FAQ: Fusion History

[Richard Hull]

It came to me that unlike fission, fusion was a nebulous discovery with no offical discovery date that set the world spinning following a revelation.

Wikipedia reports the following as an early portion of its time line......................

Timeline of significant events in the study and use of nuclear fusion:

1929 - Atkinson and Houtermans used the measured masses of light (light
as opposed to heavy; not as in radiation of the electromagnetic
spectrum) elements and applied Einstein's discovery that E=mc² to
predict that large amounts of energy could be released by fusing small
nuclei together.

Hull commentary: Interesting but not something that set wheels in motion. This is in the same class as Ida Nodackers paper suggesting fission in 1936. Nothing happened. (EC)-End Commentary

1932 - Mark Oliphant discovered helium 3 and tritium, and that heavy
hydrogen nuclei could be made to react with each other.

Hull commentary: Much better, but so what? No great experiment under way following this announcement. (EC)

1939 - Hans Bethe won the Nobel Prize in physics (awarded 1967) "for
his contributions to the theory of nuclear reactions, especially his
discoveries concerning the energy production in stars."

Hull commentary: Better still, The sun was no longer a burning ball of coal or a mass of decaying radium or uranium. Bethe's paper joined a bunch of others destined to only later be dusted off and looked at as seminal in nature such that it didn't look pretty enough for a Nobel until 1967.

Wikipedia has a hole here....Large accelerators were working by the early forties and fusion was being done as a result and data on same was accumulating. A number of folks were considering fusion as a source of energy, certainly by 1943, as Bethe, Teller, and others were considering the distant possibilites of a fusion due to their daily proximity and discussions, being trapped in a community of genius at Los Alamos on the MED project (Manhattan Engineering District).

Teller would be effectively demoted in his efforts at Los Alamos for his constant re-addressing of the fusion bomb idea. Later, he would be put in charge of such an investigation, the super, with a tiny staff within the MED. It is posited by a number of historians that Oppenhiemer did this either on his own or at the suggestion of Groves to isolate Teller who was taking others off mission. Through out it all, Teller was the fusion booster. (EC)

1947 First kiloampere plasma created by a team at the Imperial College,
London, in a doughnut shaped glass vacuum vessel. Plasmas are entirely
unstable and only last fractions of seconds.

Hull Commentary: Finally experiments at thermal fusion for other than fusion bomb work begins a long and tedious period of plamsa physics research. EC

1951 - Argentina made a claim that with the Huemul Project they had
harnessed controlled nuclear fusion. This prompted a responsive
research effort in the U.S.

Hull commentary: This was a stunning yet bogus announcement that launched project Sherwood in the US. By this time, fission systems in the US naval submarine effort had already produced usable kilowatts on land based, small, test bed, fission reactors. (EC)

1951 Lyman Spitzer started the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (or PPPL)
which was originally codenamed Project Matterhorn - most early work was
done on a type of magnetic confinement device called a stellarator.
James Tuck, an English physicist, began research at Los Alamos National
Laboratory (LANL) under the codename of Project Sherwood, working on
pinch magnetic confinement devices. (Some people claimed that the
project was named Sherwood based on Friar Tuck).

Hull commentary: Sherwood was designed to not let fusion advances of a military nature leak out to Russia while doing fusion research in the US. Sherwood relied on Defense Dept and AEC funding. If you wanted a piece of the pie, you submitted to Sherwood's publication review limitations. This was the beginning of what one might term significant fusion funding by the US government. Sherwood ended and fusion research secrecy lifted in the late 50's. In a twist, we would ultimately come to adopt the Russian Tokamak as our wonder device in the 1970's! (EC)

1952 Edward Teller expanded hydrogen bomb research at Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)
Cousins and Ware built a small toroidal pinch device in England, and
demonstrated that instabilities in the plasma make pinch devices
inherently unstable.

Hull commentary: Fusion is officially a going concern both in bomb work and an ostensibly fusion energy effort sort of pointed at electrical power for the future. (EC)

1954-1958: The ZETA -Zero Energy Toroidal (or Thermonuclear) Assembly
device at Harwell.

Hull commentary: Many false claims were made via press releases involving Zeta which was a true pure fusion power attempt. (EC)

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We see there was no real tripping point in fusion, no discovery date, no massive effort following a key discovery, but more of a idle morphing driven to its current level solely as a result of the successes in uranium fission power and bomb development. Seeing a fusion bomb go off, really tends to get the ball rolling on controlled fusion energy.

Fission had a discovery date and realization period that smeared over only a one year period, mid1938 to mid 1939.

Hahn and Strassmann stumbled upon it by experiment, ignorant of its meaning. Meitner and Frisch called it, or noodled out what the results of Hahn and Strassmann's work meant. Bohr trumpeted the work and carried the idea to a conference in the US. By mid-1939 three or four teams in the U.S. had fully verified fission. Szilard had filed for a fission energy patent in England that same year!

A devastating display of fission power, destroying two cities, would come only 6 years later and the first kilowatts of fission based electrical energy would flow only 4 years after the bomb. Grid power to real consumers in Pennsylvania would take only 18 years. This short period of time spans a period from when no one even knew what fission was to fission based electrical power reaching billable customers.

Fusion slid into the picture slowly. Without the hunt for the super by Teller, we might not have actively investigated fusion for electrical power use until the 60's or later. Once the first H bomb dwarfed the A bomb, fusion was on a public energy power fast track that it is still on since the first suggestion of fusion back in 1929, 79 years ago.

To this day, no one has hooked even a tiny electrical generator to any of the fusion machines, some of which have openly claimed near or actual over unity outputs. The reason being that none of the fusion machines can run for more than a fraction of a second over unity. The controlled fusion genie is still very much in his bottle while his evil twin, (uncontrolled fusion- H bomb), has been among us for over 54 years!

Richard Hull

[Chris Bradley]

Richard.

I think you could also usefully look at some earlier works.

It was Wilhelm Wein in1908 who discovered that isotopes could be separated out by charge and mass, and based on that Francis William Aston discovered in 1920 that four hydrogen atoms were heavier than helium.

Henry Norris Russell had previously suggested in 1919 that all this solar energy output must be due to the high temperatures, and so, along with Albert Einstein's stated conversion between energy and mass (which itself could be traced back to Issac Newton, if you really wanted to give all due credits) it was mereley then left up to someone to put two-and-two together.

That person appears to have been Arthur Stanley Eddington who was a bit of a household name in his day as a star scientist, and who, in 1920, then said "If, indeed, the sub-atomic energy in the stars is being freely used to maintain their great furnaces, it seems to bring a little nearer to fulfillment our dream of controlling this latent power for the well-being of the human race, or for its suicide."

Rather too prescient to be a merely a random statement, I feel!!

Another clip of that lecture I found on the web -"Certain physical investigations in the past year make it probable to my mind that some portion of sub-atomic energy is actually set free in the stars. If only five percent of a star’s mass consists initially of hydrogen atoms which are gradually being combined to form more complex elements, the total heat liberated will more than suffice for our demands, and we need look no further for the source of a star’s energy.”

Perhaps this gets a little closer to an origin? I would nominate Eddington for having the 'first call' to realising these things added up to a potential energy source.

best regards,

Chris MB.

(a quick scan on the internet for more on Eddington - see http://silas.psfc.mit.edu/eddington/ )

[Starfire]

Richard -

US patent 2240914 by Werner Schutze
Publication date 05/06/1941 filed in Germany May 20th 1938
produced Neutrons from Deuterium

This is the first machine to produce fusion that I can find.


a noted American - Winfield W. Salisbury also took out a patent for a Neutron generator using Deuterium

Application made Dec 17th 1947
Publication Date:11/29/1949 US Patent :2489436


BTW Dr Salisbury also invented " chaff " - still used today by military aircraft.

[Chris Bradley]

Having had a further rummage around the internet, this New Scientist article came up and it says that Mark Oliphant attempted to fuse deuterons and liberate more energy that it took to put in (the text implying a date of 1933), and he knew exactly what he was attempting to do (to Rutherford's annoyance).

Sounds like it was an interview with the man himself, so I don't know if that makes it more or less accurate!!

See;

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13618474.700.html

Does this description of his experiments convince you any further that this was the first-real-attempt you were seeking, Richard? (If you want a first-successful-attempt, then of course we're all still waiting for that one!!)

best regards,

Chris MB.

[Richard Hull]

Thanks all for the plug-ins to the history of fusion.

What the original thrust of my post was and what still remains valid is there was never a Eureka event as in fission. Fusion was a dribble and stumbling effort with no fanfare or immediate application or use. As discoveries and theories were urinated into the sciences over 3 decades, they were not coming in a bold stream, but in insignicant, weak spurts that, while satisfyingly emptying the fusion bladder onto the floor of science, few heard the flow.

I fear that even after any numbers of what some here might want to call "the single event", it was met with a great big "ho-hum" or even "humbug" by the peers of the experimenter/theorist. There were also any number of fusion boosters from Eddington to Oliphant and Teller. The only reason Teller succeeded was because fusion stood a chance to beat the A-bomb. Fusion turned out to be a very interesting post WW-II dabble as both fission and fusion were looked at as a possible future energy source beyond the bombs they first created.

For my money, and inspite of the good work of many in the late 40's, It is a near tie between the British Zeta effort, 49-52, and Lyman Spitzer's stellarator efforts, 51-52, that kicked off a serious look at fusion for electrical power inspite of some hints of it being trumpeted in the early teens of the past century. Frederick Soddy, one of my favorite early nuclear investigators, hinted at a nuclear powered sun in several books and papers in the teens and early 20's.

Old duffers like myself who are science history buffs are among the few who would instantly recognize the Oliphants, Boltwoods, Nodakers, Nutalls and others deeply buried in nuclear science history. While all contributed, It is the Rutherfords and Hahns and Tellers that stand out due to the bold strokes attributted to them often coupled with a peculiar personality, to boot.

Fission came at us out of a cannon while fusion started as a tiny stream slowly accumulating and creating little stir, until it became a usable, recognizable river and had a cadre of older folks still around who could remember when it was just a trickle and decided, belatedly, to hand out a nobel prize for some of the earlier work.

Richard Hull

[Chris Bradley]

I'm not sure I agree with your essential thesis. I think the fission time-line was the exception, not the fusion. And the reason for that exception was 2 world wars and the threat of a 3rd. This period was unique in history and we are settling back down to the usual slow pace of radical scientific discovery.

The recent (last few decades) devotion to scientific development has also given us, in this decade, a distorted view of how quickly we think scientific knowledge should move on. But I think it is mostly 'development' which is the current scientific mantra, not 'breakthrough' - and fusion happens to be a science that needs that 'breakthrough'.

Whenever I hear that expression "research and development" I always think "shouldn't it be research OR development"!

Can you pick a non-military related invention that has been developed quicker than fusion's current time-line? Electricity? - noticed by the ancient greeks, Guerick electrostatic generator 1663, Volta cell 1800, formulated scientifically by Oersted in 1821, first commercial manufacture of electrical machines 1853. Computers? Babbage formulated 1822, prototype abandoned, first machine=~1940s. Flight? dreamed of immemorial, Cayley, formulated 1792, first flight 1853. First powered flight, 1903.

Decades is quick. Hundreds of years has been the norm. (Unless there's a war on.)

best regards,

Chris MB.

[Richard Hull]

I certainly see your point, but fission was an instant hit and totally unexpected. The experimental results spread like wildfire as everyone who heard of it replicated it in crude labs and saw the instant application to what seemed like unlimited power. The first patent came within months and was not for a bomb, but a source of energy.

Fusion had no epiphany. It limped over a bomb making finish line 30 years after some of the seeming seminal fusion discoveries. The H bomb showed the power of fusion far outpaces any fission system, thus, finally the lure of unlimited fusion power.

War made a big difference with fission as a bomb, but not one step towards electrical power to the people was made, just like fusion. After the war, fission was on the grid in 10 years. Fusion power was investigated right along side fission. Here we sit, still, fusionless on the electrical grid and looking at 40-50-100 years more?

Fission's discovery was big, not because of a war, but because it was a revolution with the end in sight from the opening gate. Fusion languished as only a war horse that didn't even run or place in the war. To this day it has not run or placed as a continuous controlled source of net energy.

Fission fuel is real and contains stored real binding energy and it wants to go and be released with a light press of the trigger, like coal or any other conventional fuel.

Fusion fuel has no trapped potential energy. The energy is a virtual promise of energy, not a given. There is no easy trigger. It demands a tremendous feedstock of energy to gain any return.

Folks could smell fission's future right around the corner days after its discovery. The first fully controlled, continuous running fission reactor capable of real power output was assembled within 4 years of fission's first discovery. Such a fusion reactor has yet to be built.

Fusion had no lauded discovery date and excited no one at any point along its path outside of mild academic interest until a war got started. Fusion energy for public use has always come in stages of grand annoucements without fruition. The gloss is slowly falling of the fusion energy apple for many who have been promised much and received zip.

I am not just saying that fission was easier than fusion, (it is), but that power fusion is thus far just, flat out, not possible even at this late date. Great concept and a really huge carrot hung out in front of us, but it still hung out there. U235 has been in controled burning like coal since 1942 and powering up ovens and TV's in homes since 1957. All the excitement about fusion remains due to cheerleaders on the sidelines. Teams are assembled, and what few games they have played have been something-zips.

There was never any excitement about fusion all along the discovery path until the latter day cheerleading squads came onto the field.

Richard Hull