Bob Hirsch and I have discussed a lot of fundig specific questions over the last couple of years. Hindsight is always 20-20, of course.
I have talked extensively about some of this on the old board and the posts are still up.
His only excuse was that he wanted fusion now, and came into office having tasted decent fusion results at ITT/Farnsworth. He saw that the various fusion labs were most autonimous and loosely regulated with many small efforts looking at theoretical concerns of plasmas ONLY!! Fusion was a secondary concern of the labs in 1970.
This really upset him. He felt he had inherited a nickel and dime effort at fusion which was redirecting itself to the study theoretical plasma physics. When he came in only about 10-20 million a year was spent on every thing, across the board, each year! He sought to centralize command rather than let a bunch of egg-heads muse and dabble at plasma physics. He came up with a great idea which would immediately get him in trouble with 100% of the extant program directors and experimenters.
1. Washington and the AEC and Bob Hirsch would be breathing down everyones throat on a daily basis. (Egg heads losing control and answering hard questions)
2. All programs at the various labs would be reviewed immediately and half-hearted and failing efforts would be shut down immediately. (egg-heads outta' work) Two such projects were indeed shut down within six months as sacrificial lambs and proof that Bob Hirsch was a lethal device, armed and loose, looking to acquire new targets.
3. No longer would the labs decide what they would be doing or be in absolute, unfettered control of their work. Instead, specific milestones would be set and fixed in stone. Failure to meet a milestone would result in immediate review and most likely cancellation (egg-heads and hangers-on out of work)
4. Fusion was the goal and nothing else. (Egg-heads would have to stand on equal footing or share the stage with yucky old engineering types.)
5. A lot of money was going to be forced down the throats of the labs with the best ideas, most of which tended to look at scale up as the solution. (Egg-heads forced to spend money on stuff they were not sure they needed inorder to look like they were actively in serach of the fusion nirvanna.)
So.....................
Basically, Bob Hirsch generated a lot of bile within the extant fusion crowd in place at the time of his appointment.
Also, the Russian Tokomak was looking about two orders of magnitude better than anything the best programs in the US had on line at that time.
Hirsch forced many labs to consider the option of importing this Russian device into the Americas. Some of the labs realized that if they were to survive and be able to spend the sums anticipated, the tokomak would afford a good shield and act as a money dump, and as a from scratch effort, might have reduced milstones for a few years due to a total lack of US fusion program familiarity with the system.
Many labs jumped on this band wagon for a number of reasons.
Hirsch was hopeful that with real money pouring into an all out fusion effort and with Engineers sobering up the eggheads and acting as gravity boots for their wild musings, fusion might really be a doable thing within 10-20 years. This, coupled with hard and fast milestones, would also act to "thin the herd" and focus in on the best avenues of research.
Not an un-reasonable course of action at the time, until the 20-20 hindsight of today kicks in.
So, Bob Hirsch is no evil being, but just an administrator tired of a slow and plodding fusion effort which he viewed a just a plasma physics playground.
He has never lost the love of the IECF concept, but could not redirect funds to get it off the ground. He tried, but failed. Too many resentful folks already looking at him through a magnifiying glass....... A personal aggenda hailing back to his failed effort to obtain funding 3 years earlier for the fusor, might appear as payback for this rejection coupled with stealing their funding to do this worthless IECF stuff being funneled of to his cronies.
Bob was politicized enough by now to look out for the land mines.
One the other question you asked, Bob now feels a couple of million dollars per accepted idea would get the ball rolling on a lot of decent alternative fusion ideas. The key is low staffing, inspired project heads and short project "proof of concept" time frames. Let's face it..... This is a megabuck world now in science for any startup effort..........gigabucks if the thing is a goer! Five figures wouldn't even cover the feasibilty study!
Richard Hull
Created on Monday, January 22, 2001 5:58 PM EDT by Richard Hull