Farnsworth claims

[Richard Hull]

There is much discussion about what Farnsworth did and did not do.

There have been a flurry of books. Most have it all wrong. Most authors did not dig into fusion the way they dug into the TV story. Even the perfessor includes the episode at the end of his book, but his work is obviously the very best of the lot.

Vassilatos and others are just wrong, the book is wrong and there is no written evidence that even one sustained fusion interval, no matter how brief, ever existed.

As to Farnsworth's claims...... Two people on the team were actually present when Farnsworth was taking notes on several different occassions. Both claimed to see him enter numbers that were just not supported by the data that they were physically reporting to Farnsworth at that very moment in time!!! One even mentioned it to him and said Farnsworth just smiled, closed the note book, picked it up and left the room.

As for Pem's witnessing the meters pinning in that "private run" with Phil late at night............Gene meeks remembered the incident as he had to replace that meter the next day. It was the fusor HV supply current meter. Phil had just applied so much voltage in that private session to get the neutron counter to count, that the current tried to go to infinity, (electron avalache due to thermal emission), then the meter pinned and burned out. George Bain ordered Gene to replace the meter and to call him if Phil ever attempted to run the fusor alone again. All of the folks on the team agreed that it was always an "A-hole" puckering moment when Phil was at the controls. He was not familiar with the systems as he rarely worked on them, especially later in the effort after 1964.

I asked several of the members of the team why on earth Phil might make up numbers. The most kind and generous said that Phil might have to do that in the notebooks to keep funding, make the Admiral happy, etc. The one or two who spoke from the gut said that Phil KNEW in his MIND what he should be getting and marked those numbers down.........AND ON MORE THAN ONE OCCASSION! Again, these general comments along with a lot of eyes rolling around in the head and broad smiles, gave me the impression that even with notebooks in hand, some of the data couldn't be trusted. All the while and to the man, every one on the team adored Phil and thought him the finest of people to be associated with.

As real fusor operators we have all had to slam the control wheel back to zero because we got too close to thermal- electron avalanche in our fusors. Only a Farnsworth team member used to operating a fusor or some of us on this list could appreciate and identifiy with this condition. Pem, observing in a private session might assume or be told by her Husband "Look at that!" The incident would stick in a non-technical, non-fusion persons head. Later it would be pinned into a book.

Finally, during the claimed real runaway fusor incident, Phil was not even in the building!!! From my notes, only three people were present. one is dead, another is permenantely disabled and un-communicative from a stroke and the final man has had a stroke and recovered over two years, but has lost some of his long term memory. The most lucid and recollective report on this incident is heresay by Steve Blaising who said that an ashen faced and nervous John Fisher (deasesed) told him of the incident the next morning. Fisher was a tech (one of the sharpest according to Steve). Fisher, Gene Meeks and Steve were intrumentation specialists. Fisher said the neutron meter went off scale, the power supply needles started jumping in both current and voltage. The entire pit area had a brilliant light in it and Bain immediately killed power. All of the neutron badges hung down in the pit walls were collected along with the personal badges. The badge report came back that the personal badges did have a moderate exposure, but all of the three pit area badges were pitch black with no way of indicating the exposure.

No internal ITT report was ever issued of this specific incident as Bain feared a major shutdown of th project and as there was little human exposure no report was needed. Fisher was advised to keep quiet.

Bain, who I interviewed shortly before his massive stroke in 2000 was a bit cagey and brushed it off as one of a frequent group of "burn throughs". Bain was the hard-nosed, by the book project engineering manager that most folk felt was a good man, but a bit to tight assed. Of course in the engineering and rad safety area, HIS, ass was the one on the line with ITT corporate and the Admiral.

Yes! when they started using Tritium in late 64 and early 65, they had to weekly pee in a cup for the company doctor.

With no more data than this there is no point in going beyond this heresay. Haak, the living witness with memory loss remembers the incident and remains firmly convinced that it was ignition, but he is the only one alive thinking this.

Richard Hull

[Adam Szendrey]

Interesting, thanks Richard...there is a lot more to the history of the Fusor than i thought...It was a complicated project, both technically, and personally. Yea, i know it's kinda "conspiracy theory", but it is a peculiar coincidence, that all three people present, were somehow "disabled", being unable to remember the details, or at all (ie. being dead). I'm sure the ITT had "misplaced" a number of papers, reports, etc...
Isn't there a possibility , that somewhere the reasearch continued under cover? Without the knowledge of the fusor "old hats". I like speculating, that's all .
Thing is, that you and many others say, that if something works , the world of science is quickly stirred up, and research is being done into the subject. Like if an o/u device would exist, we would already be using it...
Now look at the fusor!A functional, cheap, though at the time not practical fusion reactor. It was forgotten...(or made forgotten, on that point the article is correct i think). I still don't think it's about science at all...it's about personal, or group interests coupled with plain old human stupidity and dumbness, neglect, etc...we witness it even here, on the forums every once in a while.... And not a single person on this planet can convince me otherwise.

Adam

[Frank Sanns]

I am taking the liberty of transfering my calculations to this thread since I think it is a better long term place.

It is highly unlikely that a true neutron runaway took place from a health physics stand point. Here is why. One eV=1.6E-19 Joules so the average energy release from one fusion is 4 MeV=6.4E-13 Joules. Now ask yourself, how much energy would it take to perforate a stainless steel chamber. Even in the thinest area, it takes quite a bit of energy. I have a pulsed Nd/glass laser with 60 joules out. It will only put a 0.5 millimeter hole through a piece of stainless steel that is 1 millimeter thick. Just to do enough fusion to barely put a hole in a fusor if all that energy were focused in a tiny spot would be 60 joules / 6.4E-13 Joules per fusion. This equals 9.36E13 neutrons. Divide that by 2 because neutrons are only produced by half of the fusion reactions (only the He3 product) so you get 4.7E13 neutrons. This is just for a single tiny focused pinhole. In reality the total number of joules released to breach a fusion chamber would most likely be hundreds or thousands of times more. This puts the number up in the 10^15 to 10^17 neutrons/second area. These kind of numbers for 20 seconds contiuous are huge.

Radiation levels would have been huge! To put this into perspective since most of us don't have neutron sources lying around, let me put this in the perspective of a gamma source. One curie of Radium is 3.7E10 disintegrations per second. 10E15 to 10E17 neutrons would be like standing near 10^5 to 10^7 curies of radium times a quality factor of a decade more. How far do you have to stand from 1 million to 10 million curies of radium and survive 20 seconds without sickness or death! Pit and shielding or not, those are a ton of neutrons!

Frank S.

[Adam Szendrey]

And what about the blacked out dosimeters from the pit?
Richard, was that pit covered with lead to protect the researchers?
They were never directly exposed, so the layer of lead (if there was any) , plus concrete, plus the very short time of exposure all together can give an explanation why they have survived.
And don't forget, the chamber might have not been melted by fusion! This runaway was probably paired with a current surge of some kind, and that might have melted the chamber. If the grid has been heated (by the extreme current, plus the fusion runaway) to extreme temperatures, it would act as thermite, and melt a hole into the chamber wall...the vacuum implosion does the rest. Also, if i'm not mistaken they used a rather thin walled chamber, if it's not even penetrated, but at a spot heated to a temperature ,where it becomes weak, the atm. pressure could have punched a hole into it. Even with a thicker wall.

Adam

[badflash]

I have no idea what pressure the fusor was operating at, but a rough calculation I just did would indicate that if all the D-T in the unit fused, it would produce at best a few thousand BTU's of heat. Maybe something like 1E19 neutrons total. I'll have to do some calcs to see what sort of rad level that would give at ~2.2 Mev and 20'-30' distance. I can't think it would be very high with any sort of dirt shielding.

Lead provides almost no neutron protection. It just scatters neutrons. You need something to slow the neutrons and then something to absorb them. Light stuff rich in hydrogen such as water or poly works well. Boron is the atom of choice to absorb.

If you think about the fusor, how could it ever sustain fusion without outside power? What would hold things together after the power was off?

[Adam Szendrey]

This runaway happened while power was applied. It did not continues after the power was cut off, but even if it would've the chamber has ruptured.
Interesting to note, that something holds together a ball lightning aswell, and i doubt it's a microwave phenomena, it's an electrostatic event, though we know little about it. I'm not saying it has anything to do with the fusor.
Anyway it was cleared , thanks to Richard, that there was no such "powerless" fusion ever in that lab.

Adam

[Richard Hull]

This speaks to Frank's reply and adam's.

The one person who was there, is cogent and alive and does remember certain details. During the event.......

1.No hole was produced in the device on this occassion.
2.The device turned off instantly with the power shutdown.
3. Vacuum conditions were lost quickly due electron runaway outgassing and volitizing thin metal parts, none of which were damaged severely.

Mechanically, the event did no damage of a significant nature! A lot of tales swim around this event, but this is what Haak told me. Haak verified that on at least three occasions during the fusor period, they did burn pin holes in the devices with the ion beams from the guns. These were not times of unusual neutron events just plain old burn throughs. It is important not to confuse loss of vacuum pressure with a hole in the device versus a repressurization due to volitization. The vacuum gauge will read the same in both instances.

The blackend dosimeters are the hardest item to explain away.

Yes, the pit was incredibly well shielded with special pour borated concrete and block. ITT was frightened enough at Farnsworths claims of what he was PLANNING to do that when the Pit was dug, it was heavily shielded as if a real reactor would be started up underground at Pontiac street! The cave was above ground but used a double layer of borated block.

The Pit's "sky shine" was considered and the offices above the area were converted to storage areas and the office personnel placed at the other end of the building. If one thing bugged the ITT management, it was that they would get in trouble doing nuclear stuff in a manufacturing facility. The Admiral assured them that these were small scale systems.

Richard Hull

[Adam Szendrey]

I think this further supports that a true neutron runaway happened. Thanks Richard. I don't know if we can ever replicate it, as you have said we are more likely to stumble into it.
But it shows, that there is some event, or a chain of events, that causes a fusion cascade. Now, to find the cause(s)...

Adam

[Frank Sanns]

Richard,

I had no idea that they had that level of shielding! Thank you for filling in some of the blanks. That makes the dosimeter reading all the more suspect. If there was proper shieilding and the dosimeters where on the personell in the shielded area, then it was most likely a dosimeter processing error (or N rays) that was responsible.

Many things we will never know!

Frank S.

[Adam Szendrey]

The blackened dosimeters were in the pit if i'm not mistaken.

Quote:
"The badge report came back that the personal badges did have a moderate exposure, but all of the three pit area badges were pitch black with no way of indicating the exposure."

Adan

[Frank Sanns]

Exactly. So if the dosimeters were behind mountains of shields how could the radiation been from the fusor. If there was enough radiation coming through a commercial reactor level of shielding, I think the people in the other end of the buiding would not have made it very long after exposure and I think the fusor would have been vaporized. All the more reason to think it was a lab development error on processing all of the film that day.

Frank S.

[Adam Szendrey]

No, those badges were INSIDE the pit, directly exposed to radiation. The reactor was in the pit.
The personal badges only measured a moderate exposure, thanks to the shielding.

Adam

[3l]

Hi Guys:

I hate to burst your bubble but film badges can be bad from the factory you know. When I worked with the badges it was a pain in the tail. A screwup in developing them with bad or out of date
developer or sloppy photolab proceedures can give you the "Black badge". Most government labs abandoned the badges due to their inherent unreliabilty. Dosimeters are better by far. The human factor is by far the worst on the multi step badge proceedure. We had a staff of twenty people who's only job was badges. When a black batch showed up everybody got their blood drawn. Almost always a false positve.
It is not uncommon for a group of badges say from one area to get developed en mass. So all that area's badges would turn black.

Happy Fusoring!
Larry Leins
Fusor Tech

[Adam Szendrey]

Strange coincidence, that just when the fusor "blows" (not literally) that group of badges is developed badly...oh okay, i give in, it was nothing more than a screwup? So be it. It is indeed more likely. The fusor will not produce a runaway just because i wish it would.

Adam

[Richard Hull]

Again, the ever skidish and easily alarmed Bains had Fisher collect all badges at the same time and mailed all off for a single "out of the normal date" pull report. He was concerned mostly due to the two eberline PS-1's going nuts coincident with the light in the pit. Thus, the total badge pull for testing.

This was 3 pit badges 2 on the walls of the pit (inside) about 1 meter from the fusor and a third about 1 foot from the fusor on its mount frame. In addition was 3 personal badges of the same type as the pit badges. It is close to inconceivable that a bag of 6 badges received by the processor would selectively develop the lot in two runs one with bad developer and the other control badges in yet another run. The personal badges DID NOT indicate a dose of reportable significance based on a normal cycle run.

The pit control numbered badges were "fully exposed." Unfortunately, this was not a normal cycle run. The badge developers didn't know any of this. They just report a rem/milli-rem figure for the badge accumulated exposures and that is all. They have no knowledge of the rate or time related to the badge exposure, nor do they care. It is up to the customer's local health physics department to maintain records for the control number and divide the total dose reported by the worker's badge -on time at work to arrive at a viable rate.

Bain was never concerned with the personal exposure as they were protected and received only a moderate and tolerable exposure during the event. No other workers anywhere in the building was exposed either.

Traditionally, no fusor run was ever conducted during work hours. The team members would set it up during the day for a run, go home, eat dinner, return and do the run and be out of the place, hopefully, by 9PM, according to Bain and Meeks. It was rare to actually have a formal run more than once a month!!!

Richard Hull

[Frank Sanns]

The plot thickens but hopefully my last question. I suppose that the film badges were sensitive to x-rays and not neutrons. Is it not entirely possible that a thermionic runaway could have produced a momentary high x-ray flux from the fusor and was responsible for the film badge exposures?

Frank S.

[Adam Szendrey]

But at those voltages, way above 100 kV, wouldn't the fusor emit x-rays big time, anyway?
Were those badges meant to only measure neutron radiation exposure, or radiation generally? If it's a film,can't it be "blackened" by any form of high energy radiation?

Though those n-detectors also went crazy, ofcourse that might have been caused by EMI. To me the facts still support a n-event.

Adam

[3l]

Hi Guys:

Too bad the bubble detectors didn't exist at that time.
This discussion tho pretty neat shows how much of the work depends on good detection.
We now have the the best detector yet devised for fast neutrons.
In time we meet or exceed fusor yields.... and be beyond criticism and doubt.
I call that progress!

Happy Fusoring!
Larry Leins
Fusor Tech

[Richard Hull]

The badge type and specifics are not known. I have tried to determine this. Bain was the registered radiation safety officer and Fisher was his assistant in this task. Fisher did all the put-and-place work.......collect badges on schedule, log the mating numbers to persons in the record book, issue new badges, mail off to processor, etc. Bain received and wrote up all the scheduled and required RAD reports, followed the QC and attended to shielding calcs and other ongoing radiation safety needs and monitoring. Once Tritium came into use, the on-site medical and safety office with its doctor and nurse had to monitor tritium absorption in the fusor team workers and report to the AEC directly.

Bain is the man who had the massive stroke from which he still can't speak. So a phone interview is impossible. I have talked with him in 15 phone conversaions and spent 10 hours one day in his presence in one of my Fort Wayne visits. All prior to his stroke. His memory for minutia as in many of the workers still alive is ever fading. At that time, he was foggy about the badge type. There are all sorts of badges of course. The most common badge has a small lead casing about the film as they ideally only wnat to capture x-rays and gamma rays for most purposes. Neutron specific badges usually have a special boron rich substrate in contact with the film which also has a special emulsion.

I do know that a neutron badge responds fully to x-rays and gamma rays as a normal badge does, however the regular badge responds only marginally to neutrons.

I did not ask if the badges were in the pit and behind a parafin moderator which would have, effectively, turned regular badges into neutron badges. Still they WOULD respond, as all badges do to x-rays, and gammas.

I would think that working with fusors on and off in the pit that used voltages well over 80kev all the time, that they would have shielded them fully against normal 100kev xrays. (1/4" lead.) otherwise, every report from the processors would have been fully exposed!! Thus a fully blackened badge from the pit area would have been no big deal. However, in this instance it was a big deal.

Finally, I have really researched the hell out of the fusor effort, but I always have new questions pop into my head. If possible, I generate a call to one or more of the researchers to get the answer.

Added later same day...............

I just contacted Steve Blaising who, as it turns out, replaced Jack Fisher as the radiation safety assistant and got a lot of specific data. Of the remaining living people only Bob Hirsch, Steve Blaising and Gene Meeks remain sharp and vibrant.

The Farnsworth team used special FAST neutron badges manufactured and processed by Nuclear Chicago Corp. Steve was sent to a one day class on the badge!! The badge had a 1/2" thick UHMW polyethylene casing with an indium foil covering the special borated film.

So the badges were not toys nor generic in any sense of the term. Instead, they were special neutron badges handled in a special way by a famous nuclear manufacturer.

Unfortunately, an attempt to reach Geoge Bain failed. His phone is disconnected with no new data. I am worried that he has passed away! He and his wife just moved in 2001 and I fear she may have moved back home to Indiana. So another contact slips from our grasp. I will keep trying to raise the Bains.

I am glad I made the call to Steve though and hope that George is still with us.


Richard Hull

[Adam Szendrey]

From the answers given to Frank's pros and questions, plus the extra information, leads us to a clear conclusion: that it most likely was a high-flux neutron event. Still, ofcourse, we cannot be ABSOLUTELY sure...
This spells hope for us. And it's also a warning, i think.

Adam

[Richard Hull]

I keep an open mind on this, but am leaning towards a neutron event. If it was, I am sure it wasn't ignition and we know it not to be self-sustaining. At the very best, if neutronic, it was a condition, a sweet spot, that was never replicated. To George Bain it was an interelectrode short. To Haak it was real fusion. To Blaising it was his frightened friend's account of events that were most unusual. (Jack Fisher's excited and fearful story to Blaising the morning after the event with subsequent reports by Jack to Steve on the results of the badge reports from Nuclear Chicago.)

The highest neutron exposure on any personal badge during the entire 9 year fusor effort was that of Steve Blaising when he was working with a half Curie sealed Ra-Be source for about a week. He was ordered to cease working with the source once his badge report came back. I am sure that a signficant fraction of his exposure was due to the radium and daughter gamma radiation. This is why Ra-Be source just aren't used these days....Far too much associated gamma. This is easily avoided using a modern Am-Be source.

Richard Hull

[Richard Hester]

Of course a hot Am-Be source is no sweetheart, either, as fast neutrons are one of the most damaging forms of radiation. Alphas beat them in terms of RBE, but alpha emitters need to be ingested to do any significant damage, while fast neutrons penetrate every part of the body from the outside and do tremendous damage via recoil protons, with a nice, energetic capture gamma as the little cherry on top of the cake.

[Alex Aitken]

Having said that half a curie would only be producing in the region of 10^6 n/s absolute max. The amount of beta/gamma coming off could easily be ten thousand times higher for a RaBe source.

[Richard Hester]

I still wouldn't tuck it under my pillow....