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<< FUSION
For over three decades, the goal of fusion research has been to build a machine to harness the violent process that powers the stars and ignites hydrogen bombs. The daunting challenge confronting scientists and engineers working on this project has been to design a reactor that would provide inexhaustible energy by enabling operators to manipulate thermonuclear reactions in temperatures exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius.
Fusion research was an outgrowth of the postwar conviction that scientists and engineers, given adequate support, could accomplish whatever they undertook. It is clear now that had the initial decisions been made, not on theories fashioned by physicists, but rather on the basis of assessments conducted by careful economists and engineers, the United States would not have supported an aggressive, expensive quest for fusion power. The concept that a vessel might be built to contain and control the titanic heat of the sun was preposterous in 1950, and it remains preposterous today.
Until recent years, the same secrecy and awe that shielded Edward Teller from serious criticism for so long prevented citizens from forming their own judgments about fusion. But this program, too, has finally been overtaken by history. After characterizing the saga of fusion research as a “black comedy,” Bob Davis, a science writer for the Wall Street Journal, recently wrote this epitaph for the program: “Nuclear-fusion researchers promised endless energy by the year 2000; they delivered boundless laughs instead.”
Fusion occupies two special niches in the annals of the atomic age. Never has so much talent and money been deployed to accomplish so little. The $2-billion plus spent so far on this venture recalls the myth of Icarus, who, in attempting to fly to the sun, fell back to earth to his doom. Fusion research was characterized by its capacity to be kept afloat by an endless stream of frothy, self-serving announcements about dramatic “breakthroughs” in nuclear engineering. From its first days, hype has been the mother’s milk of fusion research. >>
