An Interview with Dr. Robert L. Hirsch - 03/13/02

[Paul_Schatzkin]

As many visitors to this site already know, I am in the final stages of completing a book, a biography of Philo Farnsworth, that will be published this summer. The title looks like it is going to be "The Boy Who Invented Television: The Quiet Passion of Philo T. Farnsworth." The text is based on "The Farnsworth Chronicles" which appear on the web at http://farnovision.com/chronicles>, but that material has been greatly expanded to trace the arc of discovery that took Farnsworth from electronic television to nuclear fusion.

In order to get a different perspective on "the fusion years," I recently conducted a couple of phone interviews with Dr. Robert L. Hirsch, who worked in the ITT/Farnsworth fusion lab in the 1960s, directed the effort to obtain federal funding for the ITT project after Farnsworth retired, and eventually went on to head the entire national fusion program for ERDA, the Energy Research and Development Agency of the Department of Energy.

Some of the things Hirsch said about electrostatic fusion, and why the research into this field is not further along, will be of great interest to this group. Here are some pertinent excerpts:

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PS: Why is there not more interest in the Farnsworth approach to fusion?

RLH: The scandal in the whole thing, and the thing I don't understand at this date...is how those people would not open up to the possibility of a Farnsworth-like idea. I do not understand that. I simply do not understand that because maybe I'm a simple person, but good physics and good research should be done with a relatively open mind, and sure you're going to pursue things that you like, but when you're dealing with a complicated problem you should not over constrain yourself and you should look in a lot of different corners to understand what the possibilities are. And, the people in the program were almost paranoid when it came to this particular subject.

PS: Paranoid? Why do you think they were paranoid?

RLH: Elements of the reason was that they were trained differently. They were trained in what's called equilibrium plasma physics, and what Phil was doing was not equilibrium plasma physics. And that is a resepctable area of plasma physics, but not when applied to fusion. They just wont allow that for reasons that I don't understand. So I think they were uncomforatble with something that they didn't understand. I think they were probably also uncomfortable with Farnsworth, in the sense that here was an inventor, a farm boy with just dribs and drabs of education, who in fact conceived and developed one of the most significant technological advances of the 20th century, and here he was coming along in
fusion, and I don't know whether it was ego or what but there is something strange there.

PS: Can you say what it is that keeps the Fusor from reaching a break-even level of fusin?

RLH: Not enough money, not large enough experiments. It's just that simple.

PS: Not the science? You don't see an impediment to break-even in the physics?

RLH: The difficulties of science were there, are there, will be there as people creep up on this thing further. There are very complicated dimensions to the problem and it is indeed possible that the thing won't work. That's always a possibility, and it's still speculative. My own gut feeling is that it can work and can be made to work but that's a certain amount of judgement and a certain amount of faith and I'm not smart enough to know how much of either one.

PS: Your're really saying that the obstacle was financial, not scientific?

RLH: The primary obstacles that we were up against was not having large enough equipment and not having diagnostics, measurement techniques to measure these complicated phenomena that occur in this complicated sphere. In one sense it is very simple but in another sense doing diagnostics and understanding what is going on in any kind of plasma is very complicated, spheres have their own special problems, and in a small laboratory with a few people out in the middle of nowwhere from a plasma physics standpoint that was hard to do and there really wasn't not enough money and that's not surprising because fusion research is expensive.

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As the conversation progressed, we turned to Bob's experience trying to convince the Atommic Energy Commission to devote some funding to the continuation of his work in Fort Wayne. We talked about the day in late 1967 when Bob and Gene Meeks rolled a portable fusor into a meeting of the committee that was considering his proposal:


RLH: We built something that was incredible in that toy. We rolled it into the Atomic Energy Commission, plugged in and turned it on. It was just amazing to these guys. They were trying to figure out what was wrong, and what kind of shenanigans this was...

PS: They were looking for the man behind the curtain?

RLH: That's a good way to put it. But there was no man behind the curtain. The thing just sat there and they looked in and there's this bright spot in the middle and it just stared right at them and the neutron counter when clickety click and that was kind of mind boggling to them.

PS: So what happened, why didn't they fund the proposal?

RLH: I thought I did as good a job as I was capable of doing. I was answering questions honestly. When I didn't know I told them I didn't know. I told them what I thought and what was speculation, and how the experiments were run and everything, and I thought it was going very very well. The turning point was when a fellow named Tom Stix -- who was a professor from Princeton -- leaned back in his chair and said, "if we fund this, whose budget is it going to come out of?" I will never forget those words as long as I live, because that's when I knew the game was over. Because it was strictly that if there was going to be some money that went for that it was going to come out of somebody's existing budget because that's the way the program was run and that's when I knew it was all over.

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That should give you some idea why we don't have practical fusion energy today, and why the IEC approach still goes wanting for funding at an appropriate level. The establishment has
always been biased against it, and there has never been adequate funding to determine if the approach is viable or not. There it is, straight from the Hirsch's mouth, so to speak.

A "scandal," the man called it...

Amen.

--PS

[Starfire]

Tks Paul -- a very good article -- valuable information