Hi, I’m Jessica. I’m Amy. I’m Ted. Here’s a riddle. There’s something you do all the time, and you probably don’t even know it. What is it? Here’s a hint. Need a little more help? Watch this. You know what it is?

Here’s one more hint. Yes! Oh! I still beat you! Okay, time’s up.

So, what’s the answer? What do you do all the time without even knowing it? Drive your parents crazy? Go to school with a goofy haircut? Make awful noises when you chew? We all do those things, but that’s not it. The answer is you use nuclear energy. That’s right, nuclear energy. But if you guessed that you use electricity, you’re right too, because we use nuclear energy to make a lot of electricity and we do it by splitting atoms.

It’s an electrifying experience.

About 1 fifth of the electricity we use comes from nuclear energy. Does that sound like a lot? It does if you think about it like this. In the whole country, about 1 out of every 5 houses gets its electricity from nuclear energy. You might even use it every time you turn on a light. But even if nuclear energy isn’t used to light your home, you still use it. How? Because nuclear plants make the electricity that is used to make all kinds of stuff, like the clothes you wear, or a cool TV show. Or a frozen pizza.

So, why do we use all this nuclear power? Because we use a lot of electricity. Just imagine how much electricity it would take to keep millions and millions of people warm in a big city like New York. And just think how much electricity they need for all these lights. Or take some place where it’s hot most of the time, like Florida. Imagine how much electricity it takes to run all the air conditioners in the whole state for a whole year. Wait a minute, what about malls?

Think about how much electricity it takes to run all the malls in America. We use a lot of electricity. Just look at New York. It uses about 87 million kilowatt hours of electricity every day. That’s a really big number. But what does it mean? It means you could run not just 100, not just 1,000, but 100,000 100 watt light bulbs 24 hours a day for a whole year on about the same amount of electricity New York City uses in one day. And that’s just one city for one day. How do we get enough electricity to run the whole country?

We use different kinds of power plants to get the electricity that we need. Nuclear plants like this one in New York are just one kind. The state of New York gets almost a fourth of its electricity from nuclear plants. A lot of other states get even more of their electricity from them. Some states get more than half from nuclear power. Vermont gets over three-fourths of its electricity from it. In the whole country, over 100 nuclear plants make electricity. Now you know how much we use nuclear power.

So let’s find out how it works. Let’s start with how we make electricity. To make electricity, you need a generator. This one makes the electricity to run the light on Jessica’s bike. As she pedals, the tire turns into generator shots, and the generator makes electricity. But there’s a really big problem when you make electricity like this. It’s hard work!

Lucky for us, there are easier ways to turn a generator shaft, like falling water. The water turns this pinwheel, which turns a generator shaft and makes electricity. We use falling water to make electricity every day. It’s called hydroelectric power. The water is collected behind dams like this one.

Inside that building, falling water turns giant pinwheels called turbines. It’s like Jessica’s pedaling. The turbines turn generator shafts that go into big generators and they make electricity. A lot more than you can make on a bike, but not enough for all the electricity we need. We can only get about a tenth of our electricity from hydroelectric dams. Because you’ve already built all of the dams in places we can put them. That’s why most power plants use something else to turn their generator shafts. They use steam.

To get enough steam to make electricity, you need to heat water with something that gets really hot, like coal or oil or natural gas. This power plant uses oil to make steam. Oil, natural gas, and coal are called fossil fuels. Fossil fuel plants make most of our electricity, about two-thirds. But there’s another way to make electricity, nuclear power.

A nuclear power plant works just like a fossil fuel plant, except instead of using coal, gas, or oil to make steam, It uses atoms of the element uranium. Here’s what a pellet of uranium fuel looks like. Uranium can be very powerful. A little bit can make a lot of electricity. A pellet this size can make the same amount of electricity as a whole ton of coal. So where does uranium fuel get its power? From the enormous energy stored inside its atoms. Nuclear power plants gets energy by splitting atoms apart. It’s called nuclear fission. Here’s how it works.

There are special kinds of uranium atoms that will split in two. They split when a certain type of very small particle smashes into them. When a uranium atom splits, it gives off a few more of these particles. It also gives off energy in the form of heat.

Each particle can go on to split another of the special uranium atoms. Every atom that splits gives off more particles and more heat. And those particles go on to split even more atoms, which give off even more particles and more heat. This is called a chain reaction and it makes lots of heat, enough to turn water into steam to make electricity. Uranium fuel comes from a natural resource, uranium ore. It’s mined from the ground like gold.

But before it can be used to make electricity, it has to be processed. That’s because there aren’t enough special atoms in the raw uranium to make the chain reaction work. So the atoms have to be concentrated. They’re processed called enrichment.

The amount of these atoms goes from one percent to three percent. The uranium can then be used as fuel in a nuclear reactor. Some people think this fuel can explode like a nuclear bomb. That’s not true. It isn’t powerful enough. Uranium used in bombs is over 30 times more concentrated than nuclear fuel. After it’s been concentrated, the uranium is made into pellets. The pellets are stacked in long, hollow metal tubes and bundled together. The bundles are used as fuel in a nuclear power plant. Now, let’s see how a nuclear plant makes steam. The bundles of uranium fuel go into a part of a nuclear plant called the core. Control rods are placed between the fuel bundles.

They’re made of a material that gets in the way of the chain reaction. When they are taken away, the chain reaction starts and the core gets real hot. The heat is used to turn water into steam and the steam is used to make electricity. To slow down or to stop the chain reaction, the control rods are moved back between the fuel bundles. A nuclear reaction creates a lot of heat. That’s why it can make so much electricity. And it also makes something called radiation. There’s some radiation around you all the time. It comes from all kinds of things, like the sun and even your TV set.

A little bit of radiation isn’t harmful, but a lot can be. So it’s important to keep as much radiation as possible from getting into the environment. Because of radiation, a nuclear plant has to be built safer than just about anything else in the world.

It needs special plans, people, and equipment. And it has to be made out of special materials. Radiation and nuclear power plants to be stopped by thick metal and concrete. To keep radiation from getting into the environment, the core of a nuclear plant sits inside a special metal tank. It’s made of steel that’s nine inches thick. That’s thick enough to keep the radiation inside. But then, to be extra sure, this tank sits inside walls made of concrete three feet thick. The thick walls are part of that building. It’s called the containment building because it contains the radiation in the core, and it keeps it inside.

Okay, we know a nuclear plant heats up all this water and turns it into steam to make electricity. So what happens to the steam? The steam turns to turbines, and it goes in the special coolers where it becomes hot water. But then it has to cool off even more. One way nuclear plants can cool the water is to pump it inside those weird-looking things. They’re called cooling towers. They’re full of nothing but air. The shape of the cooling tower brings air in from the bottom. The air cools the hot water as it falls like rain into a special pond underneath. If you think this water might be radioactive, well, it’s not because it never touches the radioactivity in the core. Once the water is cool enough, it goes back into the river. The smoke you see at the top is only water vapor. So what have we found out today? For one thing, we use a lot of electricity. And we found out that about one-fifth of it comes from nuclear power plants. You’re using electricity that comes from nuclear energy right now.

It was used to help make the film you’re watching. So when you’re cold… When you’re really hot. When you’re having fun. Or when you’re just goofing off. You use nuclear energy all the time without even knowing it. Yeah, I guess that’s it. Yeah, hey, guys, want more soda? All right. I’ll try a lemon light on this time. You always have that. Try something different. Orange is good. Okay, that’s really good. You can find out more about nuclear energy at your local library. Or you can read the Harnessed Atom. You can get it from the United States Department of Energy. I’ll see you next time.

Accidents happen. Transportation accidents can involve the carriers of containers used to transport highly radioactive materials, such as the spent fuel from nuclear power plants.

These containers, called casks, are designed by engineers in the nuclear industry and the federal government to survive the potential hazards of transportation accidents.

Casks must pass a series of qualification tests prescribed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Transportation that simulate the threat that casks would face in serious accidents involving impact, puncture, fire, and immersion.

When a new cask is being developed, designers must demonstrate, either with analysis, experiment, or both, that it can survive the impact conditions of a 30-foot drop onto an unyielding target.

Other prescribed tests in the sequence include puncture, fire, and extended immersion in water.

Beyond the required tests, casks have been dropped from 2,000 feet onto hardpan desert soil in order to evaluate the effect of different targets and impact velocities.

despite such tests and despite the fact that no cast designed for the shipment of highly radioactive material has ever leaked as the result of a transportation accident a question frequently asked is but how do you really know the casks would survive actual accidents to answer that question engineers at Sandia National Laboratories have undertaken studies to ascertain whether current analytical methods can accurately predict what will happen in very severe accident environments. The first step is to develop a mathematical model of the entire physical system and then evaluate the model with a computer. One measures and determines weights and describes how various sections and elements of the transportation system will react in an accident. How much force it will take to crush these elements. How much energy they will absorb and how the container will interact with the transportation system.

One strips away all extraneous elements, looks only at the basic structure, the frame, the sheet metal, the engine and wheels, the cask itself, the tie-downs.

One studies the strengths of the various materials, calculates the forces of crushing or crumpling the structural elements.

With this information, the computer is used to determine how fast the cask will be traveling when it reaches the massive object it impacts.

Reduced to simplest terms, this is the general framework of the problem.

Computers are used to obtain solutions to these problems, to tell what will happen to the various elements of the total system in a specified set of accident conditions.

Using the output of the system dynamics model as the input data for the cask deformation model, the engineer can use the computer to analyze what will happen to the cask.

With information on the various materials used in constructing the cask and the yellow impact limiters that absorb energy during a crash, plus knowledge of their physical arrangement and the speed of impact, the engineer can predict the extent of cask deformation.

Scale model testing is one possible way of verifying the computer analysis.

Tools such as a centrifuge and high-speed cameras, for example,

Allow a cask to be studied during a severe impact without concern for any vehicular structure around it.

A centrifuge can be used to study all kinds of impacts, side-on or angle, and at various speeds.

After a series of scale model centrifuge tests and mathematical predictions,

it appeared that the casks would survive even extremely severe impacts without loss of containment or shielding.

Three specific transportation accident environments were then analyzed.

First, by computer simulations or studies, then in a series of 1-8 scale model tests of simulated accidents.

The first scale model test simulated a truck transporting a nuclear cask crashing into a solid concrete structure at 60 miles per hour.

The spray is from the braking system for the rocket sled.

Other tests were conducted at 70 to 80 miles per hour.

All models were instrumented to measure such things as the acceleration of the cask through the time of impact.

This series of close-ups shows the deformation to the casks.

The second accident situation involved a grade-crossing accident

in which a stalled tractor-trailer is hit by a diesel locomotive traveling at high speed.

The model cask was mounted across the track on supports simulating the bed of a tractor trailer.

The scale model locomotive was propelled by rockets to a speed of 80 miles per hour.

It smashed into the cask and swept it away.

Here’s a slow motion close-up of what happened during impact.

The cask fins were bent and there were dents where the locomotive frame had hit,

but there was no passage open to the cask interior.

The third accident situation simulated a rail-mounted nuclear fuel cast involved in a high-speed train accident in which the cast car impacts a solid structure, such as a massive bridge support.

In the scale model test you’re about to see, the rail car was traveling 80 miles per hour at impact.

Following the scale model tests, a series of full-scale tests was conducted in order to verify the accuracy of analytical prediction techniques.

These tests represent an upper limit in the range of credible accidents. is they are severe over tests. Here in real time is the 60 mile per hour test. cask sustained some minor damage but pressure tests after impact indicated that there was no loss of containment integrity that is there would have been no release of radioactive material most important however was the fact that the damage that occurred was similar to the damage that had been predicted analytically the damage that had in fact already been seen in the scale model tests the test allowed designers and engineers to correlate the results of mathematical computer modeling, scale model testing, and the full-scale testing of a cask on a truck.

Here, in slow motion, we can compare the scale model test at the top of the screen with the full-scale test.

The cask that survived the 60 mile per hour test was then cleaned up and readied for a second test of the same type, this one at 84 miles per hour.

Results of this test also closely paralleled predictions.

The cask again survived without damage serious enough to jeopardize containment of its contents.

In the third test sequence, a diesel locomotive crashed into a stalled truck carrying a nuclear fuel cask.

By an array of six rockets the locomotive was traveling 81 miles per hour when it struck the 22-ton cask. This slow-motion footage shows more clearly what happened at impact.

Here, for comparison’s sake, is the impact of both the scale model and the full scale locomotives.

In the fourth test, a railroad cast car was crashed into a 690-ton concrete abutment at 80 miles per hour.

These shots show how the crumpling of the front end of the car structure absorbed much of the impact energy, thus protecting the cask.

Here again, there was close correlation between the results of the scale model test and the full scale test.

Following the crash test, the cask and rail car were moved to a fire test site and immersed for 90 minutes in burning JP4 jet fuel. Temperatures experienced by the cask ranged between 1800 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit. The rail car carrying the cask eventually warped and rolled onto its side, but the cask survived more than an hour and a half of fire with no consequences that would have affected its ability to contain its radioactive contents.

The full-scale tests made it clear that existing mathematical modeling techniques and scale model testing are valid and inexpensive methods of evaluating the structural properties of nuclear transport casks.

Even in the event those casks were to be exposed to extremely violent transportation environments, since these modeling and testing techniques proved valid, they can be used in the future in the design of casks and other shipping systems.

We are trying to do exactly what the sun does.

We have to build big machines, very expensive machines to carry out our research.

There’s no doubt that job turned out to be more difficult than people thought 20, 25 years ago.

Fusion is so important to the future of the world.

3, 2, 1, shot.

The only catch is that we don’t have it yet.

3, 2, 1, push.

In our estimation, for the next century, we need fusion.

It’s a bright sunny morning in Princeton, New Jersey. Rob Goldston leaves his car in the driveway and rides his bike to work. It’s his daily quest for fusion energy, a quest to copy the sun.

And what we’re trying to do is imitate the fusion process that goes on in the sun, create energy by the same kinds of physics, but within the laboratory.

The laboratory is Princeton’s plasma physics lab. It’s been home to fusion research since Harry Truman was president.

Goldston manages experiments run by the 75 scientists here, trying to see if fusion could be an economical alternative source of energy.

The quest for fusion energy has been a long and winding road, much like the concrete corridors leading to Princeton University’s fusion test reactor.

A lot of fusion veterans walk through here.

Goldston’s 16 years in fusion science is only a fraction of the collective 2,000 fusion research years that Princeton physicists have logged.

This is where science hopes to open the door to a new future where energy is safe, clean, and unlimited. it but even approaching that door has taken many years lots of money and engineering wizardry like this huge fusion test reactor and there’s a sense that it’s a much more expensive experiment than we’ve worked with before and so we have to be more careful than before but it’s mostly exciting it’s mostly an experience of new physics new regimes we haven’t been to before so the the experiment experiences exhilaration more than feeling a sense of being imposed upon by it. Princeton’s TFTR, as it’s called, is among the world’s largest fusion test reactors, $350 million worth of copper, stainless steel, and cable.

Fifty years from now, history may remember TFTR as the forerunner of clean, safe, endless energy. But for what may already seem to be an endless era of research, TFTR amounts to one giant physics experiment to which dozens of scientists dedicate their time and their lives. It’s a one mega amp shot with 12 mega amps of balanced beam injection. The control room resembles the Houston Control Center that monitors space shots. There’s even a countdown.

One minute.

But instead of rockets blasting, here motors whine.

The sound of the reactor draining power reserves to fire up atoms and run giant magnets. Oh, that’s pretty. That’s a nice shot. Look at that. That’s really quiet. They’re called shots because each one lasts only about five seconds. Scientists feel if they can make fusion reactions last longer, we won’t have to worry if we run out of coal or oil. If we do not have this alternative source of energy, we will be in a world situation that would be much worse than where we could be if this energy were available.

The energy available today won’t be around tomorrow. The world’s growing population, forecast as high as 10 billion next century, will tax our depleting supplies of coal and oil.

Today’s nuclear power picks up some of the slack, but safety and reliability issues have already stifled the growth of nuclear fission. The answer to tomorrow’s growing demand for power may not lie here on Earth. It may come from the basic energy that powers the universe. The sun and the stars, they’re the universe’s way of making nuclear energy. But unlike today’s man-made reactors that split atoms, the sun makes them fuse together. Its immense gravity traps hydrogen atoms until the sun’s blazing core blends them into helium. Their fusion unleashes dynamic energy and titanic heat.

The same atoms that power the stars are plentiful here on Earth.

Our oceans are rich with hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe. This is how science understands fusion. Each atom of hydrogen is like a tiny planetary system. It rides a balance of a negatively charged electron orbiting around a positively charged nucleus made of a single proton. Water also has another type of hydrogen, deuterium, an isotope that lends itself to controlled fusion research. It’s got an electron, too, and a nuclear proton as well.

But the deuterium nucleus also carries one neutron, a particle with no electrical charge at all. There’s no shortage of deuterium. It’s found in one in every 6,000 molecules of seawater. It’s also easy to extract. But more importantly, it only takes a teaspoon of deuterium to equal the energy you get from 100 barrels of oil. A typical fusion reaction would combine deuterium with another hydrogen isotope, tritium. Besides carrying two neutrons, tritium is man-made. It’s also radioactive.

But unlike today’s nuclear reactors, where waste stays radioactive for thousands of years, tritium radioactivity would last less than a hundred years. Fusing them forms harmless helium and releases massive energy, sending neutrons bursting away. In theory, those flying neutrons would strike a reactor wall that collects heat to drive electric turbines, while also regenerating expensive tritium.

The nice thing about fusion is there’s less radioactivity, and if you build the thing right, it really has no ability to disperse itself over the countryside.

Imagine a busy train station, one where people hurry no matter how crowded it gets.

Now, it’s human nature for people to try not to run into each other, but let’s just suppose that people kept coming into the station, but nobody could get out. Well, eventually, as the crowd got more dense, there’d be a bigger chance of a collision. Well, it’s that concept of density and confinement that science hopes will force hydrogen nuclei to collide, fuse, and release energy.

Laboratories don’t have the sun’s gravity or size to clamp so much atomic density in place. But there are other ways to increase the chance that atoms will collide and fuse. The method at Princeton’s Plasma Physics Lab is higher temperature. Two years ago, scientists here used super hot beams, raising the reactor temperature to a record 300 million degrees, six times hotter than the interior of the sun. Heat makes atoms speed up.

When they’re hot enough, electrons break away from their nuclei. The resulting atomic swarm creates a plasma. It’s a warm plasma that burns in a fluorescent light bulb. When plasma is hotter and denser, nuclei have a better chance to slam together. But the proton’s positive charge makes nuclei repel, just like people scurrying in a train station. They also respond to a magnetic field. It takes a strong one to trap nuclei till they collide. That’s where Princeton’s TFTR comes in.

Embedded inside is a donut-like chamber where plasma is made. Surrounding the chamber, two sets of powerful magnets. Their grip resists the plasma’s struggle to strike the reactor wall and cool, in effect binding protons onto a collision course. But plasma is as hard to confine as it is to see. It’s like trying to hold jello with an elastic band. The view from inside the chamber shows carbon bumpers glowing with hot gas, a sign that some burning plasma is leaking away. Solving the plasma confinement problem could solve the fusion mystery. Right now, Princeton scientists have to put in a lot more energy than fusion reactions give back.

By 1991, they hope to break even.

That means getting as much energy out as they put in. But TFTR is designed only to test the conditions to make fusion. If future reactors work, they’ll make plasma ignite, just like a match lights a fire. enough fusion reactions, the plasma would stay hot by itself and outside power needed to ignite it could be turned off. But we haven’t yet got the thermal insulation to the point where the fusion power that’s generated would be enough to keep the thing going on its own. We still have to put in our own power from outside. The Austrian-born physicist who runs the plasma physics lab has been researching fusion for over 30 years. Dr. Harold Firth foresees an experimental reactor by 2010. He also knows the old fusion axiom that success is always 20 years away. But now scientific success is not 20 years away you know it’s it’s at hand what’s 20 years away is the proof that this will be economically attractive. Princeton’s plasma physics lab is among several facilities around the world researching magnetic fusion. Now that’s one approach but it’s not the only one. That satellite dish reminds scientists here that they have some competition. It enables Princeton’s computers to communicate with another computer more than 3,000 miles away at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco. This California computer complex is the nerve center for magnetic fusion research around the world. it looks a little like a coin laundromat.

but there’s no cleaning here it’s all thinking and some tape changing courtesy a robot that works like a jukebox livermore supercomputer is a multi-million dollar project run by the Department of Energy it serves plasma research in more than a dozen American universities, as well as fusion labs in Japan, Europe, and the United States.

A high-tech pumping system pipes special liquid that keeps super-fast processors cool. But in supercomputing, they’re the hottest thing. They enable several fusion researchers to tap in at the same time. One of those processors over there might be sending data to New Jersey, for instance. And another processor might be sending it to my diacommit across the room here.

Livermore’s supercomputer is designed to do in moments what a personal computer might take years. It’s become the world’s first electronic fusion ambassador. This particular center plays a crucial role in the international development as well as the US development of fusion.

But ironically, most of Livermore’s magnetic fusion research no longer exists. A $300 million project using parallel magnets, sometimes called mirror fusion, was shut down because it cost too much to run. But there is other research here that could give magnetic fusion a run for its money.

3, 2, 1, go. This is Nova, a $176 million investment, the cornerstone of what’s called inertial confinement fusion. And it takes something this big. to hit something so small. The bottom tip of that metal arm holds a tiny pellet containing fusion fuel. It’s the dead center of a five-story target chamber that looks more like a giant metal octopus. When I first started, I walked in here. It’s like being in a space movie or something, but after a while, it becomes second nature. There’s a lot of things to think about when you’re doing this. This is just one small part of it. But this one small part plays a big role in fusion research. Laser fusion, in effect, turns pellets into tiny hydrogen bombs. It only takes a microsecond. But slow motion shows how a laser beam makes the pellet shell blast away. That makes the fusion fuel inside heat up and implode. And researchers hope make deuterium and tritium fuel fuse.

All of this with the goal of trying to improve the fusion process with each shot so that we understand better what’s going on for the ultimate goal of trying to get more energy out of this pellet than we put in it with the laser this is a scale model of the nova laser the real thing is over 300 feet long longer than a football field it’s designed to fire a lot of power in less than a blink of an eye in fact in a billionth of a second it drives 200 times the power of all the power plants in the united States. 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, shot. You could fit NOVA’s control room in a corner at Princeton’s TFTR. Yeah, we got it. Yeah. Good, good shot. But the laser it controls is the biggest and most powerful in the world. It’s the third generation of Livermore lasers, each raising hopes that inertial confinement is the way to go.

That requires a certain minimum fuel pellet size, which we do not have enough laser energy to compress a pellet that size. It means you’re going to have to build an even bigger laser. It means that it’s most likely that we will have to have an even bigger laser than NOVA. One of our challenges for the next year and a half to two years is to refine our concepts for a technical and economic baseline to show us how we can build that laser at what we tend to call an affordable cost. Reportedly, it was a secret nuclear bomb that told researchers how much power that bigger laser would need. In a 1986 project dubbed Centurion Halite, scientists found the bomb’s intense radiation made a fusion pellet’s hydrogen fuel ignite. But Livermore has little to say about it. Much of the work here is classified. Even the energy funding comes from a defense pie. They’re not just pursuing commercial power here laser fusion lets science study the effects of nuclear weapons within the safety of a laboratory. Beyond that there’s not much detail I’m afraid I can go into in that area. Livermore and Princeton are going after the same fusion goal in different ways. They call it a friendly rivalry where nobody’s ahead. But scientifically I’m sure that we view it as some some sort of a race and a rivalry, but it’s not an intense one.

It’s a very good thing that not all the hopes of the future should dangle from a single thread. These hopes cost lots of money. Next year’s magnetic fusion budget totals over $351 million. There’s another $164 million for inertial confinement. But those funds are over $100 million less than peak years when the energy crisis gave fusion research funding a boost. It’s very difficult to motivate political figures who are beset with day-to-day problems to think 25, 30 years in the future.

In the near future, the next decade, Princeton plans to build a new machine designed to achieve ignition. But budget cuts mean the compact ignition program, better known as CIT, may have to wait another two years. And the machine after that may be so expensive that one government may not be willing to pay for it We may have to have several governments contributing into it, and that really slows down development.

In the fusion community, Steve Dean is a household name. He’s a physicist by trade who lives, breathes, and literally drives fusion. A few years ago, he left a job at the Department of Energy, raised private corporate funding, and moved into a nearby Maryland office. Actually, I’m going to be over at NRL next Tuesday. Are you going to be in the neighborhood of the plasma physics division? Dean’s Fusion Power Associates keeps labs and private industry up to date on fusion research. He’s also kept up with a bottom line, whether costly research and expensive reactors will price fusion out of the market.

I think that’s a real problem if that turns out to be the case. I personally believe that we can make discoveries and come up with ideas and methods that will be cheaper than what our knowledge allows us to do today. Dean is not the only one who thinks fusion will take a global commitment. Fusion scientists are now marking more than 30 years of international cooperation. A top emissary of scientific glasnost frequently meets with American scientists in Washington. Eugene Velikov is the Soviet science minister.

Secretary General Gorbachev, in meeting with the President, told him exactly he is interested in fusion, and our government is interested, and make a decision to try to make this internationally. But fusion science is a lot older than 30 years. Seven American presidents have funded it. Those first funds, though, went to study a fusion science that’s both secret and explosive. The hydrogen bomb, the deadliest force known to man. It’s wild fusion energy that’s uncontrolled. Its development after World War II inspired researchers to try to tame it. But back then, plasma physics was virtually an unknown science. That’s why a 1951 edition of the New York Times caught science by surprise. In a front-page article, Argentina’s president Juan Perón boasted a laboratory breakthrough, claiming an Austrian physicist working near Buenos Aires successfully controlled nuclear fusion. Skeptical scientists later found there was no breakthrough and no fusion energy. But the story would turn a Princeton physicist into one of the fathers of modern fusion research. Dr. Lyman Spitzer started thinking about new ways to control fusion reactions. But he needed a little seclusion to think them through, so he and his wife went on a Colorado ski trip.

So I was all primed to think about magnetic fields, which is a very esoteric subject, and I figured out on the lift that really the magnetic field should be a method of acting at a distance, pushing on a hot plasma and keeping it from striking the walls where it, of course, would immediately cool. Spitzer worked out his ideas and got the Atomic Energy Commission interested. We grew and grew and grew, and now what you see here is a direct result, or at least an outcome, of that early project.

These coils that you see here, these carry electric current in this direction, and that produces a magnetic field that goes around this racetrack, as we called it, that, in principle, can hold the plasma in. And if it’s hot enough, the hydrogen nuclei will fuse and produce electric power. Knowing he was copying the energy of the sun and the stars, Spitzer called his device the Stellarator. He used it to mount Project Matterhorn.

It was Princeton’s first fusion research, and it was cloaked in secrecy. But fusion’s first pioneers got disappointing results. And in fact, if we’d gone right ahead and built a device that was 10 times bigger than this, it would have worked very much the way the present devices are. Looking back, it’s not surprising that the people were disappointed in their early efforts. There was no way they could have succeeded with the knowledge they had at the time. But from Russia came some early fusion genius.

Dr. Andrei Sakharov and his wife Yelena live on the seventh floor of a Moscow apartment. Together, they’ve braved the Kremlin’s muscle to fight for human rights. A fight that’s won Sakharov the Nobel Peace Prize. But Sakharov’s science won him worldwide respect.

After working on the Soviet hydrogen bomb, Sakharov turned to more peaceful science. In the early 50s, he and Dr. Igor Tom wrote a theory of magnetic confinement, fathering the concept that inspired modern fusion research.

Sakharov speaks broken English, but speaking in Russian, he told us through an interpreter, the fusion science that grew out of his early theories is making good progress. This work turned out to be much more difficult and lengthier than it had presented itself to Sergei Tom and myself in 1950. But the fundamental principal problems have been overcome.

The reasons for instability have been explained and it seems to me that we not only know that the magnetic fusion device is possible but also the parameters in which magnetic fusion can become a real operating machine how do you think fusion might change the world yeah I think that controlled fusion reactors will decide problems of energy production which already have other solutions and therefore I do not think that fusion will change the world its purpose does not have that revolutionary character that the other great discoveries of the 20th century have had when something was being solved for the first time all the same i think that practically it will be very important for humanity I think that large-scale atomic energy production will receive a great deal from controlled fusion in the first stage i think that this will take the form of the breeder reactor controlled fusion reactions to obtain uranium-238 for use in atomic energy production. Of course, this means of atomic energy is founded upon fission with all of its difficulties and dangers. For this reason, I support the idea of placing all nuclear power underground. The fusion breeder that Sakharov mentioned is a concept the Russians still study but found too impractical by Western and Japanese science. It was the concept of safety though that prompted Sakharov to return to english and remind fusion researchers to never forget we have no right to have another chernobyls the man who’s given his life to peace feels science must do the same for the atom that’s not a new idea Hopes resting on the nuclear promise led the world’s scientific nations to start sharing knowledge.

So the cloak of secrecy surrounding fusion and fission research started to lift. Just before the opening of the conference, the United States and Great Britain jointly announced the declassification of their thermonuclear research programs, and the United States unveiled its most promising experimental devices actual operating machines like Princeton’s b2 stellarator these represent the various paths being explored in a quest for a new source of power many of these machines were operated throughout the conference the Princeton exhibit included a model of the university’s stellarator laboratory devoted entirely to fusion research Another approach, the racetrack stellarator, in which the twist in the magnetic field is produced by current flowing through adjacent groups of wires in opposite directions.

The Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory showed a number of operating devices including Scylla, in which the plasma is superheated by compression. All of the machines are still in the experimental stage, but from one of these research channels may come the elusive secret of cheap, plentiful power. A secret which certainly will be unlocked the sooner as a result of international cooperation. Fusion first worked in secret because governments wondered if nuclear byproducts might help make powerful bombs.

They knew that, in theory, a plasma chamber wrapped inside a uranium blanket would lead to a fusion breeder reactor capable of making plutonium, a key ingredient for nuclear weapons. were afraid maybe this was some sort of shortcut for making fissionable material for bomb. So by 58, it was clear that building a fusion reactor just had to be one of the toughest ways on Earth to make material clandestinely for bomb. And then it made sense to declassify. Suddenly, fusion was heard around the world. And at a 1958 Atomic Energy Conference in Geneva, researchers from a host of nations showcased their fusion science. Soviets were there, the Japanese, the Europeans. And it was remarkable, because up until that time, all these programs had been conducted in secret. And when people opened the veils and they showed the other parties what they had done, it was all the same.

But not for long.

In the mid-1960s, Russian scientists working in Moscow announced a major fusion achievement. Using Sakharov’s theories, the Soviets improved on the donut-like confinement chamber. Researchers at places like Moscow’s Kurchatov Institute invited the world to copy their idea and the world copied away. They even copied the word Tokamak, a Russian acronym that applies to today’s most common fusion research device. The Soviets opened their fusion research doors years before anyone ever heard of Glasnost, symbolizing that scientists around the world find it a lot easier to cooperate than their respective nations do.

Perhaps it is today’s spirit of Glasnost that led the Soviets to invite our cameras in for a rare and comprehensive look at fusion research here in the USSR. this is russian fusion research at work the lab looks a lot different than princeton’s tftr but the goal is exactly the same the ignition of the dt reaction is the most important step in our old work we worked 38 years and if we don’t ignite the reaction the public opinion will be against fusion 40 years spend it and not ignite the reaction that is an unluck

you’re watching some of the international spirit to make fusion work the man standing is sam hoken an american exchange scientist from mit he learned fast that it helps to speak russian here He also learned from dusty oscilloscopes and obsolete technology. After hearing how Russian science suffers from technical setbacks and shortages, he came to Moscow armed with his own personal computer. And that’s something that all American scientists and all Western scientists know, that when you come to the Soviet Union to do exchange work, bring your own equipment, everything, including a voltage meter, soldering iron, whatever you want, because even if it’s here, it’s hard to find and things get tough.

But the brain power here is top notch Dr. Vyacheslav Strelkov manages Moscow’s fusion workhorse, better known as T-10. It’s older and a lot smaller than Princeton’s TFTR, but it leads the world in a key type of plasma heating technology. Where most other tokamaks use electric heat and so-called neutral beams, T-10 uses gyrotrons that generate the same kind of heat you get when you turn on a microwave oven.

one. It’s called T-15. It’s the Soviets’ first modern generation tokamak experiment. When it’s ready, it will look just like Princeton’s TFTR. But there are some key differences. The Soviets are building T-15 with a superconducting coil. It will act like a power bank, storing the energy to heat and confine the plasmas, minimizing the power T-15 will have to drain from Moscow’s power company.

A real thermonuclear reactor must have only the superconductor coils. It is practically impossible to have a thermonuclear reactor with usual magnet. T-15 is supposed to start in December. That’s more than five years since Princeton turned on TFTR. The Soviets had hoped T-15 would have been working right now, but it suffers from a five-year lag that underscores a fundamental complaint that bureaucratic rivalries and managerial conflicts often slow down Soviet scientific development.

It is not easy, so many difficulties, not only the scientific difficulties, the technology difficulties and also difficulty of organization manager maybe problem of management another problem radioactivity first generation fusion reactors will burn radioactive tritium the soviets say both they and their american counterparts have painful memories that will force them to minimize contamination the public opinion no is against erect radioactivity we know in the United States and now after Chernobyl in our state that the opinion is that the energetic must be with such low level of radioactivity there’s plenty of energy and enthusiasm here to make fusion work the Russians hope t15 will help them catch up to fusion science around the world. Russia until now has been pretty much out on its own. And as experiments get bigger,

as it looks like a fusion reactor is going to be a big, complicated, expensive thing, at least at the beginning, it is clear that international cooperation is necessary. It is nonsense to make a competition in such field as fusion because it is a very long-term goal and we benefit from the development of tokamak in the United States. The Soviets’ appeal for joint fusion development historically gets a lukewarm response at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. It’s a concern that the Russians are subtly trying to grab Western technology. As one House staff member put it, we don’t want to give away the store. Among those concerned, the New Jersey congressman who chairs a House Science and Technology Committee.

As it is now, in my judgment, we’re a little paranoiac on technology transfer. I don’t mean that unfairly. I mean legitimately we have concerns there. We’re all going to have to change our ways of how we do business internationally and our concern of technology transfer and the protection of our country, which everybody understands. But if we’re going to be doing these big things together, we’re going to be breaking new ground, we’re going to do joint missions to Mars with the Soviets and so forth,

we’re going to have to be in a position of being developing new methods which we don’t exist today those concerns held back researchers like doug post he’s a princeton physicist we met last april that was just before he left for germany where he and teams of scientists from around the world are working to design the international test engineering reactor better known as iter the A multi-billion dollar reactor would be a joint project to be built after the turn of the century. Originally, Post and other scientists hoped the Munich conference would actually lead to construction. But the U.S. Defense Department was concerned that there would be issues associated with technology transfer with the Soviet government, and so they basically downgraded it to a design study. Before we get to the big construction area, we’ve got to see this relationship between the Soviet Union and the Western countries continue to mature by quite a bit.

I can’t tell you how that’s going to go. That’s up to the Russians. But if we make proper steps in the arms race control and disarmament after start and better interrelation, I think why not? But if East and West grow close enough to start test reactor construction, then where would it be built? Princeton’s TFTR is the latest in a series of plasma physics lab experiments. With CIT planned to start in 1996, it’s unlikely that Princeton would have time, place or room for another project.

California’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory hopes to build a new laser even bigger than nova to perfect inertial confinement fusion so it’s unlikely that iter would be built there in fact it’s unlikely that iter will even be built in the united states the u.s is only one of four major fusion research nations the betting money on iter’s location somewhere in a rural tract in europe we’re very nationalistic when you when you get right down to it and i think this especially on the in the congress you’ll see a lot of resistance to having that us money go abroad if we had to stop some of our own plasma work in this country that we’re working on again in princeton tokamak and so forth and versus participating in funding uh an either program in europe i think we would we would work with i know we would go to the domestic end you understand where i’m trying to come from so i don’t think that the decision process is as hand as yet Nor do I think that the case is set and anybody determined that that program would be built in Europe or any place else at this point. So why don’t we start with our usual agenda and see what the status is of the machine, beams, and so forth. But before ITER, there’s still TFTR.

Every Monday morning, Rob Goldston leads a crowded conference updating Princeton-Tokomak progress. We had about three or four choices of problems on the RF limiter. and it turned out the difficulty that we’re seeing the hot spot most likely wasn’t insulated on the limited balance it’s like managing a baseball team except here they use computers instead of bats and their field is a mysterious and challenging level of plasma physics what to talk about how we how we implement this procedure to save the machine and also let us operate but if TFT our works the machine won’t be saved it only burns deuterium now but in two years, Princeton plans to wrap up research with a hundred tritium shots. Resulting radiation will make TFTR literally too hot to handle. Maintenance would require special tools and special robots. Those planned tritium shots raised government concern. Federal research found TFTR’s radiation would pose no danger even in the unlikely chance that safety systems fail. In fact, a geology study concluded there’s only a one-in-a-million chance that even harmless trace amounts of tritium would penetrate underground water supplies. Yet tests are underway to see if in a worst-case scenario, like a major fire, nearby Princeton neighbors would still need an emergency response plan. Leaking radiation apparently went unnoticed for three hours yesterday. The nuclear reactor at the Three Mile Island plant overheated and shut down at 4 a.m. Three Mile Island, a symbol for what can go wrong with nuclear power. Loose This radioactivity contaminated one of the reactor buildings. The device itself radiated with what nuclear scientists call after heat. After heat could affect fusion too.

Fusion reactors would produce a safe helium ash that’s a lot simpler to dispose than the radioactive waste from today’s nuclear fission power plants. And no matter what happens, the reactor’s plasma chamber would contain no more than four seconds of fuel at any one time but fusion also makes neutrons that bombard the chamber’s wall that would make the wall radioactive and that contamination would also spread to the reactor’s supporting structure but compared to a fission power plant where the thing has that much energy inside this thing really hasn’t got the energy to not only damage itself but damage a containment building and end up moving out it’s it it doesn’t you feed the fuel in very slowly into a fusion power plant you don’t keep it there the way you have to in a fission power plant all the time that’s if engineers build it right the challenge of material science is to develop metals and compounds that resist radioactivity the material of the first wall cannot work in such big neutron fluxes 30 years it must be changed after some three or four years and therefore such a reactor must stop and must be repaired and the first wall must be changed. That is not a commercial kind of machine. We might even be able to make a wall that lasts 30 years and there are other possibilities too. We may go to a fuel cycle that doesn’t involve tritium, for example. Then the neutron flux on the wall goes down a lot. A safe fusion fuel cycle might involve a little travel, like a trip to the moon. The moon is loaded with Helium-3, an isotope not found here on Earth. Burning deuterium and lunar helium would be a lot safer than tritium. Both Soviet and American space programs plan some lunar mining missions, possibly to bring back Helium-3.

Engineers think a fusion reactor might look something like this. There’d be a concrete igloo to contain radioactivity. Robotics would be needed to maintain the reactor structure. Such a reactor could be up to 50 years away. But the promise of fusion provides fuel for imagination. It could not only power our utilities, it could run our rocket ships too. On almost every count, fusion would seem to be superior to fission. The only catch is that we don’t have it yet. But Isaac Asimov uses fusion all the time. His noted science background helps him dream of worlds that turn from today’s heavy chemical rockets to tomorrow’s faster fusion rockets that burn lighter hydrogen fuel, meaning a trip to Mars that would take us months today might only take a few days tomorrow. We’ll be able to pack more energy into a spaceship so that we can have more bang for a buck. What we really need to make my science fiction work is faster than light travel. But I don’t consider that much of a possibility at all.

Still, with fusion alone, we ought to be able to reach any point in the solar system we want without too much trouble and maybe if we take a little trouble reach some of the nearest stars i must admit that i had rather thought that we’d have done it some time ago the fact that we haven’t done it yet is a little disheartening that disappointment is felt by a growing number of scientists as well as the very industry that would sell fusion power at this point there’s a significant risk in whether or not fusion will actually work. Ken Mattson works for the New Jersey utility that supplies the energy that runs Princeton’s TFTR. Utilities don’t supply much more than that to support today’s fusion research. Beset by problems plaguing the nuclear fission industry, they’re waiting for more promising results in fusion before jumping in.

If you had fusion that worked, but you couldn’t maintain it economically, or you couldn’t operate it economically, then it isn’t a viable technology, even though it works. It’s not a viable technology for our ratepayers. That doesn’t mean power companies forget. Nestled beneath California’s purple foothills lay sprawling research. Microchip manufacturers, computer firms, laboratories, they checker flatlands south of San Francisco, appropriately called the Silicon Valley. Among the science centers here, the Electric Power Research Institute, a think tank supported by the American power industry. They think a lot here about nuclear physics.

But Dr. David Wurlidge also thinks about fusion, a much different type than current research. The technique here is to try to avoid the use of plasmas, or at least to try to avoid the use of very high energy. It’s called muonic catalytic fusion, in which a bulky heavy electron acts like a powerful glue, bonding deuterium and tritium a lot more tightly than a normal electron would. So tight, the nuclei run a better chance of fusing. And instead of super hot plasmas, particle accelerators would generate muons at low temperatures. It’s an old idea littered with technical problems, but EPRI sees new promise. We’re interested in this process because at a very low level of funding with very small scale experiments, one has an opportunity perhaps to participate in a breakthrough perhaps in the next five years we may need a breakthrough on any type of alternative energy source for more reasons than we realize most commercial power plants today not only make energy they make pollution too the fossil fuels they burn send gases into the air And it’s not just power plants.

Anything that burns also pollutes. They fill our skies with carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide, along with other man-made pollutants, chlorofluorocarbons and methane, gases that have come to be known as the greenhouse gases. Greenhouses trap sunlight and heat, an efficient way to make plants grow better. It works well for botany, but it’s not so good for humanity. As greenhouse gases encircle the earth, trapped sunlight raises temperatures making climates change.

Professor Ned Rees teaches meteorology at New Jersey’s Rutgers University in New Brunswick. He’s accustomed to tracking weather patterns like winds, rain, and humidity. But lately, he’s been tracking something else. What we’re looking at here is the global average concentration of carbon dioxide for the last 23 years, beginning in 1958 and extending up through 1981, and the ups and downs that you see here are the variations over the course of each year. Carbon dioxide increases and decreases with season, but the important thing to see is that the general trend has been upward, and it shows that during those 23 years there has been something like a 10% global worldwide increase of carbon dioxide that has taken place.

There are signs that the greenhouse effect is taking its toll. Some meteorologists point to recent heat waves and a costly Midwestern drought. There’s evidence of desert migration in Africa that’s gobbling up the already limited farmland. And if the greenhouse keeps up, scientists fear some melting of the polar ice caps will make the oceans rise, triggering beach erosion and floods. It’s possible that some of the things that have taken place in the Sahara Desert regions, the droughts that we’re seeing now, could be some of the first manifestations of that, kind of a forerunner of things to come.

But the time range that we’re talking about where the effects are going to become incontrovertible is going to be in the next few decades. It’s going to be very, very difficult to do anything about it because the fossil fuel combustion is something that has been an integral part of our civilization for a very long time.

The most important thing that we could do would be to try to go to some alternative types of fuel, but building a few nuclear power plants, nuclear fusion facilities around the U.S., for example, probably wouldn’t have too much of an effect. It would have to be a very large-scale type of a thing to really make a difference. Now, there’s speculation in how strong those effects are and how much carbon dioxide it takes to create that sometimes called greenhouse effect. But it’s only prudent that we look to other forms of power generation which don’t create carbon dioxide for the long run so that we do manage to maintain our environment in a form that we find both productive, comfortable, and otherwise acceptable.

Presidential science advisor Dr. William Graham works in the old executive office building next to the White House. His office is down the corridor from the room where Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and his secretary, Fawn Hall, shredded Iran-Contra documents.

But for Dr. Graham, that nearby modern American history is hardly as significant or pressing as what man’s doing to Earth. These aren’t short-term effects I’m talking about. Earth’s a big place. It’s got a big atmosphere.

But over the long run, we want to be careful that what we put in the atmosphere doesn’t have undesirable side effects. And fusion can help in that. Our sun has been burning for over four billion years.

It’s only in the last hundred years that we’ve really come to understand why. Perhaps in the next hundred years, we’ll also learn how to harness the sun’s energy here on Earth. On paper, fusion energy sounds like a clean, safe, limitless source of power. But to make a son of man here on Earth will take some hard decisions. After 40 years of expensive research, can we afford the cost of 40 more? can we afford the risk that maybe it won’t work? If you ask the scientist you’ll be told we can’t afford to wait. With a growing human family we’re going to need more energy to power the world and there just aren’t that many sources of energy around. I looked up the population figures the other day and at the time that the fusion program started there were two billion people in the world, 1953.

Today there are five billion people in the world. That’s three, you it’s more than doubled. By the time we find out whether or not we can really build a fusion reactor say shortly after the turn of the century there probably be another 3 billion people in the world, and by the time we can start producing energy with fusion or any other new technology we’re talking about 10 to 15 billion people in the world. There’s just simply no way you can support that population with conventional energy sources. Fusion of course is designed not for us but for our children’s future because we know that in the 21st century the world is going to run out of coal and oil and what are we going to do when that happens if we don’t do the work now we won’t be in a position to ensure our children’s energy future and their standard of living in the 21st century the time when there will be a lot of fusion power being commercially applied when when fusion takes over a good share of the power requirement, will be sort of 2040, 2050.

That seems like a very long time away. But if you draw a little graph on when the crunch really hits, the rising power requirements around the world with the growing population and the rising standards of living crossing over with the falling fossil fuel resources, you find that the crunch hits in 2050. So that is not a bad time to be able to shoulder a big piece of the load. Because if fusion mostly depends on our brain, not from the resources and other, in the modern time, high technology win. In such case, I am sure we win. But how fast is the question?

Fusion is so important to the future of the world, to the populations, to civilization, that it’s a technology that we have to develop. We can’t afford to overlook any options. It will be something that’s useful for mankind, maybe my grandchildren. My own children now are of an age that this won’t happen in their lifetime. It’s like working on the first layers of a pyramid. pyramid you can see the final product in your mind but it will be generations after my generation that will actually finish this I’m going to be confident within a few years we will know that the laws of physics make it possible to to extract energy from fusion for the welfare of mankind we have no right to have another Chernobyl. Plasma, what is plasma? That’s not part of your blood. That’s not what we’re talking about. A plasma is a fourth state of matter. They could be future plasma physicists, but today they’re only visitors. Princeton’s plasma physics lab runs hundreds of tours each year. This one is no different. As always, the lab’s auditorium rings with curiosity and questions. When this thing’s running, what’s the radiation level on the floor? Very high.

While chasing the fusion mystery, plasma physicists often find themselves splitting time between science and public relations. They know how good PR helps save federal funding, but it also helps educate and inspire. it may take two more generations of plasma physics before the world enters the fusion era that was the last balance shot that we had with 795 is that good enough to try to get a temperature or is that for nearly four decades science has been struggling to make fusion work there are still decades to go before 2030 when the first fusion reactor may go online those future fusion scientists will get their cues from the Rob Goldston generation and its dedication to mastering the atom sometimes down on the shore when the Sun is out and it’s very hot and I have my little boy with me I’ll explain to him that the power that’s coming out of the Sun is one of the sort of fundamental powers that the universe has and it’s that kind of power that we’re trying to harness for fusion energy and I think he gets a kick out of seeing that that’s what his dad is working on