Sun in a Bottle_The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking

by Charles Seife

  With the moratorium in place, nuclear tests are at an end. New scientists entering the program will never have a chance to design a bomb and test it. They will never have a chance to study a live nuclear explosion. All they have left are computer simulations and experiments that mimic one part of a nuclear explosion. NIF would be the only facility that mimics the explosion of a secondary; it would give young scientists a chance to study secondary physics without ever seeing a nuclear test. And that’s the point of NIF. NIF is essentially a training ground for weapons scientists. As old ones retire and new ones grow up without ever having seen a nuclear test, NIF is a way to give them some level of experience so that America doesn’t lose its nuclear expertise.

  NIF isn’t truly about energy. It is not about keeping our stockpile safe, at least not directly. It is about keeping the United States’ weapons community going in the absence of nuclear tests. However, it is contributing next to nothing to the stockpile stewardship program at the moment, and the program is heading toward a crisis. Weaponeers are complaining that the United States is increasingly unable to vouch for its nuclear arsenal, and the government seems to be slowly slouching toward a resumption of nuclear detonations.

  A number of ominous signs suggest that nuclear testing might begin again before too long. The debate in the early 2000s about the new Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator warhead was an indication that the government was thinking beyond the test ban; before deploying the weapon, it almost certainly would need a test. Even though Congress strangled that program, it has blessed the Department of Energy’s campaign to design yet another warhead. The Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW), as it is called, is supposed to obviate the need for nuclear testing because it would be a hardier device less susceptible to aging. It would be able to assure the reliability of the nation’s nuclear arsenal for decades without nuclear tests. The only problem is that the RRW would probably require a few nuclear tests before anyone was convinced of its reliability in the first place. It’s a paradox: to maintain the nuclear test ban, the United States might have to resume testing.

  A debate is also ongoing about shortening the time it will take to prepare the Nevada nuclear test site for a resumption of underground tests. President George W. Bush tried to make the site ready to resume testing within eighteen months, rather than maintain the previous twenty-four-month lead time. But going to a higher level of readiness announced to the world that the nation was moving toward ending the moratorium, and this could hamstring American attempts to stem the proliferation of nuclear weapons around the world. Year after year, the president put money for eighteen-month readiness in the budget; year after year, Congress took it out. Even without the cash, though, the National Nuclear Security Administration, the organization inside the Department of Energy responsible for nuclear weapons, lists eighteen-month test-site readiness as an integral part of the stockpile stewardship program.

  The stockpile stewardship program will soon reach a crisis point. Will the federal government be able to assure the reliability of the stockpile without testing nuclear weapons as the program originally promised? Or will it fail, forcing a resumption of testing, breaching the moratorium in place for over a decade? The move toward renewed nuclear testing is happening now, and NIF, if it helps with stockpile stewardship at all, will do so indirectly and in the distant future. The nontesting regime might well be in tatters by the time scientists get any benefit from the multibillion-dollar machine supposedly designed to uphold it.

  NIF is the state of the art in laser fusion, yet it is a deeply troubled project. It is vastly more expensive than originally projected. Even if it works perfectly, it won’t keep the country’s nuclear arsenal working or the nontesting policy alive. For a decade, experts have questioned whether it would be sufficiently powerful to achieve ignition and breakeven—and if the history of laser fusion is any guide, NIF, like Nova, will fail to reach its goal. Yet NIF marches on. Laser fusion scientists won’t give up their decades-old dream to put a star in a bottle. And if they fail, as it appears they will, after spending more than $4 billion, there is little hope that they can sucker the government into building yet another bigger and better laser machine.

  In 2002, five years after the United States abruptly left the ITER project, fusion scientists were about to get a serious case of déjà vu.

  The American departure shook the ITER collaboration—and branded the United States as an unreliable partner when it came to international science—but the project limped along. Russia, Europe, and Japan continued designing an international fusion reactor. The plans they came up with were much less ambitious than the original ITER. The plasma in the reactor would span twelve meters rather than sixteen meters. It would not achieve ignition and sustained burn—the plasma would never be fusing enough to keep itself warm—but if all went well, the reactor would be able to keep a plasma confined for up to an hour and produce ten times as much power as it consumed. (It would finally achieve breakeven—for real, this time.) It would cost half as much as the original ITER: $5 billion, rather than $10 billion.78

  The American magnetic fusion program, in the meantime, was in ruins. There was no big domestic tokamak, just a few lesser ones in Boston and in San Diego. The big domestic tokamak, TFTR, had been shut down in 1997 to make room for ITER. Princeton, once home of the $100 million giants, was reduced to working on a tiny, $25 million spherical torus. Plans existed for larger machines, such as billion-dollar tokamaks, but they were just dreams; there was no chance they would be built. The United States was rapidly retreating from the cutting edge of magnetic fusion. Instead of getting a robust domestic program along with an enormous international reactor, American fusion scientists had neither. By 2002, with slim pickings at home, those scientists began to eye the slimmed-down ITER project, argued that many of the design flaws of the original machine had been fixed, and asked to rejoin the collaboration. At a cost of only about $1 billion, they argued, the United States could become an ITER partner again. The request worked its way up the food chain—from the scientists to a fusion advisory panel, to the head of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, to the secretary of energy, to the president. The answer was yes.

  In early 2003, President Bush announced that the United States was back in the collaboration. The Americans would rejoin ITER.79

  Even though the machine’s design had been revamped and the collaboration had expanded—China, South Korea, and Canada had joined in—the same problems that haunted the first incarnation of ITER remained. For one thing the partners were still fighting over where the machine would be built.

  Japan and Europe were the main contenders. Each attacked the other’s proposal. Japan complained that the proposed European site in the south of France was too far from a port. The French argued that the Japanese site was prone to earthquakes. Most scientists in the United States understandably seemed to prefer a laboratory a short drive from the French Riviera to one near a dismal brackish lake in the north of Japan, but the United States officially backed the Japanese site. Some Europeans hinted, darkly, that American support of Japan over France was political payback for France’s criticism of the Iraq war. The Japanese accused the Europeans of circulating a nasty anonymous memo to the ITER parties that faulted the Japanese choice of site. China and Russia backed France. Canada pulled out of the collaboration entirely. Europe threatened to do so as well. In early 2005, more than three years after the United States had reentered the collaboration, ITER was deadlocked and on the brink of unraveling once again.

  Back at the Capitol, Congress once again was getting very annoyed at the delay—and another old debate reopened. American fusion scientists started bickering about whether it was wise to decimate the domestic fusion program to fund an international reactor. The Department of Energy slashed its domestic programs to finance ITER; Congress restored the domestic funds and threatened to completely cut off money for the international reactor. ITER was about to collapse entirely.

  Lucki
ly for ITER’s backers, the Japanese blinked just in time. Japan agreed that the French would host the reactor, but in return Europe would pay half the reactor’s cost and would use Japanese companies for many of its manufacturing contracts. Furthermore, Japan would get to host a $600 million facility devoted to researching advanced materials for fusion reactors, materials that could withstand the intense heat and radiation inside a tokamak as well as reduce the amount of radioactive waste when the reactor vessel needed to be replaced. The debate was over. ITER would be sited in Cadarache, France. The American government, for its part, managed to find a way to fund its share: the fusion budget was increased to support ITER as well as the (modest) domestic program. India joined the collaboration. Everything seemed to be hunky-dory again.

  On November 21, 2006, representatives of the seven ITER partner states signed the formal agreement. Everybody took the opportunity to wax poetic about what fusion power meant for the future. French president Jacques Chirac bubbled about ITER as a “hand held out to future generations”:

  The ambition is huge! To control nuclear fusion. To control the tremendous amount of energy generated at one hundred million degrees and to design sufficiently resistant materials for the purpose. To produce as much energy from a litre of seawater as a litre of oil or a kilo of coal.

  It is a glorious vision. Unlimited energy—a tiny star bottled in a magnetic jar—would liberate mankind from the fear of global warming and from the impending energy crisis.

  If ITER fails, it will probably mean the end of tokamaks. The likelihood of using magnets to confine and heat a plasma would seem slimmer than ever. However, there’s no reason to assume that ITER, like generations of machines before it, will be a disappointment. If nothing goes wrong, ITER will begin experiments in 2018 or so.80 And if ITER works as planned when scientists turn it on, it will light the way to a fusion reactor. If, miraculously, no more instabilities crop up that prevent scientists from bottling their plasma, fusion energy will be within reach. Scientists would then build a demonstration fusion power plant that would begin operations in 2035 or 2040. After five decades of broken promises, lies, delusions, and self-deception, it will finally be true. Fusion energy will be thirty years away.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE SCIENCE OF WISHFUL THINKING

  When one turns to the magnificent edifice of the physical sciences, and sees how it was reared; what thousands of disinterested moral lives of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patience and postponement, what choking down of preference, what submission to the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into its very stones and mortar; how absolutely impersonal it stands in its vast augustness,—then how besotted and contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes blowing his voluntary smoke-wreaths, and pretending to decide things from out of his private dream!

  —WILLIAM JAMES, “THE WILL TO BELIEVE”

  We see what we want to see. That is why science was invented.

  Science is little more than a method of tearing away notions that are not supported by cold, hard data. It forces us to discard ideas that we cherish. It eliminates some of our hopes, some of our dreams, and some of our wishes. This is why science can be so soul crushing to even its most devoted adherents.

  Every scientist, at least on some level, has a vision of the way nature should behave. Every scientist, at least on some level, is wrong. And that means that scientists, sometimes subtly and sometimes unsubtly, occasionally try to wrestle the scientific narrative in the wrong direction. Like the mythmakers of old, they try to craft nature in their image.

  The true power of science comes from its ability to withstand the wishful thinking of the humans who craft its stories. Individual scientists err. They deceive themselves—and they can deceive others. They might even lie or cheat in an attempt to win fame or glory or immortality. But the whole point of the scientific method is to try to insulate the scientific story from the whims and frailties of the scientists who write it.

  The mechanisms of science are, essentially, protection against wishful thinking. This protection takes many forms, but the strongest come from the scientific community itself. Published scientific research is peer reviewed and vetted by rivals to ensure that its authors have made no obvious mistakes. The scientific community demands that experiments be repeatable, and if any question arises about the validity of an important experiment, scientists will clamor to have a second group verify the result with a different piece of equipment. And if there’s a hint of incompetence or fraud, the community will howl for the blood of the malefactors. It can be brutal, but this is the way science protects itself from the dishonesty, the stupidity, or the human failures of an individual scientist. This is what makes science seem so inhuman. The scientific method has no sympathy for wishful thinking.

  This can be hard on even the most brilliant scientists. As they practice their craft, they are forced to renounce some of their beliefs, no matter how deeply held they might be. If they err—as they almost certainly will—they must admit that they have deceived themselves. They have to do it publicly and without regard for their fragile human egos. They must eviscerate themselves on the altar of science. At least, that’s what their peers expect.

  For Andrew Lyne, an astronomer at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in England, the day of reckoning came in January 1992. Standing in front of a roomful of physicists and astronomers, Lyne was steeling himself, preparing to make an announcement that could destroy him. “It was the thing that one fears more than anything else in one’s scientific life, and it was happening,” Lyne said. “I certainly at the time thought that it was the end of my career.”

  Lyne was a radio astronomer, an expert in detecting and interpreting radio waves spewed out by stars and galaxies. In the early 1990s, his attention was drawn to a collapsed star known as a pulsar. These pulsars shine like cosmic lighthouses, emitting beams of radio waves as they spin. An earthbound observer like Lyne sees these pulsars blinking on and off with a clocklike regularity. But Lyne noticed that one pulsar was not blinking quite so regularly; it seemed to speed up and slow down. It was almost as if the pulsar was being tugged about by an unseen object, an invisible massive body orbiting the pulsar and pulling it out of its regular rhythm. He and his team had spotted what appeared to be a planet circling a foreign star.

  Lyne was ecstatic. It would be the first detection of a world outside our solar system, a truly alien planet. It was something that astronomers had been looking for, in vain, for decades. This discovery would inscribe Lyne’s name among the immortals of astronomy. Barely able to contain his excitement, Lyne submitted a paper to Nature.

  The manuscript contained at least one significant issue. The planet seemed to orbit the pulsar once every 365 days, the same amount of time it takes the Earth to orbit the sun. It would be a pretty stunning coincidence if true, and to some astronomers it suggested something was wrong with Lyne’s measurements. Perhaps he was failing to take the Earth’s motion around the sun into account. It was a big warning sign, but Lyne was confident about his observations. “We did all sorts of tests on the data and tried to think of all the possible ways we might be making a mistake.” They couldn’t find an error. They were truly convinced: they were seeing an extrasolar planet. The reviewers at Nature were apparently convinced, too. It seemed to be a momentous discovery.

  When the Nature paper came out, the astronomical community went wild. Lyne was showered with congratulations. The president of the American Astronomical Society immediately called a special session at the society’s annual meeting to discuss the discovery. Lyne would be the guest of honor. Then disaster struck. “Ten or twelve days before I was due to give that talk, I discovered the error,” Lyne said. It was a subtle one. His team had used the wrong piece of software to correct for the Earth’s motion. With one of the dozens of pulsars they had been observing, they forgot to make a key change in the computer code. This minute error manifested as a tiny glitch in the pulsar’s timing, a glitch that exact
ly mimicked the tug of an extrasolar planet orbiting the pulsar every 365 days.

  The alien planet was a complete fiction. It vanished as soon as Lyne’s team corrected the program. Less than a week before Lyne had to address his fellow astronomers—luminaries who had called a special session—the discovery dissolved into dust.

  When Lyne took to the stage, he was petrified. “It was a large audience of extremely eminent astronomers and scientists,” he said. However, he had decided what to do. Instead of telling everyone about the discovery of the extrasolar planet as originally planned, he told the gathered audience, in great detail, how he and his team had deceived themselves by failing to check their software properly. It was humiliating. Yet, at the end of his presentation, the audience broke out into a long, loud round of applause. Lyne was shocked. “Here I was, with the biggest blunder of my life and...” Lyne paused, gathering himself. “But I think that many people have nearly done such things themselves.”

  This is the way science is supposed to work. When a scientist discovers that he has erred, that he had deceived himself, he gives the scientific community a full and detailed report about his folly. The scientist abases himself, science rids itself of the erroneous notion, and the march of research continues on. However, reality isn’t always so clean. Sometimes, other experimentalists join a scientist in self-deception; this makes it much harder to correct an error. It is also difficult when ego gets involved, as it often does. Lyne was lucky; he found his error himself. It’s much harder to come clean when other scientists—your rivals—find your errors for you.