nullThe Shiva Star facility, located at the Kirtland Air Force Base in Albequerque, produces a power pulse that justifies its name.

Air Force Research Laboratory

Everything was ready. The lab’s blast walls were up; sheets of Kevlar hung to catch shrapnel; banks of capacitors on the co-opted Air Force experiment primed to unleash 12 million amps of current; X-ray detectors set to snag bursts of photons; bottles of celebratory champagne chilled. If all went as planned, Glen Wurden would be a very happy man, and one experiment closer in his long-shot effort to exploit a nearly limitless source of energy.

The champagne had to wait, though, because something went wrong. Not a glitch, not a minor mishap. An explosion. “The floor shook; the walls shook; there was a hell of a boom,” says Wurden, a sandy-haired, 54-year-old physicist and fusion program manager at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. “An Air Force guy with us said, ‘Damn, that was loud!’ One of the Kevlar blankets was tossed 40 feet. A piece of shrapnel went through one of the air-conditioning ducts. The experiment was a spectacular failure.”

For someone talking about a fantastically borked bit of work, Wurden sounds almost cheerful. We are sitting in his office at Los Alamos, a 45-minute drive northwest of Santa Fe, on a cool September afternoon, nine months after the explosion. No one was hurt that day—the blast walls protected Wurden and his colleagues from the, uh, mistake in the adjoining room. “It turns out there was a short circuit,” Wurden says as we look on his computer monitor at photos of a blackened, debris-strewn lab. The short overloaded the equipment with 18 million amps, delaying for a few months the initial test of technology that could yield the world’s first commercially viable nuclear fusion reactor.


“My goal in life is to make fusion energy happen. Period,” Wurden says. The control of nuclear fusion—the reaction that powers stars and hydrogen bombs—would permanently solve the world’s energy problems, not to mention a few geopolitical ones. No small ambition, by any measure. But Wurden harbors another goal, nearly as daunting. He wants to beat the world’s two biggest fusion projects in the race to make fusion not just possible but practical. The competition could scarcely be more lopsided. The ranking fusion heavyweights, one in France and one in California, each have at least a thousand-to-one funding advantage over Wurden’s project and a huge edge in manpower as well. ITER—an international fusion experiment now under construction in the south of France—will probably cost $20 billion by the time it is finished in 2018. The $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility (NIF) in Livermore, California, is slated to begin fusion tests by 2012, after 15 years of construction and development.

When I tell Wurden that I would like to compare his research favorably with the work going on at NIF and ITER, he tries to discourage me. “I’m not comfortable with that. Why should we be in the same paragraph with a $4 billion machine? We’re not even a $4 million operation.” Yet after I spend a couple of afternoons with him, it becomes clear that he thinks he has a reasonable shot at something that has eluded researchers for decades: creating a fusion device that yields more energy than it consumes, and doing so on a budget of tens of millions instead of billions.

“Our goal is to demonstrate fusion gain before ITER is built. I don’t know about beating NIF—it will probably get a good shot in a year or two. We almost certainly won’t make that,” Wurden says. “Our goal is to make a fusing plasma in the lab once a week.” Without any more explosions.

The physics of fusion seems so straightforward, so tantalizingly graspable: Two atomic nuclei (the dense centers of atoms) collide and merge to form a larger nucleus, releasing a lot of energy. Fusion is the opposite of fission, which frees energy when an atom like uranium splits into two smaller atomic nuclei. Today’s nuclear power plants use the heat from uranium fission reactions to do nothing more complicated than boil water, making pressurized steam that spins turbines to generate electricity. Fusion power plants would also be boilers, albeit exceedingly complex ones. Although physicists and engineers conceptually figured out how to construct fission power plants almost immediately after the invention of the atomic bomb, fusion has never been tamed.

The quest to control the process has seduced physicists for more than half a century, for obvious reasons. As an energy source, it seems too good to be true. It releases no greenhouse gases. Its primary fuel—deuterium, a heavy version of hydrogen—can be extracted from seawater. Unlike the waste from conventional nuclear power plants, which remains radioactive for tens of thousands of years, the by-products of fusion decay within decades. And there is irrefutable evidence that stable, self-sustaining fusion reactions are physically possible. The most obvious example is a fusion reactor that has been running smoothly for more than 4 billion years: the sun, which fuses hundreds of millions of tons of hydrogen nuclei into helium every second. Without fusion, stars would not shine. Just look up at the sky and you can see that fusion reactors are stupefyingly common.

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