Photo by Robert Burroughs

Bob Bussasrd: “I was never mainly a scientist, never in all my life.”

If Bob Bussard is right, the following things will happen, perhaps within a half dozen years: 1) People on earth will be able to stop worrying about energy shortages. Forever. 2) Interplanetary space travel at last will be economically feasible. 3) San Diego will be headquarters to an industry that will make IBM look like a poor investment.

There’s a good chance, I believe, that Bussard is right. He is a tall, thin man who has hired about eighty physicists and engineers and secretaries to work in second-story quarters in one of the E. F. Hutton buildings on Torrey Pines Mesa in La Jolla. With them, Bussard thinks he’s going to be able to achieve nuclear fusion. Yes, fusion — one of the great scientific rhapsodies of the Seventies, that which the physicists have been telling us was possible. And they’ve been telling us this for thirty years now.

Stu Rosenwasser:“This is really a very goal-oriented lab."

Photo by Robert Burroughs

For all the excited publicity and the billions of dollars that have been spent trying, it’s almost difficult to remember that no one has yet once achieved a controlled, sustained fusion reaction. Never. But amidst the jungle of fusion research, Bussard six years ago struck out on a very different path. He didn’t make any startling scientific discoveries; he simply conceived of a different way to solve the problem. At first the path led him away from the entire fusion community, and while in this uncharted territory, he says he was ambushed by the U.S. government. Today, however, almost everyone within the world fusion community concedes that this sad-looking, silver-haired Del Mar resident has a chance of being right; some say that it’s a good chance.

“I was never mainly a scientist, never in all my life,” he says. ”A scientist is someone who’s interested in studying phenomena and getting answers and then studying more.” Instead, Bussard, who was born in Washington, D.C. fifty-four years ago, had other childhood models. His father was a civil engineer; his mother was an architect. And from the time he was seven, Bussard says he wanted to create useful things which had never existed before. Thus his story, this story, is about engineering — about how it gets done and how it can seem dashing, even romantic.

Ramy Shanny insists he could build machines tomorrow that should achieve the conditions that ought to allow one to achieve fusion.

Photo by Robert Burroughs

In Bussard’s case, the first visionary idea was that of building rocket ships to carry humans to the moon, to other planets. So he got two engineering degrees and in the 1950s he worked on the government’s program to design a nuclear-powered rocket. “It was a machine that everyone said couldn’t be built, and yet it [the engine for the nuclear rocket] was built. It took a bunch of us a couple of years to make sure that it would happen. And it was a technological tour de force that to this day has never been matched anywhere.” Eventually, Bussard continues, “The market use for it went away because the United States decided not to go into manned interplanetary flight and decided to fight a war in Vietnam instead, which was highly stupid.” But the nuclear-rocket program was gaining momentum at the time Bussard went to Princeton to pick up an advanced degree in physics.

By this point, fusion had already captured his imagination. The rocket program had relied on the idea of using fission reactors — that is, engines which produced energy by splitting atoms apart (just as the San Onofre power plants produce energy). But since the late Forties, physicists had seen that enormous quantities of energy also can be produced by joining atoms together to form a new element. (This is what happens in the sun, where hydrogen atoms are transformed into helium.) Bussard says it had become obvious to him in the nuclear-rocket program that fusion-powered rockets would be superior to fission-powered ones, partly because fusion is fueled by hydrogen, which is virtually free and unlimited, and furthermore, because a fusion reaction produces just 1/1000 the radioactive waste of a fission reaction.

Copper magnets designed to produce extremely high magnetic fields.

Photo by Robert Burroughs

All that was needed was to do it. But ironically, by the time Bussard completed his dissertation (on plasma physics) in 1961, he had already decided that controlled fusion wouldn’t be achieved for a long, long time. The basic problem is that the last thing hydrogen atoms want to do is to be fused into helium atoms. In fact, physicists had uniformly agreed that just about the only way to get those atoms to fuse is to heat them to incomprehensibly high temperatures (tens of millions of degrees). Excited by that much energy — driven to such a superheated frenzy — the hydrogen atoms effectively should be unable to avoid ‘‘running into” each other.

But how do you contain anything heated to 70 million degrees? The highest melting point of any known material is only 6000 degrees Fahrenheit. The answer the world’s physicists had quickly settled upon was to contain the superheated hydrogen gas, known as “plasma,” by a force field, one created by magnets. To the physicists, it sounded simple, and initially hopes ran high that it would in fact be so. By 1961, however, the naive optimism had all but died. The early experiments with magnetic “bottles” quickly showed that the bottles unexpectedly “leaked.” The physicists would start heating the plasma, and then some little amount of the plasma would sneak past the magnetic field and reach the walls of the container. At that point, rather than melting the container walls, the converse would always happen: contact with the walls would instantly cool down the reaction and halt the entire process.

Riggatron power core

Bussard says by the time he received his Ph.D., it was clear that the fusion research community desperately needed to study plasma painstakingly in order to learn how to build better bottles around it. And most experts then projected that thirty years would pass before practical fusion machines would be built. This hardly suited Bussard, who, again, felt compelled to make useful things. So he returned to work on other high-tech products for private industry (developing electro-optical night vision devices for Xerox; working on space propulsion for TRW).

He didn’t lose his fascination with fusion, however. In fact, by 1973 enough progress had been made to interest him in a job as deputy director of the laser fusion program at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and the next year Bussard was lured into signing on as assistant director of fusion research for the Atomic Energy Commission. If practical fusion power still was decades away, nonetheless OPEC had just imposed the first oil embargo on the world, and in response, the great race for fusion power had begun. Bussard worked with the AEC “just long enough to create this big, huge momentum wheel of money that became the national fusion program.” Then the confines of government bureaucracy began to chafe. “I didn’t want to be a civil servant,” he says. Instead, he went into business as an energy-studies consultant. And not long thereafter, the aforementioned new path opened up before him.

Bob Bussard: “Money has no meaning. The only thing that has any meaning in this world is time."

Photo by Robert Burroughs

This momentous occasion occurred in the summer of 1976, Bussard recalls, when he was attending a fusion research conference at Princeton. One day he was strolling down the road to lunch in the company of an Italian physicist named Bruno Coppi, whom Bussard had known for years. This particular day, Coppi was telling Bussard about the highly original plasma research he was working on at MIT. The most original feature of that work-was the kind of magnetic bottle Coppi was using to contain the hydrogen plasma. The plans for virtually every other magnetic bottle in the world at that time called for using “superconducting” magnets to create their magnetic fields. And with good reason: superconductors require very little electricity to operate; there seemed to be no question that they would consume less power than they should be able to produce. However, due to certain other characteristics, superconductors only work in a huge machine, one about the size of a small office building. And such huge machines were staggeringly expensive.

Consequently, Coppi had built a magnetic bottle of the same basic design as all its larger brethren but with this crucial difference: he used copper magnets designed to produce extremely high magnetic fields to develop the necessary force field. For various reasons, this allows for the construction of a very small magnetic bottle — say, in the range of a nine-by-twelve-foot box. At the time of his historic conversation with Bussard, Coppi was only using his creation to study regular hydrogen plasma, but he casually mentioned to Bussard that he thought it was theoretically possible to add deuterium and tritium (both necessary to a fusion reaction) — and to achieve fusion in it. In practice, Coppi saw an insurmountable obstacle to doing this: the great heat of a fusion reaction concentrated in a room-size space would melt the inner walls of the reactor. This is when Bussard stopped in his tracks.

“I said, ‘Bruno, it’s a winner! If you just marry it with aerospace engineering and make it have wonderful heat transfer and high stresses and structures, you can get a much higher power level — hundreds of times higher.* And Bruno said, ‘No, no. Bob. It will melt.’ And I said, ‘No, no, Bruno. Not if you cool it properly.’”

Today Bussard says, “All of a sudden I knew we had the answer to the fusion problem. I just knew if we dug at it, it would work. And all of a sudden all this planning, and all those years would go away. And we’d have a small, cheap thing. It was something that just smelled like it would work.” That night at a party held in the home of Princeton University’s president, Bussard walked up to the director of the government’s fusion program and announced enigmatically that he had solved the man’s problem. ‘‘He said, ‘What’s my problem?’ I said, ‘Getting fusion power.’” When the man demanded to know how, Bussard replied that he had a few months’ work to do before he could answer. ‘‘But I’ll be back,” he gloated.

To understand Bussard’s excitement, you have to understand what difference the small size of the reactor made. Smallness implied cheapness, and cheapness meant you could afford to build a number of the little machines relatively quickly, and push them to their limits, and break them, and build some more. ‘‘It’s the classical Thomas Edisonian method of development,” Bussard says. ‘‘You build and test, build and test, build and test.” You develop the new machinery in spite of the fact that you lack understanding of all the physics involved in running that machinery. Bussard .cites an analogy: ‘‘If we had to understand on the basis of fundamental theory the flow of water in pipes before we could build anything that used flowing water in pipes, we would not today have flush toilets. Flush toilets were not designed on the basis of theory.” By the same token, he figured that if you didn’t first have to develop all the theory, fusion could happen much faster.

The magnetic bottles being used by the late Seventies in the main line of the government’s research each cost fifty to eighty million dollars. To consider an example close to home, the government estimates that it will have spent two billion dollars on the giant Doublet III experimental fusion device in the course of the machine’s Fifteen-year lifetime up at General Atomic Technologies in La Jolla.

No one can afford to take risks with such a piece of equipment, Bussard says sympathetically. Breaking it would invite scandal . . . Congressional uproar ... a threat to the very funding for the main-line programs! Since that’s unthinkable, the established researchers have been forced to proceed an inch at a time, first developing the physics theory and only then timidly pushing the machines closer to their full capacity. Furthermore, even as new theoretical discoveries are made, the big machines can’t be quickly modified to reflect the new knowledge. All this explains why in 1976 the government was resigned to not seeing a controlled fusion reaction until around the year 2000, with a twenty- to thirty-year wait after that for the real commercialization of fusion power.

Bussard, however, suddenly foresaw designing a series of little fusion reactors within about five years, establishing demonstration plants within an additional three to five years, and seeing commercial plants selling electrical power to utility customers just a year or two later — say, by 1988. And in the first year after Bussard’s brainstorm, events moved with a speed to match his galloping vision. Within six months, Bussard and Coppi filed for a series of patents on various small machines that used copper magnets (which they had baptized “Riggatron reactors” in honor of the Riggs National Bank in Washington, D.C., which had extended them a line of credit). They also founded a company which they called INESCO (for International Nuclear Energy Systems Company) to develop the fusion machines. Within a few months more, they had obtained $637,000 to study in detail whether one could actually design and build machines to do what these machines would have to do.

The United States government provided that money. Bussard says he always planned to seek private funding after receiving those first public monies, because ‘‘we wanted to hold the patent rights commercially, and be able to exploit it for profit. I learned a hell of a lot at Xerox. What I learned is that if you have a hell of a good idea and you own all the patent rights on it, you’re gonna make billions of dollars.” However, he claims he viewed and continues to view the very receipt of that government seed money as “the best way to get a stamp: ‘USDA Prime Beef.’ People believe it must be okay because the government says so. It’s probably wrong — but that’s what people believe.” And so he claims he doesn’t regret having asked for and received the government funds — even though the strings attached to that money nearly succeeded in pulling the fledgling company under before it really got started.

The calculations Bussard and Coppi undertook for their feasibility study bore out Bussard’s initial intuition — it seemed (to Bussard) that the little fusion reactors were indeed buildable. But then because the government had funded the study, a panel convened by the government’s Office of Fusion Energy reviewed those conclusions in 1978 — and the panel’s verdict was calamitous. The panel members asserted that Bussard couldn’t build magnets capable of producing a sufficient force field because no material existed that was strong enough. The magnets would break under the stress. The members also said it was impossible to transfer the unimaginable heat (roughly equal to the power consumed by the City of San Diego at any given moment, all concentrated into the size of a conference table) out of Bussard’s machines fast enough to avoid melting the structure. The members picked at other points, too, and the combined effect was devastating.

To Bussard the official rebuke meant nothing less than a declaration of war. He viewed the panel members’ statements as blatant falsehoods. True, no metal existed with the strength needed for building the magnets. But one could be developed; industry normally only develops new materials when a specific need for those materials arises, Bussard pointed out, and no one before had needed a copper alloy of such strength. With regard to the heat-transfer requirements, Bussard countered that the aerospace industry in the 1950s had come up with methods for cooling far more heat than Would concentrate inside his Riggatron reactors.

Today he looks back and judges that one reason the panel members didn’t know these things was that most of them were physicists rather than engineers. Unlike Bussard, with his twenty years of experience in the aerospace industry, they simply didn’t realize what dramatic technological strides that industry had taken. “None of them had ever built rocket engines. None of them had ever built high-density power machines. Anything to do with the design of power equipment was to them a vast mystery,” Bussard says.

But he believes more than simple ignorance was at work. He thinks the very concept of a small reactor threatened the review panel members, almost all of whom had close ties to the existing, more conventional research efforts. “If the way we were studying worked, we would achieve the result of fusion power twenty years sooner and at one-fortieth the cost of the way all those other people were chasing,” Bussard says. If it even looked as if it might work, Congress just possibly could say to established fusion researchers, “Why are you asking us for a half a billion-dollar budget this year if... it can be done for ten million?” He says that faced with such a prospect, the government labs and institutes in the conventional fu ion program made ‘ ‘a strong effort to discredit the entire idea and to view it as useless and hopeless, which would have prevented us from going forward with anyone,” even private investors.

“I didn’t want the war. I didn’t seek it out,” Bussard says wearily. Neither did his partner, Bruno Coppi, who was so distressed by the turmoil that Coppi withdrew from active participation in INESCO (although he still owns part of the company). “Bruno hates political conflict, and unfortunately the field of physics is dominated by political conflict,” Bussard says. His own response to this encounter with it was to be more aggressive. “When I’m being shot at by the biggest government on earth with cannons, tanks, and submachine guns, I’m not going to lie down and smile and say, ‘You’re all wonderful fellas.’ I’m going to shoot back in order to survive.”

Bussard says someday the long, day-to-day history of how his war evolved will get written, “and it’s a Robert Ludlum story.” Apparently a prominent character in the events was then-Congressman Mike McCormack, whom Bussard had become friends with back while working for the Atomic Energy Commission. McCormack, in fact, was chairman of the Congressional subcommittee that oversaw all energy research back when INESCO applied for the feasibility study money, and when the first review panel report came out, McCormack again lobbied for INESCO. Ultimately, McCormack brought enough pressure upon the Department of Energy that it convened a second review panel (“very bright, senior people who were not beholden to the Atomic Energy Commission; whose salaries weren’t paid by the fusion office,” says Bussard. “We had a retired vice president of Westinghouse, a senior professor at MIT, people from NASA”). Late in 1979 that second review panel released a report which Bussard says concluded that “the idea’s pretty good, reasonably sound. It has risk but it also holds enormous promise. The program time is sensible; the engineering science seems okay.”

“We won,” he says flatly. Other observers viewed the war’s conclusion less dramatically. If less damning, the second panel’s report was still highly skeptical. But by the beginning of 1980, it didn’t really seem to matter. In fact, a year and a half earlier Litton Industries had given INESCO a small amount of money, not enough to begin designing the Riggatron reactors but enough to occupy a skeleton staff with some small-scale studies. Furthermore, in April of 1980 Bussard found a patron to help him start the main development program. Millionaire publisher Bob Guccione (Omni, Penthouse) was convinced enough of Bussard’s chances for success that he agreed to fund the project. At last, Bussard was finally doing it.

Just down the block from the Danish Pastry Shoppe on the main street in Del Mar, INESCO today has rented some rooms which might draw a sneer from any burglar who chanced to enter. These are big, fluorescent-lit rooms as spare and utilitarian as a freight elevator. They look empty, even though they harbor work benches, a machine shop, microscopes, and other testing apparatus. Some of the only color is provided by pieces of copper deposited here and there: pieces as small as bottle openers, other slabs larger than card-table tops.

“This is really a very goal-oriented lab,” says Stu Rosenwasser, who directs the facility. “It’s not a research lab.” When Rosenwasser joined the staff of INESCO about two years ago, probably the most important goal of this lab was to come up with the copper alloy needed for the fusion reactor’s magnets — the metal which INESCO’s critics said couldn’t be developed. In fact, that metal had to meet formidable requirements. It had to be as conductive as possible, because the more conductive the Riggatron reactor’s copper coils are, the less power will be consumed to create the magnetic field. Although pure copper is one of the best conductors in the world, it’s also not very strong, whereas the Riggatron magnets must be much stronger than steel. (When you run a huge electric current through a conductor, the interaction of that current with the magnetic field produced by the current imposes a strain on the metal no less physical than the strain that exists when you suspend an automobile from a metal hook.) So Rosenwasser and his crew got to work. By this past August they had produced a copper alloy fifty percent stronger and thirty percent more conductive than any previously available alloy, a material more than three times as strong as ordinary structural steel and at the same time almost as conductive as copper — certainly more than good enough for the Riggatron magnets.

This accomplishment wasn’t particularly difficult or ingenious, according to Rosenwasser, a boyish-looking materials engineer who worked up the road in General Atomic’s fusion program before coming to INESCO. First INESCO found two copper alloy manufacturers willing to work with the fusion company to develop the new metal. Then Rosenwasser and his crew looked at the existing alloy that came closest to what they needed, asking themselves what about it might be changed. They learned that it contained trace elements of iron and silicon, so INESCO asked the manufacturer to remove them, a step which immediately increased the conductivity by fifty percent. Rosenwasser’s team further figured out a different way to process the alloy, a method of heating and cooling and working it that improved the material still further.

Rosenwasser says that by a similar process, the lab has solved the other major materials problems presented by the Riggatron project: he and his people have developed a method for building channels in the magnets (through which the cooling water will flow); they’ve developed new materials for insulating the magnet coils (since standard plastic insulators break down under the shower of neutrons produced by the fusion reaction). These achievements aren’t all that different from the kinds of projects Rosenwasser was doing when he worked for General Atomic, the rival fusion company on Torrey Pines Mesa; what is different is the pace of the project, he says. “Bob [Bussard] is a go-for-broke kind of guy. He envisions pushing technology farther than anyone. He’s never satisfied.’’ Bureaucracy within the small staff of INESCO is minimal; employees talk enthusiastically about being allowed to work from seven in the morning until late at night if they feel like it (and conversely, to be able to get away when they need to). Rosenwasser says when he worked at General Atomic, he never really expected to see fusion in his lifetime. “It’s not that what I was doing wasn’t exciting. It was. But when I would think of fusion power, I wouldn’t imagine it happening until 2030 or 2040.’’ Now he hopes to see it within less than a decade.

Rosenwasser also remembers when he first heard about INESCO back in the late 1970s. He was working at General Atomic at the time, and he says, “You’d go to all these meetings and people would say, ‘Did you hear about Bussard and his crazy copper machines?”’ Later, after Bussard’s “war” with the fusion establishment had ended, Rosenwasser heard that INESCO had relocated from the Washington, D.C. suburbs to San Diego, drawn by the climate and the concentration of scientific and technical brainpower here. Rosenwasser was curious enough to make an appointment to talk to Bussard and his second-in-command, an Israeli physicist named Ramy Shanny, at their offices a few doors down from Alfonso’s Restaurant on Prospect Street in La Jolla. Rosenwasser also dug out the two controversial review-committee reports and he recalls, “I’m looking at all these criticisms and I’m saying, ‘Gee, Bob is right. There must be a way to design this.’ But the people who reviewed this [the feasibility study of the Riggatron concept] were university physicists who wanted to use just sort of common technology.” In contrast, Rosenwasser had worked in the aerospace industry before working for General Atomic and he knew “in aerospace you’re always solving the impossible.”

Today he’s confident that not only has INESCO solved the problem of finding suitable building materials for its small reactors, but the company also has designed a reactor that will work. That’s an assertion upon which Ramy Shanny elaborates. A big, droll man who speaks with a pronounced Israeli accent, Shanny joined forces with Bussard way back in 1977; it was Shanny who assembled the multinational staff of about fifty-five engineers and physicists now working for INESCO up the road from the Del Mar materials lab. For the last two years Shanny says that staff has been asking questions: “How do I fabricate this particular tube?” “How thick should it be?” “How do you connect the water?” “What’s the pressure on the connector?” “What kind of insulator do I use?” “How do I machine and fabricate it?” “How does it all fit together?” He says INESCO doesn’t yet have “fabrication drawings,” the detailed plans that show where every bolt will go, but the Riggatron reactor is “no longer just conceptually possible. It’s numerically defined and designed as to details.” With the designs he has today, Shanny insists, he could build machines tomorrow that should achieve the conditions that ought to allow one to achieve fusion.

And yet INESCO doesn’t plan to build the Riggatron reactors today or tomorrow or even this year. For one thing, enormous electrical power will be required to run the reactor magnets, roughly a gigawatt — the equivalent of the full output of one of the San Onofre reactors. INESCO can readily obtain that power by purchasing gigantic generators from one of many possible sources. The only hitch is that delivery won’t come for three years after the order is placed. Moreover, Bussard and Shanny aren’t ordering anything yet. First they’ve got to get more money.

Bussard says it will cost a minimum of $100 million to test his concept and achieve fusion. That amount of money would buy not only the power generators and a test site (almost certainly outside California), but it would also cover the cost of developing and building five separate reactor models to be tested on the site. By way of contrast, the giant new experimental fusion machine just unveiled at Princeton cost $500 million, according to Bussard, and is “a toy,” generally acknowledged to be only a fraction of the size required to have any hope for producing power. Despite the Riggatron’s relative economy, however, an additional $100 million is a heftier burden than Guccione will be able to shoulder alone. (Guccione has already given INESCO some $12 million.) Thus, almost immediately after enlisting Guccione’s support, Bussard began turning to other potential backers, seeking not the minimum amount of $ 100 million but $250 million or more, enough for two test sites, one inside the United States and one outside the country, with five experimental machines on each site.

“Raising that kind of money, privately, is a fascinating educational experience,” Bussard understated one day recently. “That’s more difficult than obtaining fusion,” he jokes. “You’re now talking in fractions of a billion dollars in private money, for an investment in something for which there is no possible payoff in short of six to eight years.” It’s a slow, tedious process of talking to people scattered all over the world; to date Bussard and Shanny have talked to some thirty American corporations, plus a number of wealthy individuals here and abroad, and also to government officials in several countries, most notably Israel and France. Bussard claims he alone logged at least 250,000 miles per year in airplanes over the past several years. Indeed, today he looks weary, sleeps only four to five hours a night, consumes megavitamins to increase his energy level.

If the scramble for money has drained him, however, he insists that those labors are almost over. As of today, INESCO has tentative commitments for $150 million, and Bussard claims he expects to receive word about the balance within six months. Although he shies away from specifying where the funds will come from, in-house scuttlebutt says that Bussard is pinning his hopes on a major contribution from private Israeli investors. At least one recent report in the Israeli press confirms that likelihood; also, it fits in with Bussard’s switch to espousing an overseas test site in addition to an American one. (Though Bussard explains that switch in part by bluntly pointing out that having test sites in two countries insures that “no one political jurisdiction can completely stop it in case peculiar political things happen.’’)

“This is the largest single private R&D venture capital high-risk investment ever constructed,” Bussard says with a mixture of pride and fatigue. His attitude suggests he’s already got the money in his pocket, that it’s a fait accompli. Assuming that he’s right and the money does come through, things should start happening almost immediately. For instance, Shanny says INESCO will start building models of the Riggatron reactor’s major subsystems; the purchase orders for the parts to build the models have already been filled out. The company will order the power generators, and the company will begin marking off the time to their delivery. Meanwhile, although the test machines have been designed already, INESCO’s engineers will continue tinkering with those designs, trying to make them more reliable, more ingenious. They’ll conclude the final designs and begin building the prototypes by 1986. If INESCO gets the money tomorrow, then according to its schedule, it should complete construction of those five (or ten) prototypes three and a half years from now.

Bussard says a lot of people express surprise at the notion of testing the reactors in parallel, but he insists these critics miss the following logic: it takes much more time to build and test five machines sequentially than it does to build and test them virtually simultaneously. It’s similar to the difference between placing five bets in one horse race, versus making one bet only in five successive races. With the second method, you may win in the first race, but you also risk not winning until the fifth, and when you’re talking not about horseracing but about achieving fusion, “every year you delay going commercial Li e., winning] costs you billions of dollars in profit,” Bussard points out.

Because its prototypes will cost only about a million dollars apiece (compared with the $500 million price tag on the large, conventional machines), INESCO can afford to build five at once, Bussard argues. But with those five, INESCO will nonetheless hedge its bets. Each machine will differ in size and basic design features; each will have a slightly different arrangement for heating the plasma, for example. No one knows precisely what conditions are going to be necessary to achieve fusion, and in fact, over the years, various physicists have developed various (differing) predictions. Given that, INESCO’s five machines will each be based on the assumption that a different one of those predictions is right. One of the five, Bussard says, will be vastly over-designed. INESCO won’t end up building that machine commercially because it almost certainly will be more expensive, “but it’s a machine we’ll build to insure that no matter which conditions actually apply, we’ll get there.” That is, to fusion.

But what if it’s all just a dream, another great scientific rhapsody? I asked Bussard if he can even conceive of the possibility that fusion simply can’t be achieved. Humans can build artificial hearts. We create test-tube babies. But isn’t it possible that the very concept of a manmade star violates some law of the universe that we yet don’t know about?

“No. I can’t conceive of that,” Bussard answered. “I can’t prove that I’m right, but I just have a deep conviction that it’s there.”

“Is that faith?” I asked him.

“Yeah, it’s faith if you like. It’s faith that we’ll stumble around long enough and find a way to do it.” He says it’s a faith, however, based on the fact that “we have ten to the twelfth fusion machines running now — all the stars. They’re just burning happily all the time . . . and also there have been probably 500 small fusion machines. They’re called thermonuclear bombs.” At one end of the scale you have the stars; at the other the hydrogen bomb. “All we need to do is find a way to get a machine in the middle. We just have to figure out the right way to do it.”

That still leaves the question of whether the Riggatron is the right machine. To that, Bussard replies that almost everyone in the world involved in fusion research is. using the same basic type of magnetic bottle that the Riggatron design embodies. The Riggatron design is much smaller, it uses copper magnets, but basically it’s a donut-shaped structure known as a tokamak (pronounced toke-ah-mack), the type of magnetic bottle which has shown the most promise throughout the history of fusion research. Consequently, says Bussard, “We have the benefit of all the world’s knowledge and research of the last sixteen years of tokamak physics.”

Thus he argues that the Riggatron tokamak has as good a chance of working as any of the world’s established research projects. Nonetheless Bussard concedes the outside possibility that the tokamak represents the wrong technological choice; that when his machines try to push the plasma to the final conditions in which fusion should take place, something weird will happen. It’s possible that the plasma could behave in a way it has never behaved under less intense conditions, that it could do something no one could have anticipated; no fundamental theory exists to explain how it always will behave.

However, Bussard offers the following case for his confidence in the Riggatron. He says three things really count when you’re trying to achieve fusion: how hot you get the plasma, how dense you get it, and how long you can keep the mess together before some of the particles sneak off to the walls of the container and cool off. He continues, “Since tokamaks were invented by the Russians, those three parameters collectively have been advanced by a factor of 100,000 by all the world’s work to date.” All INESCO has to do in its reactor is to go an additional factor of six. “Now, our design is based on physics scaling laws, and we have moderately good hope that those scaling laws will still work over that last factor of six. We have a very little way to go,” he asserts.

At long last Bussard has also begun to get support for that optimism from his peers. Last fall, for instance, INESCO invited a committee composed of some of the most distinguished names in fusion research to come to La Jolla to evaluate the progress of Bussard’s Riggatron reactors. That committee concluded that although the Riggatron project still poses extreme technical challenges, INESCO had made considerable progress and the reactors held great promise. “Two to three years ago, you couldn’t have gotten that committee together,” says committee member Edward Kintner. Kintner himself formerly headed the government’s fusion program during the time when Bussard’s “war” with the establishment was raging. And yet today Kintner judges that if Bussard can get his funding, INESCO “will be the first to either prove or disprove practical fusion.”

Other clues to the change in INESCO’s status within the fusion community also have been turning up. Several articles in national publications have appeared within the last few months touting the small-reactor approach to fusion. They’ve looked not only at INESCO but at a later entrant in the small-reactor sweepstakes — namely. General Atomic. Ironically, General Atomic still runs one of the most important big-reactor programs in the country, and research within that program still continues to inch along. But the director of that program, Tihiro Ohkawa, began working on a parallel small-reactor approach sometime in 1978 (two years after Bussard had his brainstorm with Bruno Coppi). Ohkawa’s little machine is not a tokamak; it’s considered to be more experimental for that reason. Today Ohkawa directs the work on both General Atomic’s giant tokamak and on his company’s new compact contender, but when he discusses the virtues of smallness, his words precisely echo the arguments Bussard has been making for almost seven years now.

Suddenly, small is beautiful within the field of fusion research. I asked Bussard whether he feels vindicated. “I don’t know if the word ‘vindication’ is right,” he replied. “It’s sort of an obvious fact that small is beautiful. The only question is: can anybody find a way to build a small machine? For a long time people said no. Now they’re beginning to change that opinion.” He adds that if fusion is achieved in a small reactor, “I have no doubt that within five years there will be five better ideas because then people will know that it works and so it’s okay to think of it working. . . . You know Von Neumann once observed that the secret of the atomic bomb wasn’t the physics of it or the design of this piece or that. It was the notion that it will work. Once you knew that the atomic bomb would work, practically anybody could go out and design one.” Bussard is so confident that his idea will work that he’s already paying people to plan for the consequences of the Riggatron’s success. ‘‘Just building the five or ten machines and proving that fusion works is not good enough,” Bussard says. ‘‘That’s absolutely not a useful thing to do, all by itself. Because if that’s all we did, Ramy and I would appear on the Johnny Carson show and be world heroes for fifteen minutes and then we would disappear and say, ‘Well, now what do we do? We don't have a business.’ The only way of generating income is to take those wonderfully interesting machines, if they work, and make them into commercial products that are sold to the utilities and steam plants of the world.”

Thus Bussard already has a chemical engineer with an advanced physics degree designing prototype fusion power plants. Those preliminary designs reflect a dramatic fact of life about the Riggatron reactors — namely, they’ll have a very short life span, perhaps as short as only a month. This is because the neutron bombardment will make them radioactive, and radioactivity eventually causes the metal to fail. But since the reactors also will be relatively cheap — a half a million to a million dollars apiece — INESCO envisions power plants installing five or six at a time. As one of the little reactors wears out, it will be removed and replaced with a new one. They’ll be just like light bulbs, crows

Bussard, simple and disposable. (INESCO expects that the radioactive machines will ‘‘cool off’ enough in a year or less that they can be safely handled and have various elements recycled for other uses.)

Bussard has hired another engineer, this one with a master’s degree in business administration, to survey what utility companies want. This man also is one of those who have calculated what practical fusion power (as produced by the Riggatron reactors) is likely to mean in economic terms — and those numbers are amazing. If the Riggatron reactors work, INESCO should be able to produce energy as cheaply as if it were burning oil that costs only one to three dollars per barrel (oil currently costs more than thirty dollars per barrel). Consumers should be able to look forward to their electricity bills dropping by up to fifty percent. With regard to waste, fusion is a form of nuclear energy and it does produce some radioactive waste. But according to Shanny, that waste is a thousand times less toxic than the waste produced in a fission plant like San Onofre because the waste consists exclusively of metals (unlike fission, which produces other substances much more difficult to contain and store) and because the radioactive isotopes produced in a fusion reaction have much shorter half lives. Finally, besides being relatively clean and producing cheap electricity, the plants should also yield a range of other useful byproducts, ranging from synthetic fuels to desalinized water.

Those economic benefits promise, in Bussard’s words, that if the Riggatron reactors work, Bussard and his employees at INESCO will get “alarmingly” rich. But he says the money doesn’t motivate him personally. I scoffed. Bussard owns two Maseratis and flies the Concorde. Sure, sure, he conceded. He enjoys having a nice car and providing for his family (he’s been married four times and has four children). But, he repeated, “Money has no meaning. The only thing that has any meaning in this world is time. The only thing money has a value for is to buy time back for yourself; to hire people to do things that otherwise eat up your time.” And he claims that the only thing he wants to do with his time is more “creative engineering work.

“To me, engineering is art,” he says intensely. ”I don’t mean cookbook engineering where you look up formulas and design the bridge according to the formula. But creative, frontier engineering is like sculpture ’cause there’s an idea in your mind no one’s ever had before. And with a bunch of people you get together and out of your head you construct this whole new thing that’s never existed before. And if it’s useful for man, what a wonderful thing you’ve done! Engineering is the highest form of art. Chopping marble or applying colors on canvas is much less rich than engineering in which you translate ideas into objects that do things — for the.first time.”