PRESTRESS AND PREJUDICE

In the meantime, the technical aspects of the system are of great importance, and it is interesting to note the technical obstacle, now overcome, which was the limiting factor in the system when it was first proposed: the safe containment of the repeated explosions in the cavity. The solution was no manmade gadget that would brace the cavity walls against the force of a nuclear detonation plus the thermal stress in the transition from superheated steam to cool rock a few yards away. (The heat radiated by the nuclear explosion is absorbed by the steam and the debris particulates, so that this heat never reaches the walls.) The solution was a mathematical calculation, completed in 1961, revealing the conditions under which the cavity will hold up without cracks.

It was obviously no easy calculation if it took a decade to complete; yet with hindsight the condition seems simple, for it is the same as for prestressed concrete: as long as the walls are under compressive rather than tensile stress, they will not even crack. For a cavity 575 ft in diameter (holds some 300,000 tons of steam), this condition is amply satisfied by the pressure of the overburden at a depth of about one mile.

This practical, abundant and safe source of energy is, of course, a political absurdity in the present climate of antinuclear hysteria. The electronic networks, the New York Times and the other brainwashers ruling the country would simply prohibit it.

Members of the silenced minority who still have access to their own brains, however, have every right to be amused by their benighted contemporaries who recoil from the thought of five daily hydrogen bomb explosions while thinking nothing of consuming that exact amount of energy in industrial and domestic appliances, including the TV sets and radios that program them to have this attitude in the first place.

Wait a minute, you may say; what millions recoil from is the explosions of hydrogen bombs, which were originally conceived as weapons of war.

You must be talking about the millions who never fly because air traffic is controlled by radar and who never drive through tunnels blasted by explosives.

[More. R.P. Hammond, H.W. Hubbard, J.L. Dooley, "Practical Fusion Power," Mechanical Engineering, July 1982, pp. 34-43.]