METHANE FROM FUSION

In spite of KMS' brilliant success, laser-fusion as a commercial source of electric power is still very dubious. But advanced technology research is never without important spin-offs. KMS also has the knowhow of using neutrons to break down water molecules, and thus producing hydrogen. This can then be carbonated to produce methane, which is the main ingredient of natural gas. The methane can then be pumped directly into the gas pipelines, without the traumatic transformation to a "hydrogen economy,'' which would need new pumps,. new valves, new storage and consumption facilities (such as kitchen ranges), with only the pipes themselves remaining usable.

In a project developed for Texas Gas Transmission Corp., Siegel envisioned a gas price at the equivalent of $9 per barrel of oil, compared to $21 by coal gasification. With the aid of laser-fusion neutrons, he predicted a price of $1.50 per thousand cubic feet of methane, to go into the pipelines between 1984 and 1986. A pilot plant, explained Siegel minutes before his death, could begin producing hydrogen and methane by about the end of 1979.

He was not bluffing. To demonstrate the feasibility of the process, KMS uses neutrons from conventional sources and is producing hydrogen, as Siegel used to say, "by the thimbleful and the bucketful."

The role of hydrogen is often misunderstood. Like electricity or gasoline, it is a vehicle for transporting energy; it is not, like fossil and nuclear fuels, a primary source of energy. Like electricity, it takes more energy to produce it than it provides. The production of hydrogen by present methods is expensive, and this is a major obstacle to economic coal gasification, in which hydrogen is an essential ingredient (if the gas is to have the same heating value as natural gas).

That situation would drastically change if hydrogen could be produced by the KMS process using fusion neutrons (rather than conventionally generated neutrons as at present). Hydrogen could then be produced cheaply and efficiently, and fusion could be used to generate not electricity, but methane, by reacting the hydrogen with coal. This would result in clean, cheap and abundant energy.

"If it works," says a spokesman for Texas Gas (which has committed millions to KMS' methane-byfusion project), "it will be like the invention of electric light."

Another possible application of laser fusion is to use the resulting neutrons for breeding fissile nuclear fuel in a hybrid fission-fusion plant. Such breeding would require only an energy gain some 75 times smaller than a pure fusion plant, and the idea is particularly attractive to those who see a murky future for the "conventional" (to abuse a word) breeder reactor.

A11 of these applications need lasers of enormous, and as yet unrealized power. Apart from lasers that may be in the military arsenals, the biggest laser, at the Los Alamos Scientific Labs, packs an energy of 1 kilojoule into a single pulse. A laser 10 times as powerful is now under construction at the Lawrence Livermore Lab in California.

What the military has in the way of lasers (for intercepting missiles and causing them structural damage "at range") transpires vaguely from reports in the scientific literature, but the exact figures are not publicly known. And until Jack Anderson goes on another of his despicable ego-trips, they will remain, one hopes, unknown to the Soviets.