Sun in a Bottle Read online

  I suspect they felt that Oak Ridge was trying to undermine their work and rob them of a publication in a prestigious journal. They were unconvinced (and perhaps uncomprehending) of the importance of the Shapira-Saltmarsh paper. The embattled bubble fusion scientists began to get paranoid, too. When the story first broke, Taleyarkhan’s coauthor (and PhD thesis adviser), Richard Lahey, told the Washington Post that criticism of the paper was “political” and motivated by hot-fusion physicists who were trying to hold on to their big budgets. Throw on top of that their desire to patent the device and profit from it, and I doubt they ever seriously considered withdrawing the paper. In my opinion, not withdrawing, even despite the Shapira and Saltmarsh counterevidence, did not cross the line into scientific misconduct, though some anti-bubble-fusion scientists seemed to believe otherwise.

  With bubble fusion, there were no moving peaks, no firm accusations of scientific fraud—at least at first. As time passed, though, the story of bubble fusion did begin to mirror the cold-fusion fiasco ever more closely. An embattled Taleyarkhan would soon find himself under investigation and accused of fraud.

  The story began to stir again in 2005, in part because of a BBC science documentary. BBC’s science show, Horizon, interviewed Taleyarkhan and commissioned Seth Putterman to redo the Taleyarkhan experiment on TV. The results were completely negative. How many neutrons had Putterman seen coming from a bubble fusion cell? None at all. When the program, entitled “An Experiment to Save the World,” aired, Taleyarkhan looked foolish—even talking about his hopes for a Nobel. “Nuclear fusion is a major finding, some people think that it may be worthy of a Nobel Prize,” he said on the show. “It would be nice if it were. But I don’t, I don’t keep dreaming about it just now, if it happens so be it.” Apparently, as filming progressed, Taleyarkhan got increasingly suspicious, and he refused to help the Putterman team with the experiment.

  DR RUSI TALEYARKHAN: I would help out anybody who I feel, who I felt comfortable with. I would, I would, but I have to be comfortable with that particular group.

  INTERVIEWER: Why, why is that, because is it not just science?

  DR RUSI TALEYARKHAN: I will not answer that question right now.

  Despite Taleyarkhan’s reservation, within a month of the show’s air date he and Putterman (along with Suslick) yoked themselves together with a grant from the Pentagon. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) gave them more than $800,000 to try to replicate Taleyarkhan’s results. It was about that time that the murmurs about Taleyarkhan’s incompetence began turning to murmurs about scientific misconduct.

  Lefteri Tsoukalas was one of the people at Purdue who helped recruit Taleyarkhan from Oak Ridge. He apparently began doubting Taleyarkhan’s integrity early in 2004, when the bubble fusion researcher first started working on campus full-time. Tsoukalas and five of his colleagues had been trying to replicate Taleyarkhan’s work without any success, and they hoped that Taleyarkhan could help them get the experiments running properly. But when Taleyarkhan arrived, Tsoukalas’s team was put off by his increasingly bizarre behavior. According to an exposé in Nature, Taleyarkhan allegedly started observing positive results that nobody else could detect: “He said: ‘Look, there’s a peak,’ but there was nothing to see,” one lab member told the magazine. “I started questioning it.” And then, in May 2004, apparently without warning, Taleyarkhan reportedly removed the bubble fusion equipment from the department’s lab. Though Tsoukalas and his colleagues were upset, they told Nature that they didn’t press the issue in the interest of faculty harmony. Then Taleyarkhan apparently argued against publication of the Tsoukalas group’s negative results. Yet, shortly after the Xu and Butt paper came out in 2005, Taleyarkhan is said to have pressed Purdue to issue the laudatory press release.

  Soon, accusations started flying in the press that the Xu-Butt paper was not as independent as Taleyarkhan insisted, and Taleyarkhan soon found himself formally accused of scientific misconduct. In March 2006, Purdue University began an investigation into his actions, and the Xu-Butt research took center stage. Tsoukalas and a colleague, Martin Lopez de Bertodano, claimed that the Xu-Butt paper was “nothing but a contrived and hurried attempt to stage the appearance of ‘independent confirmation’ of sonofusion claims.”

  Things got worse for Taleyarkhan by the day. More scientists joined the chorus crying fraud. Ken Suslick used the f-word in an interview with the Los Angeles Times when Nature first aired concerns about the Xu-Butt paper: “Presenting that as independent is fraud,” Suslick told them. And scientists had found other reasons to be concerned about Taleyarkhan’s conduct.

  Earlier in 2006, a scientist in Putterman’s research group, Brian Naranjo, argued that Taleyarkhan’s data were consistent not with fusion reactions but with the radioactive decay of an element known as californium-252. (Taleyarkhan had been “negligent or jumped the gun or concocted data—one of those,” Putterman told the Los Angeles Times.) In May, Taleyarkhan’s group admitted that it had made an embarrassing error with a key piece of equipment; its detector was made of a material different from what had been reported. In December, Nature reported on allegations that “data from Xu’s paper are apparently identical to separate data reported by Taleyarkhan.” Taleyarkhan’s work was looking incompetent at best, and fraudulent at worst.74 Scientists were expressing their concerns to Purdue.

  When Purdue wrapped up its investigation in December, after repeatedly being accused of foot-dragging, it initially kept the results secret. In February 2007 the university made them public.

  Committee members had found a number of disturbing issues. They concluded that the Xu and Butt research was not independent after all. Taleyarkhan’s involvement in the work was consistent with that of a coauthor. In fact, his contribution was arguably greater than Adam Butt’s. Consequently, the committee deemed that when Taleyarkhan kept his name off the paper, he showed “a severe lack of judgment.” Despite this, the committee concluded in December 2006 that Taleyarkhan did not intend to mislead the scientific community and recommended against further pursuit of the matter.

  Nevertheless, it would be further pursued. The committee had only looked into the allegations of fraud leveled by Tsoukalas and Lopez de Bertodano; it did not address many of the other complaints against Taleyarkhan that had been streaming in from outside researchers, and this raised questions about Purdue’s fraud-finding mechanisms. Congressman Brad Miller, the chair of the House Science and Technology Committee’s Investigations and Oversight panel, got Congress involved. Purdue University (and Taleyarkhan) received taxpayer dollars. If Purdue was not properly investigating fraud in its ranks of scientists, then Congress had reason for concern.

  In March, Miller requested copies of the investigation reports. The request letter was ominous. “Despite the University’s statement that no misconduct had occurred, many disturbing questions remain about the scope and quality of the information,” Miller wrote. When Miller’s staff reviewed the documents, they concluded that the investigation had not been thorough, had failed to address the validity of Taleyarkhan’s research, and had not even followed Purdue’s internal guidelines for investigating allegations of scientific misconduct. Prodded by Miller, Purdue sheepishly began another inquiry.

  When I spoke to Taleyarkhan in August 2007, he was downcast. “I am exhausted, Charles. I’m very happy to speak with a friend, or [someone] who used to be a friend,” he told me. “It is devastating. I’ve got two children who go to Purdue, who are students. One day in the press they see their father so honored and the next day they see him vilified. So, it’s tough.” It was heartbreaking to see this man—who had been so genuinely excited about his discovery—brought so low.

  After nearly a year of deliberations, in July 2008, Purdue’s last inquiry panel finally released its findings. It concluded that, yes, Taleyarkhan had committed scientific misconduct. According to the panel’s report, Taleyarkhan had deceived the scientific community by falsely claiming the Xu and Butt pap
er was independent confirmation of Taleyarkhan’s original bubble fusion paper. Moreover, adding Adam Butt’s name as a coauthor—when Butt had contributed little to the work—was deemed a deliberate attempt to fool scientific reviewers into thinking that the research was more solid than it actually was. (Earlier, a reviewer had complained that a version of the manuscript, which had only Xu as an author, “was apparently done by one person so that needed cross-checks and witnessing of results seem lacking.” Adding Butt to the manuscript defused such objections.) In short, according to the Purdue findings, Taleyarkhan had deliberately misled the scientific community to cover up the shortcomings of his work. (Further, it didn’t find convincing evidence that Taleyarkhan had faked any experiments or fudged data.)75

  Bubble fusion, like cold fusion, was steadily driven to the fringe of science. Though bubble fusion started out at the core of establishment science, it ended as sordidly as the cold-fusion fiasco had. The scientific community moved quickly from mere skepticism to accusations of fraud. Like Pons and Fleischmann before him, Taleyarkhan became increasingly bitter and isolated. As his experimental evidence came crashing down around him, according to the Purdue findings, he apparently turned to scientific misconduct to cover the shortcomings of his work.

  Taleyarkhan’s reputation will likely never recover. In early 2002, Taleyarkhan was a distinguished engineer. Six years later, he was an outcast. He threw his career away chasing after the hope of unlimited fusion power—and after dreams of the Nobel Prize that would come from solving the world’s energy problems.

  CHAPTER 9

  NOTHING LIKE THE SUN

  They started at once, and went about among the Lotus-eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with Lotus-eaters without thinking further of their return; nevertheless, though they wept bitterly I forced them back to the ships and made them fast under the benches.

  —THE ODYSSEY, TRANSLATED BY SAMUEL BUTLER

  Bubble fusion, like cold fusion, imploded under charges of fraud and scientific misconduct. Though both methods still have their supporters, both have now been swept to the fringes of science. Without a spectacular reversal of fortune, that is where they will remain.

  Hot fusion now enjoys a monopoly. Mainstream scientists who hope for fusion energy almost unanimously pin their hopes upon inertial confinement fusion or magnetic fusion. Tabletop fusion and muon-catalyzed fusion are not going to lead to energy production. Bubble fusion and cold fusion were delusions. There are no other options.

  Despite that distinction, since the 1990s fusion scientists have had to fight, with increasing desperation, to keep hot-fusion research alive. Now, two multibillion-dollar projects, one in California and one in France, will determine the future of fusion. If the projects succeed, they will allow nations around the world to free themselves from dependence on oil. But if they fail, it is possible that no amount of money will be sufficient to realize mankind’s ambition to bottle the sun.

  When it was conceived at the Geneva summit in 1985, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) quickly became magnetic fusion’s best hope of achieving breakeven. Europe and Japan joined in the effort, and along with the Soviet Union and the United States, the four parties, together, agreed to pool their resources to build an enormous tokamak. It was to be the most ambitious international scientific project ever attempted.

  Not only was ITER supposed to achieve breakeven; it was supposed to attain ignition and sustained burn. In theory, after the reaction was started, the plasma would heat itself and provide fusion energy as long as it had fresh fuel to consume; it would be like a furnace or a boiler, just needing periodic restoking while it provided continuous power. Though ITER would cost $10 billion, it would finally end the half measures of the individual countries’ domestic fusion efforts. The cooperating world powers were confident that they would finally end the research phase of magnetic fusion. They would finally be building essentially a working reactor. After so many disappointments and failed promises, scientists from around the globe would usher in the era of fusion energy. It was a golden vision, but it wouldn’t last.

  A decade later, the USSR was no more. The United States was the only superpower left. Japan was in the throes of an economic crisis. Science budgets everywhere were declining, and in the United States the money available for fusion research was plummeting. ITER was in deep trouble.

  In truth, ITER’s trouble began at birth. Nobody had ever pulled off an international scientific project of such an enormous scale. Figuring out how to compress and ignite a plasma was only one of the problems that ITER proponents had to solve. Perhaps even trickier was the problem of distribution and containment of pork.

  Politicians like to see direct benefits from the money they spend. This means they want cash to flow into the hands of the people who elect them. That is the law of pork-barrel politics—why Congress so regularly funds ridiculous multimillion-dollar projects like useless bridges in Alaska. New Mexico congressmen tend to be munificent to Los Alamos; California senators back Livermore; New Jersey politicians support Princeton. It’s similar in other countries. Politicians always like to spend money to benefit their constituents.

  ITER provided a porky dilemma. No matter where the ITER partners put the reactor, three of the four parties were going to have to spend their money on a machine in another country. Even if these partners managed to build much of the equipment domestically, cash (and talent) would have to flow overseas. This isn’t good pork-barrel politics. The country where the reactor would be built would get the lion’s share of the benefits of the project, and the others would see their money flow into the hands of a rival.

  Even a decade after the Geneva meeting, nobody had agreed where ITER would be built. Rather than consolidating multiple international efforts into one big project, the need to distribute the pork among the parties led to just the opposite: duplication of effort. There were three centers—one in Germany, one in Japan, and one in the United States—devoted to designing the reactor.

  Declining budgets made matters much worse. Fusion scientists in the United States had been making drastic cuts to their research program. They obliterated almost everything that wasn’t part of a tokamak project; the nation put almost all its magnetic fusion eggs in the tokamak basket. Many fusion scientists thought that other configurations (including some new ones like “spheromaks”) might lead to a working reactor faster than a tokamak would. In their view, cutting off research for these alternatives was shortsighted and premature. The tokamak shouldn’t be the only game in town. Thus, they were against ITER. They didn’t want to wager everything on a single enormous tokamak. Moreover, they weren’t alone in their wariness of the international reactor. Even tokamak physicists felt threatened, because the domestic fusion program would have to be gutted in favor of the enormous international collaboration. The already stretched budgets would have to accommodate ITER. Congress would not provide additional funds for more big domestic experiments, and the existing ones would be quickly shut down to cut expenses. Laboratories like Princeton’s would become superfluous without a major machine to experiment with. There would only be one big machine in the world, and it would likely be overseas.

  Thus, by the mid-1990s, ITER had a large number of opponents: non-tokamak fusion scientists who resented the single-minded concentration on tokamaks, tokamak physicists who were afraid of having the domestic fusion program shipped overseas, and most important of all, politicians who saw taxpayer money flowing into the hands of other countries’ governments. Everybody, in theory, liked the idea of a huge international fusion effort. In practice, though it was unpopular, and budgets were still in free fall.

  By 1995, the magnetic fusion budget had been hovering around $350 million per year. The President’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Tec
hnology (PCAST), an independent panel of experts that counseled the president on all matters scientific, gave Bill Clinton a grave warning about the fusion budget. At $320 million per year, the domestic program would be crippled, and ITER—as planned—would be too expensive to support; it would have to be renegotiated at a lower cost. A demonstration fusion power plant would be at least forty years away. If the budget dropped below $320 million, the consequences were almost too horrible to contemplate. The committee tried to envision a worthwhile fusion program with lower levels of funding but came to the following conclusion:

  We find that this cannot be done. Reducing the U.S. fusion R&D program to such a level would leave room for nothing beyond the core program of theory and medium-scale experiments ... no contribution to an international ignition experiment or materials test facility, no [new domestic tokamak], little exploitation of the remaining scientific potential of TFTR, and little sense of progress toward a fusion energy goal. With complete U.S. withdrawal, international fusion collaboration might well collapse—to the great detriment of the prospects for commercializing fusion energy as well as the prospects for future U.S. participation in major scientific and technological collaborations of other kinds.