completion. Meanwhile,
the government has spent $3bn, with as
much as an additional $43bn to come, on
developing Nevada's Yucca Mountain as a
vast nuclear-waste site - despite
well-documented problems - and
continues its commitment to fission
reactors despite the fact that radioactive
waste can be lethal up to 600 millennia
after burial. Leaders in fusion field, like the
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory,
have mothballed their big machines, laid
off staff, and now are fighting simply for
their own survival.
'You have to find a way to justify doing
something that you may never see
accomplished in your lifetime,' says Jim
Bailey, who has a penchant for reading
Hume. 'I mean, instead I could be working
for a cancer cure, with at least a greater
hope of finding one. But I'm OK with this.
I've made my peace with it. Fusion will be
the greatest scientific achievement of our
time.'
Yonas, with the Super Bowl confidence of
Joe Namath, predicts that usable
high-yield fusion will be made available to
the American public by an accelerator
called X-1, a generation or two beyond Z,
within three decades - maybe sooner.
Mark Derzon, a member of what's called
the Advanced Concepts Group at Z, has
designed what would be the first practical
Z-pinch reactor - 'A zero-miracle power
plant,' he cheerfully proclaims, and
believes that the Z technology is rougher
and tougher, able to sustain more of the
constant rock and roll of such a plant,
than are the sensitive lasers and vacuums
necessary for magnetic confinement. But
optimism usually carries the day only
past lunch; the request to draw up
preliminary plans for X-1, with its price tag
of up to $1bn dollars, is likely to be
approved by the Department of Energy.
'Every day, it's a leap of faith,' says Neal
Singer, a science writer at Sandia.
'Adding wires to the array - where did that
idea come from? From the outside it
makes no sense. It's incredibly complex
and difficult to string tungsten wires 1/10th
the diameter of a piece of hair and space
them perfectly. And they did it and got
tremendous results. Then they added
more and more, spaced them a little
differently and now we're a third of the way
there. It takes these little steps, this
day-by-day thinking. Hour after hour. Ten,
12, 14 hours a day. The constant question
is, Can you just make a little change to
influence the result?'
Thus the world inside the Machine is
driven down to its smallest, most
maddening detail. For in the end, fusion -
its possibility and reality, its attainment
and capture - comes out of this finely
tuned call-and-response with the universe
itself, the channelling of some great
unknown, copulating force that calls for
the perfect alignment of human and
Machine. That is, the human culture
surrounding the Machine attempts to
mimic the Machine itself , which is trying
to mimic the universe. The mannerisms of
the Machine become the mannerisms of
its minions - people rage and tyrannise,
overheat, relent, synergise, procreate,
vanish, and recur. One idea seems
brilliant and fails, while another may start
as a quail but then, compressed by other
ideas - electrons stripping off, ions
colliding - transforms into something
sharp and fast, something agitatingly,
beautifully right. And then, of course, it is
shot into the Machine to see if it is.
Still there is Melissa Douglas's nagging
doubt, which is the nagging doubt of
everyone here. On certain days, it is
possible to believe that you are merely
trapped in the rubble of some cosmic joke
with no punch line, that Godot is eating
chilli dogs somewhere and won't be able
to make it. After all, Jim Bailey's lab
books are full of 13 years' worth of
jottings; Mark Derzon has pulled
countless all-nighters in the name of what
may or may not be the reactor of the
future; Melissa Douglas has spent entire
months of her life obsessing over a single
equation, the pallor of her face reflecting
only pale computer light - all of this
thought and activity and faith belying the
possibility that their efforts might be for
nothing. And yet as much as the race for
fusion is a race against the Russians at
Triniti labs, or the Germans at FZK labs,
or other American scientists at Lawrence
Livermore, it's also literally a race against
the ticking internal clocks of each
scientist who entertains the question: will
I live to see it?
'History forgets the individual,' says Mark
Derzon pensively, surrounded by no fewer
than 30 photographs of his young
daughters. 'One day Plato will be
forgotten. Ultimately, the name you make
for yourself is not the important thing. It's
what you did, what you stood up for, what
you acted on. Did you try to make the
world a better place? In order to do it, the
world needs fusion. I just happen to think
that Z is the best way to get there. And
we're going to have one serious pizza
party around here if it is.'
Jimmy Potter stands inside the Machine,
glaring down into the half-million-gallon
pool of water at the submerged
refrigerator-sized capacitors where, he
suspects, there may be a broken,
bubbling gas switch. Potter, a Texan, is
the keeper of the Beast, the man who
oversees the whole shebang for today's
shot. 'Are those bubbles down there?' he
asks out loud, vexed. 'We already sent
the divers in. I sure hope not.' |
