Category: Nuclear weapons

Comments on Some Comments on the National Ignition Facility

We live in a dauntingly complex world.  Progress in the world of science is relevant to all of us, yet it is extremely difficult, although certainly not impossible, for the intelligent layperson to gain a useful understanding of what is actually going on.  I say “not impossible” because I believe it’s possible for non-experts to gain enough knowledge to usefully contribute to the conversation about the technological and social relevance of a given scientific specialty, if not of its abstruse details, assuming they are willing to put in the effort.  Indeed, when it comes to social relevance it’s not out of the question for them to become more knowledgeable than the scientists themselves, narrowly focused as they often are on a particular specialty.

To illustrate my point, I invite my readers to take a look at a post that recently appeared on the blog LLNL – The True Story.  LLNL, or Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is one of the nation’s three major nuclear weapons research laboratories.  It is also home of the National Ignition Facility, which, as its name implies, was designed to achieve fusion “ignition” by focusing a giant assembly of 192 powerful laser beams on tiny targets containing a mixture of deuterium and tritium fuel.  The process itself is called inertial confinement fusion, or ICF.  Ignition is variously defined, but as far as the NIF is concerned LLNL officially accepted the definition as fusion energy out equal to total laser energy in, in the presence of members of a National Academy of Sciences oversight committee.  This is a definition that puts it on a level playing field with the competing magnetic confinement approach to fusion.

According to the blurb that appears on the home page of LLNL – The True Story, its purpose is “for LLNL present and past employees, friends of LLNL and anyone impacted by the privatization of the Lab to express their opinions and expose the waste, wrongdoing and any kind of injustice against employees and taxpayers by LLNS/DOE/NNSA.”  The post in question is entitled ICF Program is now Officially Owned by WCI (Weapons and Concepts Integration).  It’s certainly harmless enough as it stands, consisting only of the line,

ICF program is now officially owned by WCI.  A step forward or an attempt to bury it out of sight?

This is followed by an apparently broken link to the story referred to.  This gist can probably be found here.  Presumably the author suspects LLNL might want to “bury it out of sight” because the first attempt to achieve ignition, known as the National Ignition Campaign, or NIC, failed to achieve its goal.  What’s really of interest is not the post itself, but the comments following it.  The commenters are all listed as “anonymous,” but given the nature of the blog we can probably assume that most of them are scientists of one tribe or another.  Let’s take a look at what they have to say.  According to the first “anonymous,”

If (takeover of NIF by WCI) is an attempt to keep funding flowing by switching milestones from energy independence to weapons research.  “Contingency Plan B”.

Another “anonymous” writes in a similar vein:

Reading between the lines it is clear that the new energy source mission of the NIF is over and now it’s time to justify the unjustifiable costs by claiming it’s a great too for weapons research.

Perhaps the second commenter would have done better to read the lines as they stand rather than between them.  In that case he would have noticed that energy independence was never an official NIF milestone, not to mention its “mission.”  NIF was funded for the purpose of weapons research from the start.  This fact was never in any way a deep, dark secret, and has long been obvious to anyone willing to take the trouble to consult the relevant publicly accessible documents.  The Inertial Confinement Fusion Advisory Committee, a Federal Advisory Committee that met intermittently in the early to mid-90’s, and whose member included a bevy of heavyweights in plasma physics and related specialties, was certainly aware of the fact, and recommended funding of the facility with the single dissenting vote of Tim Coffey, then Director of the Naval Research Laboratory, based on that awareness.

Be that as it may, the claim that the technology could also end our dependence on fossil fuel, often made by the NIF’s defenders, is credible.  By “credible” I mean that many highly capable scientists have long held and continue to hold that opinion.  As it happens, I don’t.  Assuming we find a way to achieve ignition and high gain in the laboratory, it will certainly become scientifically feasible to generate energy with ICF power plants.  However, IMHO it will never be economically feasible, for reasons I have outline in earlier posts.  Regardless, from a public relations standpoint, it was obviously preferable to evoke the potential of the NIF as a clean source of energy rather than a weapons project designed to maintain the safety and reliability of our nuclear arsenal, as essential as that capability may actually be.  In spite of my own personal opinion on the subject, these claims were neither disingenuous nor mere “hype.”

Another “anonymous” writes,

What’s this user facility bullshit about?  Only Livermore uses the facility.  Cost recovery demands that a university would have to pay $1 million for a shot.  How can it be a user facility if it’s run by the weapons program?  This isn’t exactly SLAC we’re talking about.

Here, again, the commenter is simply wrong.  Livermore is not the only user of NIF, and it is, in fact, a user facility.  Users to date include a team from MIT headed by Prof. Richard Petrasso.  I’m not sure how the users are currently funded, but in the past funds for experiments on similar facilities were allocated through a proposal process, similar to that used to fund other government-funded academic research.  The commenter continues,

By the way, let’s assume NIF wants to be a “user facility” for stockpile stewardship.  Since ignition is impossible, the EOS (Equation of State, relevant to the physics of nuclear weapons, ed.) work is garbage, and the temperatures are not relevant to anything that goes bang, what use is this machine?

NIF does not “want to be a user facility for stockpile stewardship.”  Stress has always been on high energy density physics (HEDP), which has many other potential applications besides stockpile stewardship.  I was not surprised that NIF did not achieve ignition immediately.  In fact I predicted as much in a post on this blog two years before the facility became operational.  However, many highly competent scientists disagreed with me, and for credible scientific reasons.  The idea that ignition is “impossible” just because it wasn’t achieved in the first ignition campaign using the indirect drive approach is nonsense.  Several other credible approaches have not yet even been tried, including polar direct drive, fast ignitor, and hitting the targets with green (frequency doubled) rather than blue (frequency tripled) light.  The latter approach would enable a substantial increase in the available laser energy on target.  The EOS work is not garbage, as any competent weapons designer will confirm as long as they are not determined to force the resumption of nuclear testing by hook or by crook, and some of the best scientists at Livermore confirmed long ago that the temperatures  achievable on the NIF are indeed relevant to things that go bang, whether it achieves ignition or not.  In fact, the facility allows us to access physical conditions that can be approached in the laboratory nowhere else on earth, giving us a significant leg up over the international competition in maintaining a safe and reliable arsenal, as long as testing is not resumed.

Anonymous number 4 chimes in,

I love this quote (apparently from the linked article, ed.):

“the demonstration of laboratory ignition and its use to support the Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP) is a major goal for this program”

Hey guys, this has already failed.  Why are we still spending money on this?  A lot of other laboratories could use the $$.  You’re done.

The quote this “anonymous” loves is a simple statement of fact.  For the reasons already cited, the idea that ignition on the NIF is hopeless is nonsense.  The (very good) reason we’re still spending money on the project is that NIF is and will continue into the foreseeable future to be one of the most capable and effective above ground experimental (AGEX) facilities in the world.  It can access physical conditions relevant to nuclear weapons regardless of whether it achieves ignition or not.  For that reason it is an invaluable tool for maintaining our arsenal unless one’s agenda happens to be the resumption of nuclear testing.  Hint:  The idea that no one in DOE, NNSA, or the national weapons laboratories wants to resume testing belongs in the realm of fantasy.  Consider, for example, what the next “anonymous” is actually suggesting:

Attempting to get funding for NIF and computations’s big machines was made easier by claiming dual purposes but I always felt that the real down and dirty main purpose was weapons research.  If you want to get support from the anti-weapon Feinstein/Boxer/Pelosi contingent you need to put the “energy” lipstick on the pig.  Or we could go back to testing.  Our cessation of testing doesn’t seem to have deterred North Korea and Iran that much.

Yes, Virginia, even scientists occasionally do have agendas of their own.  What can I say?  To begin, I suppose, that one should never be intimidated by the pontifications of scientists.  The specimens on display here clearly don’t have a clue what they’re talking about.  Any non-technical observer of middling intelligence could become more knowledgeable than they are on the topics they’re discussing by devoting a few hours to researching them on the web.  As to how the non-technical observer is to acquire enough knowledge to actually know that he knows more than the scientific specialists, I can offer no advice, other than to head to your local university and acquire a Ph.D.  I am, BTW, neither employed by nor connected in any other way with LLNL.

 

Latest from the National Ignition Facility: More Neutrons, Less Hope

A paper with some recent ignition experiment results from the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California just turned up at Physical Review Letters.  The good news is that they’re seeing more of the neutrons that are released in fusion reactions than ever before, and the yield is in good agreement with computer code predictions.  The bad news is that they improved things by doing something that’s supposed to make things worse.  Specifically, they increasing the energy in the laser “foot” pulse that’s supposed to get the target implosion started.

The NIF was designed to achieve ignition via inertial confinement fusion (ICF), a process in which the fuel material is compressed and heated to fusion conditions so quickly that its own inertia holds it in place long enough for significant fusion to occur.  Scientists at LLNL  are currently using “indirect drive” in their experiments.  In other words, instead of hitting the BB-sized target directly, they mount it inside of a tiny, cylindrical can, or “hohlraum,” with holes at each end for the laser beams to pass through.  When the beams hit the inside of the hohlraum, they produce a powerful pulse of x-rays, which then hit the target, imploding it to extremely high density.  It’s harder to squeeze and implode hot objects than cold ones, so the laser beams are tailored to keep the target as “cold” as possible during the implosion process.  However, the fuel material must be very hot for fusion to occur.  According to theory, this can be achieved by launching a series of shocks into the imploding target, which must converge in the center at the moment of greatest compression, creating a central “hot spot.”  When fusion reactions start in the hot spot, they produce highly energetic helium atom nuclei (alpha particles), which then slam into the surrounding, still cold, fuel material, heating it to fusion conditions, producing more alpha particles, resulting in an alpha-driven “burn wave,” which moves out through the target, consuming the fuel.

So far, it hasn’t worked.  Apparently, hydrodynamic instabilities, such as the Rayleigh-Taylor and Richtmyer-Meshkov instabilities, are a big part of the problem.  They amplify tiny target surface imperfections during the implosion process, destroying the symmetry of the implosion, and quenching the fusion process.  There are some interesting simulations of the Rayleigh-Taylor instability on Youtube.  In the latest experiments, the LLNL team managed to control the growth of instabilities by using a bigger target “aspect ratio,” that is, increasing the thickness of the outer shell compared to the target radius, and driving it by dumping more energy into the “foot” pulse.  As a result, they drove the implosion process along a higher “adiabat,” which basically means that the fuel was hotter during the implosion.  Of course, absent instabilities, making the fuel hotter during the implosion is exactly what you don’t want to do.  In spite of that, LLNL is seeing more neutrons.

What this all boils down to is that LLNL has confirmed that the NIF has a big, potentially fatal problem with hydrodynamic instabilities using the current indirect drive approach to fusion ignition.  That doesn’t mean the situation is hopeless.  There are other approaches.  Examples include direct drive, in which the laser beams are aimed directly at the target, and fast ignitor, in which the cold, compressed fuel material is ignited on the outside, by another laser beam designed specifically for that purpose, rather than in a central “hot spot.”  In fact, the biggest potential problem here is probably more political than scientific.  You certainly have to get ignition if you plan to use inertial fusion as a source of energy, but, in spite of occasional hype to the contrary, the NIF was never intended as an energy project.  It was funded to support the weapons program in general, and to insure the continuing safety and reliability of the weapons in our arsenal in the absence of nuclear testing in particular.  It can do that extremely well, whether we get ignition or not.  The politicians whose support is needed to fund continued operation of the project need to realize that.

Regardless of whether it achieves ignition or not, the NIF is performing as well as or better than its design specs called for.  The symmetry and synchronization of its 192 laser beams is outstanding, and it has a remarkable and highly capable suite of diagnostics for recording what happens during the experiments.  The NIF can dump so much energy in a small space in a short time that it can generate physical conditions that can be reproduced in the laboratory no where else on earth.  Those conditions approach those that occur inside of an exploding nuclear device.  As a result, such experimental facilities give us a major leg up on the competition as long as there is no resumption of nuclear testing.  In other words, with the NIF and facilities like it we have a strong, positive incentive not to resume testing, potentially losing our advantage.  Without such facilities, the pressure to resume testing may become irresistible.  It’s really an easy choice.

The simulation of the Rayleigh-Taylor instability below was done by Frederik Brasz.

Fusion: The Moving of the Goalposts

An article about fusion just appeared on the Livescience website promisingly entitled “Fusion Experiments Inch Closer to Break-Even Goal” that is unexceptionable hype except for one little detail; the goalpost for fusion ignition has been moved.  It hasn’t been nudged.  It hasn’t been tweaked.  It has been torn up by the roots, carried down the road a few miles, and planted in an entirely new place that bears no resemblance to the original goal.  The article in question is about fusion experiments at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL’s ) National Ignition Facility, usually referred to by its acronym, as the NIF.  The goalpost is that which applies to inertial confinement fusion (ICF), which is the flavor being pursued at LLNL.  The other mainstream approach is magnetic fusion, which will be implemented at the ITER facility currently under construction in France.  Here’s the money quote from the article:

That got the NIF closer to the “scientific break-even point,” where the amount of energy that comes out of the fusion reaction is equal to that which was put in by the kinetic energy from the implosion. (The energy from the laser isn’t counted in the calculation). Right now, the amount of energy coming out of the NIF setup is about 80 percent of what is put in.

“NIF is built to ignite a fusion pellet,” said Stewart Prager, director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. “They didn’t get it by the time they originally stated, but they are making progress.” The NIF was built in 2008; its original mandate was to achieve ignition — the break-even point — in 2012.

What’s wrong with this picture?  LLNL explicitly agreed that “ignition” would occur at the point where fusion energy out equals laser energy in.  They did so before a committee of prestigious scientists appointed by the National Academy of Sciences’ National Research Council to review the nation’s ICF program.  It was entirely fitting and proper that they should do so, because that definition puts them on a level playing field with magnetic fusion.  It’s not as if this is a minor point.  After all, the very name of the facility in question is the National Ignition Facility.  Now, suddenly, “ignition” is being redefined as “fusion energy out equals kinetic energy of the implosion put in!”

Why is this happening?  Because, in spite of recent encouraging progress, the NIF is still a long way from achieving real ignition.  Politicians are griping because the ignition they were promised hasn’t happened, and there have been dark mutterings about defunding the project.  In other words, the NIF’s survival is at stake.  I can see the problem.  What I can’t see is that gross scientific dishonesty is the answer to the problem.  For that strategy to succeed, it is necessary for virtually all the members of Congress to be fools.  Although that is certainly a common assumption, it is not necessarily true.  There are actually a few scientists in Congress, and I doubt that all of them can be hoodwinked into swallowing this latest redefinition of ignition.

What to do?  Try telling it like it is.  The NIF hasn’t achieved ignition, and maybe it never will.  In spite of that, it remains the finest facility of its kind in the world for accomplishing the mission it was actually funded for; insuring the safety and reliability of our nuclear arsenal.  No facility outside the United States can approach so closely the physical conditions that occur in nuclear explosions.  No other facility is so precise, or has such a fine suite of diagnostics.  The NIF gives us a huge leg up in maintaining our arsenal and avoiding technological surprise as long as nuclear testing is not resumed.  As long as we have such facilities and the rest of the world doesn’t, it would be dumb for us to even think about resuming testing.  It would be throwing away a massive advantage.  Think none of our weaponeers wants to resume testing?  Think again!  The NIF and facilities like it are the best argument against them.  Try pointing that out to Congress.  I suspect it would work better than these ham-handed attempts to move the goalposts.

Accelerator-Driven Thorium Reactors, or An Easy Way to Eliminate Surplus Population

The Daily Telegraph has just taken thorium wowserism to a whole new level.  According to the title of an article penned by International Business Editor Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium.  Continuing in the same vein, the byline assures us that,

If Barack Obama were to marshal America’s vast scientific and strategic resources behind a new Manhattan Project, he might reasonably hope to reinvent the global energy landscape and sketch an end to our dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years.

And how is this prodigious feat to be accomplished?  Via none other than Nobel laureate Dr. Carlo Rubbia’s  really bad idea for building accelerator-driven thorium reactors.  It would seem that Dr. Rubbia has assured the credulous Telegraph editor that, “a tonne of the silvery metal produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium.”  This egregious whopper is based on nothing more complicated than a comparison of apples and oranges.  Thorium by itself cannot power a nuclear reactor.  It must first be converted into the isotope uranium 233 via absorption of a neutron.  Natural uranium, on the other hand, can be used directly in reactors, because 0.7 percent of it consists of the fissile isotope uranium 235.  In other words, Rubbia is comparing the energy potential of thorium after it has been converted to U233 with the energy potential of only the U235 in natural uranium.  The obvious objection to this absurd comparison is that the rest of natural uranium is made up mostly of the isotope U238, which can also absorb a neutron to produce plutonium 239, which, like U233, can power nuclear reactors.  In other words, if we compare apples to apples, that is, thorium after it has been converted to U233 with U238 after it has been converted to Pu239, the potential energy content of thorium and uranium is about equal.

As it happens, the really bad news in the Telegraph article is that,

The Norwegian group Aker Solutions has bought Dr. Rubbia’s patent for an accelerator-driven sub-critical reactor, and is working on his design for a thorium version at its UK operation.

In fact, Aker has already completed a conceptual design for a power plant.  According to Aker project manager Victoria Ashley, the group needs a paltry $3 million, give or take, to build the first one, and another $150 million for the test phase to follow.  Why is that disturbing news?  Because the U233 produced in these wonderful new reactors will be ideal for producing nuclear weapons.

In fact, it will be even better than the “traditional” bomb materials; highly enriched uranium (HEU) and weapons grade plutonium.  The explosion of a nuclear device is produced by assembling a highly supercritical mass of fissile material, and then introducing a source of neutrons at just the right moment, setting off a runaway chain reaction.  The problem with plutonium is that it has the bad habit of occasionally fissioning spontaneously.  This releases neutrons.  If such a stray neutron were to happen along just as the bomb material became critical, it would set off a premature chain reaction, causing the device to “fizzle.”  As a result, plutonium weapons must rely on a complicated implosion process to achieve supercriticality before the stray neutrons can do their dirty work.  Implosion weapons are much more technologically challenging to build than the gun-assembled types that can be used with HEU.  In these, one subcritical mass is simply shot into another.  However, the required mass of HEU is much larger than the amount of plutonium needed in an implosion-assembled weapon.  As it happens, the amount of U233 sufficient to build a nuclear device is about the same as the amount of plutonium, but spontaneous fission is not a problem in U233.  In other words, it combines the plutonium advantage of requiring a much smaller amount of material, and the HEU advantage of being usable in gun-assembled weapons.

Why, then, you might ask, are we even giving Rubbia’s idea a second thought?  Because of people like Professor Egil Lillestol, who, Evans-Pritchard helpfully informs us, is “a world authority on the thorium fuel cycle at CERN.”  According to Lillestol,

It is almost impossible to make nuclear weapons out of thorium because it is too difficult to handle.  It wouldn’t be worth trying.

Rubbia has made similar statements, based on the same “logic.”  The rationalization for the claim that U233 is “too difficult to handle” is the supposed presence of U232, an isotope of uranium with a half-life of about 69 years, one of whose daughters (elements in its decay chain) emits a highly energetic and penetrating, and hence deadly, gamma ray.  In fact, avoiding the production of U232 in accelerator-driven reactors would be a piece of cake.  Rubbia and Lillestol must know this, making it all the more incomprehensible that they dare to foist such whoppers on unsuspecting newspaper editors.

Only one neutron absorption is needed for the production of U233 from naturally occurring Th232.  Two are needed to produce U232.  Thus, one way to keep the level of U232 within manageable levels is to simply extract the U233 before much U232 has a chance to form.  However, there’s an even easier way.  Very energetic neutrons, with energies above a threshold of around 6 million electron volts, are necessary to produce U232.  Not many fission neutrons have that much energy, and slowing down the ones that do is simple.  Simply pass them through a “moderator” rich in hydrogen or some other light element.  Think of billiard balls.  If one of them going at a good clip hits another dead on, it stops, imparting its energy to the second ball.  Neutrons and the proton nuclei of hydrogen atoms have nearly the same mass, so the same thing can happen when they collide.  A fast neutron will typically lose a large fraction of its energy in such a collision.  In other words, the “secret” of avoiding the production of dangerous levels of U232 is as simple as passing the neutrons through a layer of hydrogen-rich material such as paraffin before allowing them to interact with the thorium.  All this should hardly come as a surprise to people like Rubbia and Lillestol.  It’s been old hat in the literature for a long time.  For a more detailed treatment, see, for example, U-232 and the Proliferation-Resistance of U-233 in Spent Fuel, a paper that appeared in the journal Science and Global Security back in 2001.

In other words, the idea that “it is almost impossible to make nuclear weapons out of thorium” is a pipe dream.  That does not necessarily mean that thorium technology should be rejected root and branch.  It will always be necessary to exercise extreme care to insure that U233 isn’t diverted for illicit purposes.  However, managing the risk will be considerably easier in “conventional” thorium breeders, which rely on assembling a critical mass to supply the necessary source of neutrons.  Such reactors have already been built and successfully operated for years.  The U233 they produce will always be mixed with highly radioactive fission products, and can also be “denatured” by mixing it with U238, from which it cannot be separated using simple chemistry.  Such reactors would produce few of the transuranic actinides that are the main culprits in nuclear waste, potentially requiring it to be stored securely for millennia.  They could also consume the actinides produced in the current generation of reactors, so that the remaining waste could potentially become less radioactive than the original uranium ore in a few hundred years, instead of many thousands.

If, on the other hand, the accelerators necessary to provide the neutron source for Dr. Rubbia’s subcritical facilities were to become readily available, they would be much easier to hide than conventional reactors, could be configured to produce U233 with almost no U232 contamination, and with much less radioactive fission product contamination.  In other words, they would constitute an unacceptable risk for the proliferation of nuclear weapons.  One must hope that the world will wake up in time to recognize the threat.

Fusion Update: The NIF Inches Closer to Ignition

In a recent press release, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) announced that it had achieved a yield of 3 x 1015 neutrons in the latest round of experiments at its National Ignition Facility, a giant, 192-beam laser facility designed, as its name implies, to achieve fusion ignition.  That’s nowhere near “ignition,” but still encouraging as it’s three times better than results achieved in earlier experiments.

The easiest way to achieve fusion is with two heavy isotopes of hydrogen; deuterium, with a nucleus containing one proton and one neutron, and tritium, with a nucleus containing one proton and two neutrons.  Deuterium is not radioactive, and occurs naturally as about one atom to every 6400 atoms of “normal” hydrogen, with a nucleus containing only a single proton.  Tritium is radioactive, and occurs naturally only in tiny trace amounts.  It has a half-life (the time it takes for half of a given amount to undergo radioactive decay) of 12.3 years, and must be produced artificially.  When tritium and deuterium fuse, they release a neutron, a helium nucleus, or alpha particle, and lots of energy (17.6 million electron volts).

Fortunately (because otherwise it would be too easy to blow up the planet), or unfortunately (if you want to convert the energy into electricity), fusion is hard.  The two atoms don’t like to get too close, because their positively charged nuclei repel each other.  Somehow, a way must be found to make the heavy hydrogen fuel material very hot, causing the thermal motion of the atoms to become very large.  Once they start moving fast enough, they can smash into each other with enough momentum to overcome the repulsion of the positive nuclei, allowing them to fuse.  However, the amount of energy needed per atom is huge, and when atoms get that hot, the last thing they want to do is stay close to each other (think of what happens in the detonation of high explosive.)  There are two mainstream approaches to solving this problem; magnetic fusion, in which the atoms are held in place by powerful magnetic fields while they are heated (the approach being pursued at ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, currently under construction in France), and inertial confinement fusion (ICF), where the idea is to dump energy into the fuel material so fast that its own inertia holds it in place long enough for fusion to occur.  The NIF is an ICF facility.

There are various definitions of ICF “ignition,” but, in order to avoid comparisons of apples and oranges between ICF and magnetic fusion experiments, LLNL has explicitly accepted the point at which the fusion energy out equals the laser energy in as the definition of ignition.  In the experiment referred to above, the total fusion energy release was about 10,000 joules, give or take.  Since the laser energy in was around 1.7 million joules, that’s only a little over one half of one percent of what’s needed for ignition.  Paltry, you say?  Not really.  To understand why, you have to know a little about how ICF experiments work.

Recall that the idea is to heat the fuel material up so fast that its own inertia holds it in place long enough for fusion to occur.  The “obvious” way to do that would be to simply dump in enough laser energy to heat all the fuel material to fusion temperatures at once.  Unfortunately, this “volumetric heating” approach wouldn’t work.  The energy required would be orders of magnitude more than what’s available on the NIF.  What to do?   Apply lots and lots of finesse.  It turns out that if a very small volume or “hot spot” in the fuel material can be brought to fusion conditions, the alpha particles released in the fusion reactions might carry enough energy to heat up the nearby fuel to fusion conditions as well.  Ideally, the result would be an alpha “burn wave,” moving out through the fuel, and consuming it all.  But wait, it ain’t that easy!  An efficient burn wave will occur only if the alphas are slammed to a stop and forced to dump their energy after traveling only a very short distance in the cold fuel material around the hot spot.  Their range is too large unless the fuel is first compressed to a tiny fraction of its original volume, causing its density to increase by orders of magnitude.

In other words, to get the fuel to fuse, we need to make it very hot, but we also need to compress it to very high density, which can be done much more easily and efficiently if the material is cold!  Somehow, we need to keep the fuel “cold” during the compression process, and then, just at the right moment, suddenly heat up a small volume to fusion conditions.  It turns out that shocks are the answer to the problem.  If a train of four shocks can be set off in the fuel material as it is being compressed, or “imploded,” by the lasers, precisely timed so that they will all converge at just the right moment, it should be possible, in theory at least, to generate a hot spot.  If the nice, spherical symmetry of the fuel target could be maintained during the implosion process, everything should work just fine.  The NIF would have more than enough energy to achieve ignition.  But there’s the rub. Maintaining the necessary symmetry has turned out to be inordinately hard.  Tiny imperfections in the target surface finish, small asymmetries in the laser beams, etc., lead to big deviations from perfect symmetry in the dense, imploded fuel.  These asymmetries have been the main reason the NIF has not been able to achieve its ignition goal to date.

And that’s why the results of the latest round of experiments haven’t been as “paltry” as they seem.  As noted in the LLNL press release,

Early calculations show that fusion reactions in the hot plasma started to self-heat the burning core and enhanced the yield by nearly 50 percent, pushing close to the margins of alpha burn, where the fusion reactions dominate the process.

“The yield was significantly greater than the energy deposited in the hot spot by the implosion,” said Ed Moses, principle associate director for NIF and Photon Science. “This represents an important advance in establishing a self-sustaining burning target, the next critical step on the path to fusion ignition on NIF.”

That’s not just hype.  If the self-heating can be increased in future experiments, it may be possible to reach a threshold at which the alpha heating sets off a burn wave through the rest of the cold fuel, as described above.  In other words, ignition is hardly a given, but the guys at LLNL still have a fighting chance.  Their main challenge may be to stem the gradual evaporation of political support for NIF while the experiments are underway.  Their own Senator, Diane Feinstein, is anything but an avid supporter.  She recently turned down appeals to halt NIF budget cuts, and says the project needs to be “reassessed” in light of the failure to achieve ignition.

Such a “reassessment” would be a big mistake.  The NIF was never funded as an energy project.  Its support comes from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), a semi-autonomous arm of the Department of Energy charged with maintaining the safety and reliability of the nation’s nuclear arsenal.  As a tool for achieving that end, the NIF is without peer in any other country.  It has delivered on all of its performance design goals, including laser energy, illumination symmetry, shot rate, the precision and accuracy of its diagnostic instrumentation, etc.  The facility is of exceptional value to the weapons program even if ignition is never achieved.  It can still generate experimental conditions approaching those present in an exploding nuclear device, and, along with the rest of our suite of “above-ground experimental facilities,” or AGEX, it gives us a major leg up over the competition in maintaining our arsenal and avoiding technological surprise in the post-testing era.

Why is that important?  Because the alternative is a return to nuclear testing.  Do you think no one at NNSA wants to return to testing, and that the weapon designers at the National Weapons Laboratories wouldn’t jump at the chance?  If so, you’re dreaming.  It seems to me we should be doing our best to keep the nuclear genie in the bottle, not let it out.  Mothballing the NIF would be an excellent start at pulling the cork!

I understand why the guys at LLNL are hyping the NIF’s potential as a source of energy.  It’s a lot easier to generate political support for lots of electricity with very little radioactive waste and no greenhouse gases than for maintaining our aging arsenal of nuclear weapons.  However, IMHO, ICF is hopeless as a source of electricity, at least for the next few hundred years.  I know many excellent scientists will disagree, but many excellent scientists are also prone to extreme wishful thinking when it comes to rationalizing a technology they’ve devoted their careers to.  Regardless, energy hype isn’t needed to justify the NIF.  It and facilities like it will insure our technological superiority over potential nuclear rivals for years to come, and at the same time provide a potent argument against the resumption of nuclear testing.

More Plutonium Horror Stories in Germany

Germany is plagued by an unusually large number per capita of pathologically pious zealots of the type who like to strike heroic poses as saviors of humanity.  The number may even approach the levels found in the USA.  They definitely take the cake when it comes to the subspecies of the tribe whose tastes run to nuclear alarmism.  They came out of the woodwork in droves the last time an attempt was made to move radioactive waste via rail to the storage facility in Gorleben, tearing up the tracks, peacefully smearing a police vehicle with tar and setting it on fire, and generally making a nuisance of themselves.  Now, in keeping with that tradition, an article just appeared in the German version of New Scientist, according to which those evil Americans are actually planning to restart the production of (shudder) plutonium.

Entitled The Return of Plutonium and written by one Helmut Broeg, the article assumes a remarkable level of stupidity on the part of its readers.  Mimicking Der Spiegel, Germany’s number one news magazine, its byline is more sensational than the article that follows, based on the (probably accurate) assumption that that’s as far as most consumers of online content will read. Here’s the translation:

The USA stopped producing plutonium 25 years ago.  In order to preserve the ability to launch deep space missions, they will resume the production of the highly poisonous and radioactive material.

Only in the body of the article do we learn that the particular isotope that will be produced is plutonium 238, which, unlike plutonium 239, is useless for making nuclear explosives.  As it happens, Pu-238 is the ideal material for powering thermoelectric generators such as that used on the Curiosity Mars rover because it decays primarily via emission of alpha particles (helium nuclei) and has a half life of 87.7 years.  That means that its decay products are mostly stopped in the material itself, generating a lot of heat in the process (because of the short half life, or time it take half of the material to decay), which can be converted to electricity using devices with no moving parts.  The world supply of the material is currently very short, and more is urgently needed to power future deep space missions.

All this is very sinister, according to Broeg.  He quotes Heinz Smital, who, we are informed, is an “atomic expert” at Greenpeace, that, “the crash of such a satellite could contaminate large areas with radioactivity.  Don’t look now, Mr. Smital, but if you’re really worried about radioactive contamination by alpha emitters like Pu-238, you might want to reconsider building all the coal plants that Germany is currently planning to replace the nuclear facilities it has decided to shut down.  Coal typically contains several parts per million of radioactive uranium and thorium.    A good-sized plant will release 5 tons of uranium and 10 tons of thorium into the environment each year.  Estimated releases in 1982  from worldwide combustion of 2800 million tons of coal totaled 3640 tons of uranium (containing 51,700 pounds of uranium-235) and 8960 tons of thorium.  That amount has gone up considerably in the intervening years.  The cumulative radiation now covering the earth from these sources dwarfs anything that might conceivably result from the crash of a rocket with a Pu-238 power source, no matter what implausible assumptions one chose to make about how its containment would fail, how it would somehow enter the atmosphere at hypersonic speed so as to (optimize) its dispersion, etc.  Of course, the radioactive isotopes released from burning coal will also be with us for billions of years, not just the few hundred it takes for Pu-238 to decay.

But wait!  Dispersal of Pu-238 isn’t the only problem.  There’s also (drum roll) the BOMB!  Broeg drags in another “expert,” Moritz Kütt, a physicist at the Technical University of Darmstadt, who assures us that, “In the production of Pu-238, some Pu-239 is produced as well.  As a matter of principle, that means the US is resuming the production of weapons-useful material.”  Kütt goes on to ask what the world community would have to say if Iran announced that it would produce Pu-238 for a space mission?

To appreciate the level of gullibility it takes to swallow such “warnings,” one must spend a few minutes to check on how Pu-238 is actually produced.  Generally, it is done by irradiating neptunium 237 from spent nuclear fuel with neutrons in a reactor.  Occasionally the Np-237 captures a neutron, becoming Np-238.  This, in turn emits a beta particle (electron), and is transmuted to Pu-238.  It’s quite true that some of the Pu-238 will also capture a neutron, and become Pu-239.  However, the amounts produced in this way would be vanishingly small compared to the amounts that could be produced in the same reactor by simply removing some of the fuel rods after a few months and chemically extracting the nearly pure Pu-239, which would not then have to be somehow separated from far greater quantities of highly radioactive Pu-238.  In other words, if the world community learned that Iran had a nefarious plan to produce bomb material in the way suggested by Kütt, the reasonable immediate reaction would be a horse laugh, perhaps followed by sympathy for a people who were sufficiently stupid to adopt such a plan.  As for the US deciding to replentish its stocks of bomb material in this way, the idea is more implausible than anything those good Germans, the brothers Grimm ever came up with.  It only takes 4 kilos of Pu-239 to make a bomb, and we have tons of it on hand.  In the unlikely event we wanted more, we would simply extract it from reactor fuel rods.  The idea that we would ever prefer to attempt the separation of Pu-239 from Pu-238 instead is one that could only be concocted in the fevered imagination of a German “atomic expert.”

 

Plutonium 238
Plutonium 238

 

 

But Wait! There are More “Worries” from The Edge!

I won’t parse all 150+ of them, but here are a few more that caught my eye.

Science writer and historian Michael Shermer, apparently channeling Sam Harris, is worried about the “Is-Ought Fallacy of Science and Morality.”  According to Shermer,

…most scientists have conceded the high ground of determining human values, morals, and ethics to philosophers, agreeing that science can only describe the way things are but never tell us how they ought to be. This is a mistake.

It’s only a mistake to the extent that there’s actually some “high ground” to be conceded.  There is not.  Assuming that Shermer is not referring to the trivial case of discovering mere opinions in the minds of individual humans, neither science nor philosophy is capable determining anything about objects that don’t exist.  Values, morals and ethics do not exist as objects.  They are not things-in-themselves.  They cannot leap out of the skulls of individuals and acquire a reality and legitimacy that transcends individual whim.  Certainly, large groups of individuals who discover that they have whims in common can band together and “scientifically” force their whims down the throats of less powerful groups and individuals, but, as they say, that don’t make it right.

Suppose we experience a holocaust of some kind, and only one human survived the mayhem.  No doubt he would still be able to imagine what it was like when there were large groups of other’s like himself.  He might recall how they behaved, “scientifically” categorizing their actions as “good” or “evil,” according to his own particular moral intuitions.  Supposed, now, that his life also flickered out.  What would be left of his whims?  Would the inanimate universe, spinning on towards its own destiny, care about them one way or the other.  Science can determine the properties and qualities of things.  Where, then, would the “good” and “evil” objects reside?  Would they still float about in the ether as disembodied spirits?  I’m afraid not.  Science can have nothing to say about objects that don’t exist.  Michael Shermer might feel “in his bones” that some version of “human flourishing” is “scientifically good,” but there is no reason at all why I or anyone else should agree with his opinion.  By all means, let us flourish together, if we all share that whim, but surely we can pursue that goal without tacking moral intuitions on to it.  “Scientific” morality is not only naive, but, as was just demonstrated by the Communists and the Nazis, extremely dangerous as well. According to Shermer,

We should be worried that scientists have given up the search for determining right and wrong…

In fact, if scientists cease looking for and seeking to study objects that plainly don’t exist, it would seem to me more reason for congratulations all around than worry.  Here’s a sample of the sort of “reasoning” Shermer uses to bolster his case:

We begin with the individual organism as the primary unit of biology and society because the organism is the principal target of natural selection and social evolution. Thus, the survival and flourishing of the individual organism—people in this context—is the basis of establishing values and morals, and so determining the conditions by which humans best flourish ought to be the goal of a science of morality. The constitutions of human societies ought to be built on the constitution of human nature, and science is the best tool we have for understanding our nature.

Forgive me for being blunt, but this is gibberish.  Natural selection can have no target, because it is an inanimate process, and can no more have a purpose or will than a stone.  “Thus, the survival and flourishing of the individual organism – people in this context – is the basis of establishing values and morals”??  Such “reasoning” reminds me of the old “Far Side” cartoon, in which one scientist turns to another and allows that he doesn’t quite understand the intermediate step in his proof:  “Miracle happens.”  If a volcano spits a molten mass into the air which falls to earth and becomes a rock, is not it, in the same sense, the “target” of the geologic processes that caused indigestion in the volcano?  Is not the survival and flourishing of that rock equally a universal “good?”

Of the remaining “worries,” this was the one that most worried me, but there were others.  Kevin Kelly, Editor at Large of Wired Magazine, was worried about the “Underpopulation Bomb.”  Noting the “Ur-worry” of overpopulation, Kelly writes,

While the global population of humans will continue to rise for at least another 40 years, demographic trends in full force today make it clear that a much bigger existential threat lies in global underpopulation.

Apparently the basis of Kelly’s worry is the assumption that, once the earths population peaks in 2050 or thereabouts, the decrease will inevitably continue until we hit zero and die out.  In his words, “That worry seems preposterous at first.”  I think it seem preposterous first and last.

Science writer Ed Regis is worried about, “Being Told That Our Destiny Is Among The Stars.”  After reciting the usual litany of technological reasons that human travel to the stars isn’t likely, he writes,

Apart from all of these difficulties, the more important point is that there is no good reason to make the trip in the first place. If we need a new “Earth 2.0,” then the Moon, Mars, Europa, or other intra-solar-system bodies are far more likely candidates for human colonization than are planets light years away.  So, however romantic and dreamy it might sound, and however much it might appeal to one’s youthful hankerings of “going into space,” interstellar flight remains a science-fictional concept—and with any luck it always will be.

In other words, he doesn’t want to go.  By all means, then, he should stay here.  I and many others, however, have a different whim.  We embrace the challenge of travel to the stars, and, when it comes to human survival, we feel existential Angst at the prospect of putting all of our eggs in one basket.  Whether “interstellar flight remains a science-fiction concept” at the moment depends on how broadly you define “we.”  I see no reason why “we” should be limited to one species.  After all, any species you could mention is related to all the rest.  Interstellar travel may not be a technologically feasible option for me at the moment, but it is certainly feasible for my relatives on the planet, and at a cost that is relatively trivial.  Many simpler life forms can potentially survive tens of thousands of years in interstellar space.  I am of the opinion that we should send them on their way, and the sooner the better.

I do share some of the other worries of the Edge contributors.  I agree, for example, with historian Noga Arikha’s worry about, “Presentism – the prospect of collective amnesia,” or, as she puts it, the “historical blankness” promoted by the Internet.  In all fairness, the Internet has provided unprecedented access to historical source material.  However, to find it you need to have the historical background to know what you’re looking for.  That background about the past can be hard to develop in the glare of all the fascinating information available about the here and now.  I also agree with physicist Anton Zeilinger’s worry about, “Losing Completeness – that we are increasingly losing the formal and informal bridges between different intellectual, mental, and humanistic approaches to seeing the world.”  It’s an enduring problem.  The name “university” was already a misnomer 200 years ago, and in the meantime the problem has only become worse.  Those who can see the “big picture” and have the talent to describe it to others are in greater demand than ever before.  Finally, I agree with astrophysicist Martin Rees’ worry that, “We Are In Denial About Catastrophic Risks.”  In particular, I agree with his comment to the effect that,

The ‘anthropocene’ era, when the main global threats come from humans and not from nature, began with the mass deployment of thermonuclear weapons. Throughout the Cold War, there were several occasions when the superpowers could have stumbled toward nuclear Armageddon through muddle or miscalculation. Those who lived anxiously through the Cuba crisis would have been not merely anxious but paralytically scared had they realized just how close the world then was to catastrophe.

This threat is still with us.  It is not “in abeyance” because of the end of the cold war, nor does that fact that nuclear weapons have not been used since World War II mean that they will never be used again.  They will.  It is not a question of “if,” but “when.”

The NIF Misses its Ignition Milestone

We have passed the end of the fiscal year, and the National Ignition Facility, or NIF, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) failed to achieve its goal of ignition (more fusion energy out than laser energy in). As I noted in earlier post about the NIF more than three years ago, this doesn’t surprise me. Ignition using the current indirect drive approach (most of the jargon and buzzwords are explained in the Wiki article on the NIF) requires conversion of the laser energy into an almost perfectly symmetric bath of x-rays. These must implode the target, preserving its spherical shape in the process in spite of a very high convergence ratio (initial radius divided by final radius), and launching a train of four shocks in the process, which must all converge in a tiny volume at the center of the target, heating it to fusion conditions. That will release energetic alpha particles (helium nuclei) which must then dump their energy in the surrounding, cold fuel material, causing a “burn wave” to propagate out from the center, consuming the remaining fuel. It would have been a spectacular achievement if LLNL had pulled it off. Unfortunately, they didn’t, for reasons that are explained in an excellent article that recently appeared in the journal Science. (Unfortunately, it’s behind a subscriber wall, and I haven’t found anything as good on the web at the moment. You can get the gist from this article at Huffpo.)  The potential political implications of the failure were addressed in a recent article in the New York Times.

All of which begs the question, “What now?” My opinion, in short, is that the facility should remain operational, at full capacity (not on half shifts, which, for various reasons, would reduce the experimental value of the facility by significantly more than half).

I certainly don’t base that opinion on the potential of inertial confinement fusion (ICF), the technology implemented on the NIF, for supplying our future energy needs.  While many scientists would disagree with me, I feel it has virtually none.  Although they may well be scientifically feasible, ICF reactors would be engineering nightmares, and far too expensive to compete with alternative energy sources.  It would be necessary to fabricate many thousands of delicate, precisely built targets every day and fill them with highly radioactive tritium.  Tritium is not a naturally occurring isotope of hydrogen, and its half-life (the time it takes for half of a given quantity to undergo radioactive decay) is just over 12 years, so it can’t be stored indefinitely.  It would be necessary to breed and extract the stuff from the reactor on the fly without releasing any into the environment (hydrogen is notoriously slippery stuff, that can easily leak right through several types of metal barriers), load it into the targets, and then cool them to cryogenic temperatures.  There is not a reactor design study out there that doesn’t claim that this can be done cheaply enough to make ICF fusion energy cost-competitive.  They are all poppycock.  The usual procedure in such studies is to pick the cost number you need, and then apply “science” to make it seem plausible.

However, despite all the LLNL hype, the NIF was never funded as an energy project, but as an experimental tool to help maintain the safety and reliability of our nuclear stockpile in the absence of nuclear testing.  The idea that it will be useless for that purpose, whether it achieves ignition or not, is nonsense.  The facility has met and in some cases exceeded its design goals in terms of energy and precision.  Few if any other facilities in the world, whether existing or planned, will be able to rival its ability to explore equations of state, opacities, and other weapons-relevant physics information about materials at conditions approaching those that exist in nuclear detonations.  As long as the ban on nuclear testing remains in effect, the NIF will give us a significant advantage over other nuclear states.  It seems to me that maintaining the ban is a good thing.

It also seems to me that it would behoove us to maintain a robust nuclear stockpile.  Nuclear disarmament sounds nice on paper.  In reality it would invite nuclear attack.  The fact that nuclear weapons have not been used since 1945 is a tremendous stroke of luck.  However, it has also seduced us into assuming they will never be used again.  They will.  The question is not if, but when.  We could continue to be very lucky.  We could also suffer a nuclear attack tomorrow, whether by miscalculation, or the actions of terrorists or rogue states.  If we continue to have a stockpile, it must be maintained.  Highly trained scientists must be available to maintain it.  Unfortunately, babysitting a pile of nuclear bombs while they gather dust is not an attractive career path.  Access to facilities like the NIF is a powerful incentive to those who would not otherwise consider such a career.

One of the reasons this is true is the “dual use” capability of the NIF.  It can be used to study many aspects of high energy density physics that may not be relevant to nuclear weapons, but are of great interest to scientists in academia and elsewhere who are interested in fusion energy, the basic science of matter at extreme conditions, astrophysics, etc.  Some of the available time on the facility will be reserved for these outside users.

As for the elusive goal of ignition itself, we know that it is scientifically feasible, just as we know that its magnetic fusion equivalent is scientifically feasible.  The only question remaining is how big the lasers have to be to reach it.  It may eventually turn out that the ones available on the NIF are not big enough.  However, the idea that because we didn’t get ignition in the first attempts somehow proves that ignition is impossible and out of the question is ridiculous.  It has not even been “proven” that the current indirect drive approach won’t work.  If it doesn’t, there are several alternatives.  The NIF is capable of being reconfigured for direct drive, in which the lasers are aimed directly at the fusion target.  For various reasons, the beams are currently being frequency-tripled from the original “red” light of the glass lasers to “blue.”  Much more energy, up to around four megajoules instead of the current 1.8, would be available if the beams were only frequency-doubled to “green”.  It may be that the advantage of the extra energy will outweigh the physics-related disadvantages of green light.  An interesting dark horse candidate is the “fast ignitor” scenario, in which the target would be imploded as before, but a separate beam or beams would then be used to heat a small spot on the outer surface to ignition conditions.  An alpha particle “burn wave” would then propagate out, igniting the rest of the fuel, just as originally envisioned for the central hot spot approach.

Some of the comments following the Internet posts about NIF’s failure to reach ignition are amusing.  For example, following an article on the Physics Today website we learn to our dismay:

With all due respect to the NIF and its team of well-meaning and enthusiastic researchers here, I am sorry to state hereby that sustainable nuclear fusion is predestined to fail, whether it be in the NIC, the Tokamak or anywhere else in solar space, for fundamentally two simple reasons paramount for fusion: ((1) vibrational synchronism (high-amplitude resonance) of reacting particles; and (2) the overall isotropy of their ambient field.

Obviously the commenter hadn’t heard that the scientific feasibility of both inertial and magnetic fusion has already been established.  He reminds me of a learned doctor who predicted that Zadig, the hero of Voltaire’s novel of that name, must inevitably die of an injury.  When Zadig promptly recovered, he wrote a thick tome insisting that Zadig must inevitably have died.  Voltaire informs us that Zadig did not read the book.  In an article on the IEEE Spectrum website, suggestively entitled National Ignition Facility:  Mother of All Boondoggles?, another commenter chimes in:

How about we spend the billions on real research that actually has a chance of producing something useful? There are a gazillion ideas out there for research that has a much higher probability of producing useful results. Must be nice to work for LLNL where your ideas don’t need vetting.

In fact, the NIF was “vetted” by a full scale Federal Advisory Committee.  Known as the Inertial Confinement Fusion Advisory Committee, or ICFAC, its members included Conrad Longmire, Marshall Rosenbluth, and several other experts in plasma physics and technology of world renown who had nothing whatsoever to gain by serving as shills for LLNL.  It heard extensive testimony on plans to build the NIF, both pro and con, in the mid-90’s.  Prominent among those who opposed the project was Steve Bodner, head of the ICF Program at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) at the time.  Steve cited a number of excellent reasons for delaying major new starts like the NIF until some of the outstanding physics issues could be better understood.  The Committee certainly didn’t ignore what he and other critics had to say.  However, only one of the 15 or so members dissented from the final decision to recommend proceeding with the NIF.  I suspect that LLNL’s possession of the biggest, baddest ICF computer code at the time had something to do with it.  No one is better at bamboozling himself and others than a computational physicist with a big code.  The one dissenter, BTW, was Tim Coffey, Director of NRL at the time, who was convinced that Bodner was right.

There are, of course, the predictable comments by those in the habit of imagining themselves geniuses after the fact, such as,

I am convinced. Garbage research.

and,

Don’t these people feel ashamed telling so many lies?

after the IEEE Spectrum article, and,

It’s amazing to think that you can spout lies to the government to receive $6 billion for a machine that doesn’t come close to performing to spec and there are no consequences for your actions.

Following a post on the NIF at the LLNL – The True Story blog.  Fortunately, most of the comments I’ve seen recently have been at a rather more thoughtful level.  In any event, I hope Congress doesn’t decide to cut and run on the NIF.  Pulling the plug at this point would be penny-wise and pound-foolish.

One of the two NIF laser bays

The NIF: Lots of Power and Energy, but No Ignition

According to a recent press release from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, the 192-beam National Ignition Facility (NIF) fired a 500 terawatt shot on July 5.  The world record power followed a world record energy shot of 1.89 Megajoules on July 3.  As news, this doesn’t rise above the “meh” category.  A shot at the NIF’s design energy of 1.8 Megajoules was already recorded back in March.  It’s quite true that, as NIF Director Ed Moses puts it, “NIF is becoming everything scientists planned when it was conceived over two decades ago.”  The NIF is a remarkable achievement in its own right, capable of achieving energies 50 times greater than any other laboratory facility, with pulses shaped and timed to pinpoint precision.  The NIF team in general and Ed Moses in particular deserve great credit, and the nation’s gratitude, for that achievement after turning things around following a very shaky start.

The problem is that, while the facility works as well, and even better than planned, the goal it was built to achieve continues to elude us.  As its name implies, the news everyone is actually waiting for is the announcement that ignition (defined as fusion energy out greater than laser energy in) has been achieved.  As noted in the article, Moses said back in March that “We have all the capability to make it happen in fiscal year 2012.”  At this point, he probably wishes his tone had been a mite less optimistic.  To reach their goal in the two months remaining, the NIF team will need to pull a rabbit out of their collective hat.  A slim chance remains.  Apparently the NIF’s 192 laser beams were aimed at a real ignition target with a depleted uranium capsule and deuterium-tritium fuel on July 5, and not a surrogate.  The data from that shot may prove to be a great deal more interesting than the 500 terawatt power announcement.

Meanwhile, the Russians are apparently forging ahead with plans for their own superlaser, to be capable of a whopping 2.8 Megajoules, and the Chinese are planning another about half that size, to be operational at about the same time (around 2020).  That, in itself, speaks volumes about the real significance of ignition.  It may be huge for the fusion energy community, but not that great as far as the weaponeers who actually fund these projects are concerned.  Many weapons designers at LLNL and Los Alamos were notably unenthusiastic about ignition when NIF was still in the planning stages.  What attracted them more was the extreme conditions, approaching those in an exploding nuke, that could be achieved by the lasers without ignition.  They thought, not without reason, that it would be much easier to collect useful information from such experiments than from chaotic ignition plasmas.  Apparently the Russian bomb designers agree.  They announced their laser project back in February even though LLNL’s difficulties in achieving ignition were well known at the time.

The same can be said of some of the academic types in the NIF “user community.”  It’s noteworthy that two of them, Rick Petrasso of MIT and Ray Jeanloz of UC Berkeley, whose enthusiastic comments about the 500 terawatt shot where quoted in the latest press release, are both key players in the field of high energy density physics.  Ignition isn’t a sine qua non for them either.  They will be able to harvest scores of papers from the NIF whether it achieves ignition or not.

The greatest liability of not achieving early ignition may be the evaporation of political support for the NIF.  The natives are already becoming restless.  As noted in the Livermore Independent,

In early May, sounding as if it were discussing an engineering project rather than advanced research, the House Appropriations Committee worried that NIF’s “considerable costs will not have been warranted” if it does not achieve ignition by September 30, the end of the federal fiscal year.

and,

Later that month, in a tone that seemed to demand that research breakthroughs take place according to schedule, the House Armed Services Committee recommended that NIF’s ignition research budget for next year be cut by $30 million from the requested $84 million budget unless NIF achieves ignition by September 30.

Funding cuts at this point, after we have come so far, and are so close to the goal, would be short-sighted indeed.  One must hope that a Congress capable of squandering billions on white elephants like the International Space Station will not become penny-wise and pound-foolish about funding a project that really matters.

The Atomic Bomb and the Premonitions of James Burnham

We tend to be strongly influenced by the recent past in our predictions about the future.  After World War I, any number of pundits, statesmen, and military officers thought the next war would be a carbon copy of the one they had just lived through, albeit perhaps on a larger scale.  The German government’s disastrous decision to declare war in 1914 was likely influenced by the quick and decisive German victories in 1864, 1866, and 1870.  The Japanese were similarly mesmerized by their brilliant success against the Russians in 1904-05 after an opening surprise attack against the Russian fleet lying at anchor at Port Arthur, and assumed history would repeat itself if they launched a similar attack against Pearl Harbor.

Sometimes startling events force the reevaluation of old ideas and paradigms, such as the German armored Blitzkrieg or the destruction of powerful battleships from the air in World War II, or, more recently, the sudden collapse of Communism and the Soviet Union from 1989-91.  We are always fascinated by such events, yet few of us grasp their significance as they are happening.  Our tendency is always to look backwards, to fit the revolutionary and the unprecedented into the old world that we understand rather than the new one that we can’t yet imagine.  So it was after the dropping of the first atomic bombs.  It certainly focused the attention of public intellectuals, unleashing a torrent of essays full of dire predictions.  For many, the future they imagined was simply a continuation of the immediate past, albeit with new and incredibly destructive weapons.  It was to include the continued inexorable push for world dominion by totalitarian Communism, centered in the Soviet Union, and world wars following each other in quick succession every 15 to 20 years, about the same as the interval between the first two world wars.

Such a vision of the future was described by James Burnham in “The Struggle for the World,” published in 1947.  Burnham was a former Marxist and Trotskyite who eventually abandoned Marxism, and became one of the leading conservative intellectuals of his day.  His thought made a deep impression on, among others, George Orwell.  For example, he had suggested the possibility of a world dominated by three massive totalitarian states, constantly at war with each other, in an earlier book, “The Managerial Revolution,” published in 1941.  These became Oceania, Eastasia, and Eurasia in Orwell’s “1984.”  The notions of “doublethink”, the totalitarian use of terms such as “justice” and “peace” in a sense opposite to their traditional meanings, and the rewriting of history every few years “so that history itself will always be a confirmation of the immediate line of the party,” familiar to readers of “1984,” were also recurrent themes in “The Struggle for the World.”

Burnham, born in 1905, had come of age during the stunning period of wars, revolutions, and the birth of the first totalitarian states that began and ended with the world wars of the 20th century.  He assumed that events of such global impact would continue at the same pace, only this time in a world with nuclear weapons.   As a former Marxist, he knew that the Communists, at least, were deliberately engaged in a “struggle for the world,” and was dismayed that U.S. politicians at the time were so slow to realize the nature of the struggle.  He also correctly predicted that, unless they were stopped, the Communists would develop nuclear weapons in their Soviet base “in a few years.”  This, he warned, could not be allowed to happen because it would inevitably and quickly lead to a full scale nuclear exchange.  His reasoning was as follows:

Let us assume that more than one (two is enough for the assumption) power possesses, and is producing, atomic weapons.  Each will be improving the efficiency and destructive potential of the weapons as it goes along.  Now let us try to reason as the leaders of these powers would be compelled to reason.

Each leader of Power A could not but think as follows:  Power B has at its disposal instruments which could, in the shortest time, destroy us.  He has possibly made, or is about to make, new discoveries which will threaten even more complete and rapid destruction.  At the moment, perhaps, he shows no open disposition to use these instruments.  Nevertheless, I cannot possibly rely on his continued political benevolence – above all since he knows that I also have at my disposal instruments that can destroy him.  Some hothead – or some wise statesman – of his may even now be giving the order to push the necessary buttons.

Even if there were no atomic weapons, many of the leaders would undoubtedly be reasoning today along these lines.  Atomic weapons are, after all, not responsible for warfare, not even for the Third World War, which has begun.  The fact that the political and social causes of a war are abundantly present stares at us from every edition of every newspaper.  The existence of atomic weapons merely raises the stakes immeasurably higher, and demands a quicker decision.

But to assume, as do some foolish commentators, that fear of retaliation will be the best deterrent to an atomic war is to deny the lessons of the entire history of war and of society.  Fear, as Ferrero so eloquently shows, is what provokes the exercise of force.  Most modern wars have been, in the minds of every belligerent, preventive:  an effort to stamp out the fear of what the other side might be about to do.

The existence of two or more centers of control of atomic weapons would be equal to a grenade with the pin already pulled.

According to Burnham, the resulting nuclear war or wars would lead to the collapse of Western Civilization.  In his words,

If, however, we are not yet ready to accept passively the final collapse of Western Civilization, we may state the following as a necessary first condition of any workable solution of the problem of atomic weapons: there must be an absolute monopoly of the production, possession and use of all atomic weapons.

One wonders what direction world history might have taken had someone like Burnham been President in 1950 instead of Truman.  He would have almost certainly adopted MacArthur’s plan to drop numerous atomic bombs on China and North Korea.  We were lucky.  In the end, Truman’s homespun common sense prevailed over Burnham’s flamboyant intellect, and the nuclear genie remained in the bottle.

However, in 1947 the U.S. still had a monopoly of nuclear weapons, and, for the reasons cited above, Burnham insisted we must keep it.  He suggested that this might best be done by establishing an effectual world government, but dismissed the possibility as impractical.  The only workable alternative to a Communist conquest of the world or full scale nuclear war and the end of Western Civilization was U.S. hegemony.  In Burnham’s words,

It is not our individual minds or desires, but the condition of world society, that today poses for the Soviet Union, as representative of communism, and for the United States, as representative of Western Civilization, the issue of world leadership. No wish or thought of ours can charm this issue away.

This issue will be decided, and in our day. In the course off the decision, both of the present antagonists may, it is true, be destroyed. But one of them must be.

Whatever the words, it is well also to know the reality. The reality is that the only alternative to the communist World Empire is an American Empire which will be, if not literally worldwide in formal boundaries, capable of exercising decisive world control. Nothing less than this can be the positive, or offensive, phase of a rational United States policy.

As a first step to empire, Burnham proposed the union of Great Britain and the United States, to be followed, not by outright conquest, but by firm assertion of U.S. predominance and leadership in the non-Communist world.   Beyond that, the Communist threat must finally be recognized for what it was, and a firm, anti-Communist policy substituted for what was seen as a lack of any coherent policy at all.  Vacillation must end.

Fortunately, when it came to the nuclear standoff, Burnham was wrong, and the “foolish commentators” who invoked the fear of retaliation were right.  Perhaps, having only seen the effects of dropping two low yield bombs, he could not yet imagine the effect of thousands of bombs orders of magnitude more powerful, or conceive of such a thing as mutually assured destruction.  Perhaps it was only dumb luck, but the world did not stumble into a nuclear World War III as it had into the conventional world wars of the 20th century, and the decisive events in the struggle did not follow each other nearly as quickly as Burnham imagined they would.

Burnham also failed to foresee the implications of the gradual alteration in the nature of the Communist threat.  At the time he wrote, it was everything he claimed it to be, a messianic secular religion at the height of its power and appeal.  He assumed that it would retain that power and appeal until the battle was decided, one way or the other.  Even though he was aware that the masses living under Communism, other than a dwindling number of incorrigible idealists, were already disillusioned by “the God that failed,” he didn’t foresee what a decisive weakness that would eventually become.   In the end, time was on our side.  The Communists, and not we, as Lenin had predicted, finally dropped onto the garbage heap of history “like a ripe plum.”

However, Burnham wasn’t wrong about everything.  To win the struggle, it was necessary for us to finally recognize the threat.  Whatever doubt remained on that score, at least as far as most of our political leaders were concerned, was dissipated by the North Korean invasion of the south.  Our policy of vacillation didn’t exactly end, but was occasionally relieved by periods of firmness.  In the end, in spite of a media dominated through most of the struggle by Lenin’s “useful idiots” and the resultant cluelessness of most Americans about what we were even trying to do on the front lines of the “clash between the cultures” in places like Vietnam, we prevailed.

It was a near thing.  Burnham feared that, even after losing the opening battles of the next war to a United States with a monopoly of nuclear weapons, the Communists might regroup, abandon their vulnerable cities, and transform the struggle into a “people’s war.”  His description of what would follow was eerily similar to what actually did happen, but in a much smaller arena than the whole world:

They would transform the struggle into a political war, a “people’s war,” fought in every district of the world by irregulars, partisans, guerillas, Fifth Columns, spies, stool pigeons, assassins, fought by sabotage and strikes and lies and terror and diversion and panic and revolt. They would play on every fear and prejudice of the United States population, every feeling of guilt or nobility; they would exploit every racial and social division; they would widen every antagonism between tentative allies; and they would tirelessly wear down the United States will to endure.

Though the result would be not quite so certain, perhaps, as if the communists also had atomic weapons, they would in the end, I think, succeed. Because of the lack of a positive United States policy, because it would not have presented to the world even the possibility of a political solution, its dreadful material strength would appear to the peoples as the unrelieved brutality of a murderer. Its failure to distinguish between the communist regime and that regime’s subject-victims would weld together the victims and their rulers. Americans themselves would be sickened and conscience-ridden by what would seem to them a senseless slaughter, never-ending, leading nowhere. The military leadership would be disoriented by the inability of their plans based on technical superiority to effect a decision. The failure to conceive the struggle politically would have given the communists the choice of weapons. From the standpoint of the United States, the entire world would have been turned into an ambush and a desert. In the long night, nerves would finally crack, and sentries would fire their last shots wildly into the darkness, and it would all be over.

Change “the world” to Vietnam and it reads like a history instead of a premonition.  Tomorrow is another day, and I doubt that any of us will prove better at predicting what the future will bring than Burnham.  We have lived through an era much different, more peaceful, and more sedate in the pace of events than the one he experienced between 1914 and 1945.  We should beware of assuming, as he did, that the future will bear any resemblance to the immediate past.  The world is still full of nuclear weapons, some of them already in the hands of, or soon to be in the hands of, dictators of suspect rationality.  Some of our intellectuals soothe our fears with stories about the “vanishing of violence,” but as Omar Khayyam put it in the “Rubaiyat,” they could soon be “cast as foolish prophets forth, their mouths stopped with dust,” through some miscalculation or deliberate act of malice.  As the Boy Scouts say, “be prepared.”