Battle Station

by Ben Bova

  Of course, what this day’s simulation really tested was my program. I feel a little like Cyrano de Bergerac, ghostwriting letters to the woman he loves for another man to woo her.

  Making sure that no one is watching, I tap out the code for the White House mainframe’s most secret subroutine. Only a handful of programmers know about this part of the White House’s machine. None of our candidates know of it.

  In the arcane language that only we dedicated programmers know, I ask the mainframe how well my program did. The answer glows brilliantly on the central screen: 0.96. Ninety-six! The highest score any program has ever received.

  I hug myself and double over to keep from laughing out loud. If my legs worked, I would jump up and dance around the studio. Ninety-six! The best ever!

  No matter which candidate gets elected, no matter who votes for whom, the White House mainframe is going to pick my program. My program will be the one the next president uses for the coming four years. Mine!

  With my heart thumping wildly in my chest, I shut down the consoles. All the screens go dark. I spin my chair around and go wheeling through the emptied, darkened studio, heading for the slice of light offered by the half-open door. Already my mind is churning with ideas for improving the program.

  After all, in another four years the primaries start all over again.

  MHD

  Now for a labor of love.

  In 1959 I was commissioned by Avco Everett Research Laboratory to write a “background memo” about the world’s first successful MHD power generator, in preparation for an important press conference. A “background memo” is an aid to media reporters, filling them in on the history, technical details, etc., of the story they are covering. My “backgrounder” appeared, virtually word for word, in Time magazine the week after the press conference.

  That bit of writing started an association with Avco Everett that lasted through 1971. I joined the staff of the lab and eventually founded and directed their marketing office. Actually, being director of marketing for such a high-powered research laboratory was rather like being the resident science fiction writer. The major difference was that when I succeeded in getting funding for such “science fiction” ideas as high-power lasers, artificial hearts, superconducting magnets, and so forth, the “science fiction” swiftly became hard engineering reality.

  The one real heartbreak we suffered was in the MHD generator project. As this article tells, MHD showed—and still shows—brilliant possibilities. But the technical successes of MHD have been buried beneath political and bureaucratic folderol.

  We do not have MHD-generated electrical power in the United States, and as a result you are paying approximately twice what you should for electricity. You are also paying for the environmental degradation of air and water pollution and acid rain.

  If nothing else, the MHD story is a cautionary tale of how politicians often stand in the way of progress.

  But there is one further aspect to the tale: MHD generators can be both compact enough and powerful enough to provide the electricity needed for orbiting energy weapons such as lasers. It may turn out, ironically, that MHD is “saved” in the United States by the Air Force and the Strategic Defense Initiative.

  That possibility also throws a different light on the Soviet efforts in MHD.

  Thirty-eight sturdy steel I-beams, painted bright blue, clamp the copper plates of the powerful electromagnet together. A jungle of pipes and wires snakes into one end, where the rocketlike combustion chamber stands.

  Taller than the technicians working through its final checkout, massive enough to generate more than thirty megawatts of electrical power, the Mark V is the biggest MHD power generator ever built. It looks so impressive, in fact, that a visiting Russian scientist surreptitiously took out a pocket knife and scratched it against one of the I-beams, wanting to make certain it was real and not a wooden mock-up built by the capitalists to hoodwink foreign visitors.

  In the control room, separated from the monstrous generator itself by more solid steel and a heavy shatterproof window, the engineers go through a countdown much like that for a rocket launch.

  The second hand of the clock on the wall sweeps inexorably. Once an explosion in a smaller generator started a fire so intense that the heat radiating through the window melted the instruments in the control room. No one was injured, but the roof was blown away by the blast.

  “Three … two … one … ignition!”

  A deafening roar erupts from the heart of the generator. You can feel it rattling your bones, flattening your eardrums.

  But everyone is smiling. The gauges along the control board climb steadily, showing that millions of watts of electricity are being produced by the Mark V: ten megawatts, twenty … more than thirty.

  The noise ends so abruptly that you feel like you’ve been pushed off a cliff. Your ears ring. The pointers on the gauges drop back to zero.

  The test has been a success. Slightly more than thirty-two megawatts. The Mark V MHD generator has operated just as the scientists predicted it would. Theory has been matched by experiment. MHD is almost ready to leave the laboratory and enter the practical world of electrical power generation.

  That scene took place more than twenty years ago, in Everett, Massachusetts, a few miles north of Boston.

  There, at the Avco Everett Research Laboratory, a spirited team of scientists and engineers were developing a new kind of electrical power generator, based on a technology with the jawbreaking name of magnetohydrodynamics. MHD, for short.

  I worked at Avco Everett from 1959 to 1971. I was there when the MHD program started, and I saw it founder and almost sink.

  A quarter century ago, the head of the Avco Everett lab was so confident of MHD that he bet an executive from the electric utilities industry that MHD would be producing electricity for utility customers by 1970. He lost that bet. As things stand now, MHD won’t start producing commercial electrical power until the mid-1990s—if then.

  MHD could have averted the acid rain problem that now plagues wide areas of the eastern United States and Canada. It would have allowed electric power plants to burn coal cleanly, using America’s most abundant fuel without producing the pollution fallout that is now stripping forests bare and killing aquatic life in lakes and streams.

  Studies have shown that MHD power generators can burn the dirtiest coal without polluting the air, and burn it so efficiently that they produce 50 percent more kilowatts per pound of fuel than ordinary generators. More kilowatts per dollar would mean lower electricity bills for the consumer.

  But MHD is no closer to realization today than it was twenty years ago. The story of MHD is a story of technological daring and political timidity, a story of failed hopes and lost opportunities.

  “It’s a tragic story,” says Arthur Kantrowitz. “It’s a story of frustration that’s been very painful to me.”

  Kantrowitz is universally acknowledged as the father of MHD power generation. Now a professor at Dartmouth College’s Thayer School of Engineering, Kantrowitz was the founder of Avco Everett and the driving force behind the MHD program in the 1960s. He is a dynamic, barrel-chested man who created one of the nation’s leading industrial research laboratories out of his own restless desire to do scientific research “that has an impact on the way people live.”

  MHD began in the bright promise of space-age research. In 1955 Kantrowitz left a professorship at Cornell University to found Avco Everett, bringing a handful of his brightest graduate students with him. The laboratory, originally housed in an abandoned warehouse, was created to solve the problems of reentry for ballistic missile “nose cones.” The Air Force desperately needed to know how to design reentry vehicles that would not burn to cinders when returning from space.

  Using shock tubes, Kantrowitz’s Avco Everett team simulated the conditions a reentry vehicle would have to face and within six months provided the data needed for engineers to design survivable reentry vehicles. Eventually another divisi
on of Avco Corporation built all the reentry heat shields for the Apollo lunar spacecraft.

  Using their newly won knowledge of the behavior of very hot gases, Kantrowitz and his young staff tackled the problem of MHD power generation.

  Power generators convert heat to electricity. In today’s electric utility power plants, this energy conversion is accomplished by turbogenerators. Heat is created either by burning a fossil fuel (oil, coal, or natural gas) or by the fissioning of atoms in a nuclear reactor. The heat boils water. The steam turns the blades of a turbine. The turbine is connected to a bundle of copper wires called an armature, which sits inside a powerful magnet. When the steam turns the turbine, and the turbine spins the armature within the magnetic field, an electric current is generated.

  Michael Faraday discovered the principles of electrical power generation in the 1830s, in Britain. Thomas Edison made it all practical some fifty years later, and electrified the world. Edison’s steam-turbine generators were about 40 percent efficient. The steam turbogenerators used today are no better.

  Instead of turbines and armatures, MHD employs the roaring ultra-hot exhaust gas of a powerful rocket engine, so rich in energy that it contains megawatts of potential electrical power in every cubic meter of its stream. By running such a gas through a pipe, with a powerful magnet around it and durable electrodes inside it, a steady current of electricity can be tapped from the hot gas. That is an MHD generator. A Saturn V rocket bellowing up from Cape Canaveral on its way to the Moon could have produced enough electricity, through MHD, to light the entire eastern seaboard for as long as its engines were burning.

  No moving parts. No turbines. The supersonically flowing hot gas is itself the “armature.” Efficiencies of 60 percent or more are attainable. More kilowatts per pound of fuel. More electricity per dollar.

  High temperature is the key to efficiency. Turbogenerators are limited to temperatures well below 1,000°F because the turbine blades cannot take more heat without breaking. In the rocketlike combustion chamber of an MHD generator, the fuel is burned either in pure oxygen or preheated air to raise the gas temperature to 5,000°F. A pinch of potassium “seeding” is added to the hot gas, because potassium ionizes easily at such temperatures and makes the gas an electrical conductor. Although thousands of times less conductive than copper, the ionized gas (physicists call it a plasma) conducts electricity well enough to become an effective armature.

  The high temperature in an MHD generator creates problems that ordinary generators do not face. The combustion chamber, the MHD channel, and especially the electrodes inside the channel, must be able to stand the rigors of a supersonic flow of 5,000°F plasma that is choked with soot and corrosive combustion products while megawatts of electricity are blazing within it.

  But those very conditions force the MHD system to be environmentally clean. Scrubbers in the smokestack downstream are economically necessary to recover the costly potassium seed so that it can be reused. They also take out the soot from the exhaust gas before it is released to the air. Thus the cost of soot removal is built into the original cost of the MHD power plant and is not an expensive add-on.

  Sulfur and nitrogen compounds that might cause smog and acid rain are removed from the hot gas by completely conventional equipment before they leave the MHD system. There is so much of these pollutants in the hot plasma stream that it becomes economically attractive to remove them and convert them into fertilizers, to be sold in the agricultural market. Again, the antipollution equipment is built into the MHD system for sound economic reasons. Nothing goes up the smokestack except warm carbon dioxide and a few impurities, well within the current clean-air standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency.

  The first working MHD generator was built in 1959 at Avco Everett. It produced ten kilowatts (ten thousand watts) for a few seconds. The laboratory’s parent, Avco Corporation, in conjunction with a group of electric utility companies, funded a fast-paced research and development effort under Kantrowitz’s direction.

  The program followed a two-pronged approach. Large MHD generators tested the ability to produce multimegawatts of power. Smaller generators tested the durability of the materials and components of an MHD generator over long time periods. By 1966 Avco’s Mark V had generated more than thirty-two megawatts, and smaller machines had been operated for hundreds of hours continuously.

  Kantrowitz and his team were ready, they believed, to build a demonstration power plant: an MHD generation station that would deliver some fifty megawatts of electricity and serve as a model for full-scale commercial power stations.

  The demonstration plant was never built. Although Kantrowitz was confident that his team was ready to build it, hardly anyone else was.

  The pilot plant would have cost $30 million in the mid-1960s. Avco and the electric utilities consortium were prepared to put up only $13 million. Kantrowitz and Philip Sporn, who headed the utilities group backing MHD, went to Washington and proposed to Stewart Udall, then Secretary of the Interior, a program funded fifty-fifty by the government and the Avco-utilities group.

  But two “terrible blows,” as Kantrowitz puts it, hit MHD and almost destroyed the program utterly.

  First, Sporn reached mandatory retirement age and was forced out of his powerful position at American Electric Power Company. He had been a major figure in the utility industry, a leader with the drive and vision to equal Kantrowitz’s own. The two men were well matched and made an effective team. Kantrowitz’s bet about having MHD “on-line” by 1970—a symbolic bet of one dollar—had been with Sporn. Once Sporn lost his power base and was no longer able to keep prodding his colleagues, the electric utilities began to lose interest in MHD.

  At about the same time, President Lyndon Johnson announced that cheap nuclear energy was at hand. “This wasn’t true,” Kantrowitz asserts, but with the White House pushing nuclear power, no one in Washington was willing to back an alternative such as coal-burning MHD.

  John T. Conway, a vice-president of New York’s Con Edison power company, was on the staff of the U.S. Congress Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in the mid-1960s.

  He does not see the MHD decision as being pronuclear at the expense of coal. “In fact, we were trying to make coal and nuclear developments a joint effort,” he says. “We knew that nuclear energy by itself needed nuclear and coal.”

  MHD lost out, according to Conway, for several reasons—none of them having anything to do with the technical performance of MHD generators.

  First, the coal industry itself was “terribly fragmented” by battles between labor and management. As a result, there was no unified position from the coal industry backing MHD as a user of the nation’s most abundant fuel.

  Second, according to Conway, “When you get to the big bucks that hardware requires, you reach a natural checkpoint.” The plans for an MHD demonstration plant were competing with requests for expensive new “atom-smashing” particle accelerators for high-energy physics experiments. The accelerators got the funding.

  Most important, though, was Sporn’s sudden departure. “Sporn was a hardheaded engineer,” Conway recalls, “like a Rickover.” Once the program lost his “drive and authority,” the decision-makers in Washington lost confidence in MHD.

  Princeton University’s Jonathan C. Coopersmith, in his 1978 analysis of the MHD programs in the United States and Soviet Russia, concluded:

  Exactly why the [MHD] project was not approved by the government is not clear. The enthusiasm for nuclear power … undoubtedly had a great deal to do with the lack of similar enthusiasm for coal in government circles. Funding constraints imposed by Johnson’s Great Society programs and the Vietnam War also had a negative impact … .

  As the sixties staggered to their end under the burden of Vietnam and civil unrest, there was a general decline in government support of research and development. Hardly anyone in Washington, or anywhere else in the nation, would back a new energy technology. The Yom Kippur War, the Arab oil embarg
o, and the energy crisis were less than five years away. Protests and demonstrations against nuclear power plants were already beginning; the Three Mile Island fiasco was ten years in the future.

  Because he was a corporate vice-president and member of the Avco board of directors, Kantrowitz could keep his MHD program inching along on corporate funds. But the kind of money needed to build the pilot plant could be found only in Washington. No private investors were willing to take the risk, and corporations that were already heavily involved in building conventional power generators saw no incentive in helping to develop competition for their existing products.

  Researchers at Westinghouse and General Electric maintained comparatively low-level efforts in MHD, and several universities such as Stanford and Tennessee carried on MHD studies.

  Kantrowitz and fellow Avco Corporation board member George Allen found a sympathetic ear in Clark Clifford, a longtime Washington “insider” who had served briefly as Johnson’s Secretary of Defense after Robert McNamara left the Cabinet.

  “We told him MHD would be good for the country,” Kantrowitz remembers, “but no private company could justify risking the money to develop it.”

  Clifford began “knocking on doors” in Washington. The only one that opened was that of Senator Mike Mansfield, Democrat from Montana and majority leader of the Senate. Montana is a state that is rich in coal but poor in water resources. MHD is an energy system that could burn Montana’s coal without using up its scarce water.

  “I don’t know how Mansfield reached the decision that he would grab on to it,” says Kantrowitz. “But he made the decision that he wanted MHD for Montana.”

  Suddenly the obscure Office of Coal Research, buried deep within the Department of the Interior, began funding MHD. The budget rose quickly from a few hundred thousand dollars to some $70 million per year by the mid-1970s.