Trek Legend's Fusion Dreams

Crackpot or misunderstood genius? Sometimes, it's hard to tell. Especially when you're talking about a combination of nuclear fusion, Star Trek, and the U.S. military. Defense News looks into Robert Bussard and his fusion machine, which has received, according to the article, a rather substantial $14 million from the Navy. As the story goes.....

*Bussard is not a household name, except possibly to "Star Trek" fans. In 1960, he developed — on paper — the Bussard ramjet, an engine designed to power space vehicles by collecting hydrogen atoms from the near-vacuum of space and feeding them into a fusion reactor. *His idea was the basis for the "Bussard collectors" that powered the fictional space ships in the 1960s television series "Star Trek." A decade later, Bussard served as assistant director of the Thermonuclear Reaction Division of the now defunct U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. He also worked for U.S. government nuclear laboratories at Los Alamos, N.M., and Oak Ridge, Tenn., and for TRW Systems Along the way, Bussard founded his own small company, Energy Matter Conversion Corp. — EMC2 — to pursue research into fusion.Bussard aims to use fusion to produce cheap, inexhaustible, clean energy. Unlike other forms of nuclear energy, including other methods of fusion, Bussard's process does not produce radioactivity.

Fascinating, right? The troubling part of this story is that it follows a stock -- and not always believable -- narrative: Inventor has great invention, greedy establishment scientists hate great invention (and/or inventor) and want to quash it, fearless inventor battles odds and gets money from true believers (often in the Navy for some weird reason). Years go by, millions are spent. Inventor, having not saved the world, loses funding, which he attributes to enemies subverting him. World is screwed.

Moreover, claims that if we don't invest in his fusion machine, the Chinese will get it first, are straight out of the stupid weapons index.

On the other hand, fusion is all the rage of late. The DANGER ROOM noted recently that bubble fusion is back in the news, and cold fusion, albeit still groping for respectability, is holding a session today at the American Physical Society's meeting in Denver. In the meantime, sonofusion has become so mainstream that the New York Times is now covering it.

Bussard, who is almost 80, has been working on his idea for years and boasts a career in mainstream science. You can watch his Google Tech Talk here and Defense News explains Bussard's fusion idea this way:> *The process Bussard hopes to perfect would use boron-11, the most common form of the element. Bussard says his experiments — which achieved fusion with deuterium, not boron — in

November 2005 proved that the boron process will work. The boron reactor would be similar to, but more powerful than, the reactor that blew up in 2005.**Bussard's reactor design is built upon six shiny metal rings joined to form a cube — one ring per side. Each ring, about a yard in diameter, contain copper wires wound into an electromagnet.

The reactor operates inside a vacuum chamber. When energized, the cube of electromagnets creates a magnetic sphere into which electrons are injected. The magnetic field squeezes the electrons into a dense ball at the reactor's core, creating a highly negatively charged area.
To begin the reaction, boron-11 nuclei and protons are injected into the cube. Because of their positive charge, they accelerate to the center of the electron ball. Most of them sail through the center of the core and on toward the opposite side of the reactor. But the negative charge of the electron ball pulls them back to the center. The process repeats, perhaps thousands of times, until the boron nucleus and a proton collide with enough force to fuse.**
That fusion turns boron-11 into highly energetic carbon-12, which promptly splits into a helium nucleus and a beryllium nucleus. The beryllium then splits into two more helium nuclei.**
The result is "three helium nuclei, each having almost three million electron volts of energy," according to
Gay, who has written a paper explaining Bussard's research in layman's terms.**
The force of splitting flings the helium nuclei out from the center of the reactor toward an electrical grid, where their energy would force electrons to flow — electricity.*This direct conversion process is extraordinarily efficient. About 95 percent of the fission energy is turned into electricity, Gay said.

But alas, like many of these inventors, Bussard is just a few million taxpayer dollars shy of proving his idea to the world. He's looking for private investors, too. Is Bussard's fusion reactor going to prove the naysayers wrong? This is what one nuclear physicist wrote when I asked about the idea: "Do I believe it works?
No. Could it be the germ of something important? Yes. Should one fund it? Good question." That is a good question, indeed. Because although Bussard may not save us from the energy crisis, I also believe that the Energy Department wouldn't know the meaning of the word
"risk" if a dictionary dropped on its head. Then again, I'm also not convinced that a Navy supporter, who, as the article quotes, is "not an expert" in fusion, is really the best person to judge Bussard's work either.One proposal that makes some sense is to create an office within the Energy Department that mimics what DARPA does (or at least should be doing) for the military: taking high risks grounded in real science.-- Sharon Weinberger