Though the Russian scheme seems more promising than the methods now being developed in the West, Kapitsa is not convinced of its final success.
He holds little hope for the tokamak and inertial confinement, claiming that the size of these machines would grow beyond reasonable dimensions before fusion energy could be harvested. He seems to have a point there, for the dimensions of the Nova lasers (see above) are indeed growing precarious¾two dinosaurs applying their full strength to crush a flea. If it were not for military applications of high-powered lasers (missile interception), it is doubtful that Congress would spend $200 million on Phase 1 of this gigantic project.
By contrast, the reactor described by Kapitsa measures only some 60 feet in diameter, which is small as fusion reactors go.
Yet Kapitsa feels that the problems still facing his team may prove insoluble. Chief among them is the impossibility of predicting the conditions of thermal convection inside the churning plasma; this is critical (hot electrons are of no use except to give up their heat to the positive ions, which contain the nuclei), and the only way to find out is to scale up and try.
But after a lifetime of problem solving, Kapitsa finds this uncertainty particularly attractive. "The main attraction of scientific work," he says, "is that it leads to problems the solution of which cannot be foreseen, and that is why, to a scientist, research on controlled thermonuclear reactions is so fascinating."
Should Kapitsa's reactor be successful, it will, of course, be hailed as proof of the superiority of Soviet science. What will be omitted is that the research was led by a man educated under the Tsar, trained by one of England's great physicists, and one to whom the Soviet system offered only coercion and bullying by history's greatest ogre.
[More: "Plasma and the controlled thermonuclear reaction Nobel lecture by P.L.Kapitza, Science, 7 Sep.79, pp.959-964.]
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Vol. 7, No. 2
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Volume 7 Issue/No.: Vol. 7, No. 2 Date: October 01, 1979 02:47 PM Title: More fundamental than energy
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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