- It is never night inside the Machine. Even after the
sun has set on the mesa and Jimmy Potter and the frogmen and the men in
white jumpsuits and the men in blue jumpsuits have showered, packed up,
and gone home; even as yawning, befuddled scientists - with names like
Jim Bailey and Mark Derzon and Melissa Douglas - sit in offices in a nearby
building, trapped by their own reflections and in the blackened windows;
and even as this oesophageal dark falls over coyote and jackrabbit and
moves everything towards sleep and dreams, towards the deepest centre of
the night, the Machine is awake.
-
- Its 36 Marx generators are set in a ring like a metallic
Stonehenge. The 20 Rexolite disks of the vacuum chamber look like flying
saucers. Its vast, concentric pool of five-weight oil and deionized water
seems bottomless - real oil and real water, in half-million-gallon tanks
that sit one inside the other like a wheel within a wheel. Even now, there
are depths in the Machine, invisible worlds revealing themselves, the secret
body of the universe floating up. Deuterium, tritium, helium.
-
- It begins with the flip of a cyber switch in the control
room at the north end of the hanger. Before a bank of computer screens,
a man clicks a mouse, and then electricity, quietly sucked off the municipal
power grid in Albuquerque, floods into the outer ring of Marx generators.
Which is when the Machine takes control. A siren sounds, red lights flash,
doors automatically lock. The frogmen and the white and blue jumpsuits
clamber over the high bay, down metal steps, and retreat to a copper-coated
room behind a foot of cement.
-
- Another switch is flipped, another mouse clicked. To
the piercing sound of an alarm, a countdown in the Marx generators ensues,
or rather a count up, in kilovolts, comes in a monotone, almost hollow
voice beneath the frantic alarm. The man in the control room on a tinny
loudspeaker, the Machine speaking through the human.
-
- 'Twenty kV...'
-
- 'Thirty kV...'
-
- 'Forty kV...'
-
- At 90, the floodgates open: a pulse of electricity surges
out of the Marx generators toward an inside ring of giant capacitors and
then through a series of gas switches. The current is compressed by the
Machine into a wild whitewater of electricity that charges toward the vacuum
chamber at a speed of 60 million feet per second. On its way, it passes
through painted sharks' mouths, drawn there by the men in white and blue
jumpsuits in the way that fighter pilots sometimes draw on their warplanes
to show their prowess - or hide their misgivings. The electricity pours
past the sharks' mouths, is redirected downward, along the Z axis, into
the vacuum chamber, blitzing and bombarding from all sides a three-dimensional
target in a gold-plated can, a delicately strung array of tungsten wires
the size of a spool of thread, hanging in black space like a tiny chandelier.
-
- Driven so furiously in the Machine, and then storming
the array, the pulse of electricity - enough juice now to light up America
like a birthday cake - instantly vapourises the tungsten wire into plasma,
a superheated ion gas. The ions hover and dance along the invisible circumference
once described by the array, while a relentless magnetic field keeps pressing
on them, shoving them from behind. Thrusting and squeezing and ramming
until the ions can no longer resist, the centre cannot hold, and in that
hot nanosecond - Boom ! Everything becomes one.
-
- This is not a gentle conjunction but a Pandora's box
suddenly ripped open by nuclear passion, an orgy of ions. Boom ! Lightning
fills the Machine, veins out over the surface of the water. Temperatures
flare to those inside the sun. The earth rocks once again. And in few billionths
of a second, 290 terawatts - 80 times the power generated on earth at any
given time - roar to life inside the Machine.
-
- Watching it through a Plexiglas window, you might as
well be watching the beginning of the universe. Or the end of it. Contained
in that single flash of white light, when the Machine holds the heat and
the power of the sun, when the room fills with lightning, there is everything
we know - and everything we may become. The 21st century. A world covered
by rooms of little suns, generating intense energy and, with it, the possibilities
of time travel and galaxy hopping. Peace among nations. Or the end of time
as we know it, a hole ripped in the universe by the Machine, something
many doomsayers predict, and the earth sucked into oblivion. Our downfall
or salvation. A fusion machine they call Z.
-
- The magic bean; the Holy Grail: fusion. The idea is to
take two isotopes of the hydrogen atom - deuterium and tritium - and mash
them together with a little energy, which in turn releases enormous amounts
of energy in the form of a single neutron. Contrarily, fission, the method
widely employed by today's nuclear reactors, splits heavy uranium and plutonium
atoms, creating lots of energy but also tons of dangerous and everlasting
radioactive waste. Fusion offers a clean source, borne out of the material
of roughly a handful of water and a handful of earth, with its only by-product
being an easily disposable helium-4 nucleus.
-
- What would fusion mean? Endless, cheap energy. Amazing
Star Trek , space-travel possibilities. Fame, fortune, and undoubtedly
a Nobel or two for the lucky scientists. For the better part of five decades,
the race has two separate approaches: magnetic confinement and inertial
confinement. Most researchers - those from Japan, Russia, Europe and America
- focus on the former: big accelerators called stellarators, spheromaks,
and tokamaks (a machine designed partly by Andrei Sakharov) use huge magnets
to contain and compress hydrogen isotopes that hover in a kind of reddish-blue
plasma inside the huge torus-shaped tubes until implosion.
-
- On the other hand, the idea behind inertial confinement
is that tiny fuel pellets of deuterium and tritium are bombarded by lasers
or X-rays. In the case of the Z Machine, the explosion that occurs when
ions are released by the vapourised wire array, and then when ions are
pinched together, creates a huge X-ray pulse, one that scientists hope
can be used to heat the tiny pellets and, in turn, create a small thermonuclear
explosion. As it is, fusion has never been achieved for an extended time
outside the explosion of a hydrogen bomb.
-
- The first time scientists attempted to shoot an early
incarnation of the Z machine, in June 1980, there was bravado and false
bravado and downright fear. At Sandia National Laboratories on Kirtland
Air Force Base, in the same New Mexican high-desert landscape of America's
greatest, most frightening nuclear discoveries, they'd been working on
the Machine for four years. Yet there were still unknown variables, a scientist's
nightmare. First, it was so much bigger and more powerful than any of its
predecessors. What if the Marx generators blew up before it could be shot?
What if residual X-ray radiation contaminated people in the area? Or a
fire destroyed the complex? And what if everything worked perfectly and
they got a huge energy release that blew up Albuquerque itself? It was
a scenario that had been considered at the highest level. As had something
worse: what if people later wished that it had been only Albuquerque that
blew up?
-
- The shot - Sandia shorthand for the firing of the Machine
- was scheduled for a Friday night. But then the machine blew a fitting.
The technical crew - the frogmen, as well as the men in white and blue
jumpsuits - worked feverishly, and by Saturday noon the Machine was ready
again. 'No one knew what to expect,' remembers Gerry Yonas, 58, an engineer
and physicist and one of the founding fathers of the Z Machine. They took
all necessary precautions, charged the Marx generators, and crossed their
fingers. A switch was flipped, electricity pulsated into the Machine, ripped
through the switches, stormed on to the wires. There was a wicked jolt,
and... silence. Sweet, beautiful silence. Everyone was still on earth;
everything seemed to work. The feeling was surreal. 'I felt the ground
shake,' says Yonas, grinning at the memory, 'and everybody said: "Let's
do it again!" Nobody wanted to go home. I had to kick them out. There
was nowhere else in the world to be. This was the beginning.'
-
- The scientists, at that time a group of 20 or so men,
threw high fives and drank beer. Pure, silly jubilation. Only later, photographs
of what actually had occurred inside the Machine made them gasp: huge dragon
snorts of fire filled the hangar. Apparently, plumes of oil had sprayed
skyward in the instant of explosion, flamed, and then flamed out before
the men returned inside the Machine. They had nearly blown themselves up.
By the grace of some benevolent god, or the Machine itself, they were allowed
to return to work on Monday morning, giddy limbs intact.
-
- Over the next 15 years, the Z Machine gradually improved
its output, packing an astonishing wallop - 20 trillion watts' worth of
electrical output, as compared with the mea gre 100,000 amps of the first
machine - but it wasn't enough. Scientists and theoreticians estimated
that for high-yield fusion to be achieved inside the Machine, it would
need to generate something over 1,000 trillion watts. A factor of at least
50 of Z's output.
-
- Which is when the men in suits and ties tried to kill
the Machine. It was a dinosaur, they argued, no longer useful. They felt
Z-pinch technology could not yield the mother lode. By 1995, even Yonas,
who was about to become a grandfather, was acutely feeling the passage
of time. He sadly had to admit that maybe he should sacrifice Z and all
the optimism that had driven the project. Perhaps achieving high-yield
fusion, something scientists compare to the invention of the lightbulb
for its potential to change the world, did indeed belong to the other fusion
machines, the stellarators and spheromaks and tokamaks. To the Russians
or the Japanese or the British or the confederate nerds at Princeton or
Lawrence Livermore or Oak Ridge. And maybe Sandia National Laboratories
- over time, a place known more for its secretive mystique, its downright
weird nefariousness, dating to the cloak-and-dagger days of Little Boy
and Fat Man - would have to sit on the sidelines while someone else gave
the world perhaps its greatest legacy.
-
- But a funny thing happened on the way to the chop shop.
Maybe it was 11th-hour desperation, or some invisible bolt of providence
visited on a few overworked scientists, a couple of whom lit on the simple
idea of stringing the wire array, the spool-sized target at the centre
of the Machine, with double, then triple, the tungsten wire. All of a sudden
- Boom ! Forty trillion watts! No one believed it. They reconfigured the
Machine, boosting its X-ray production. Then someone, Melissa Douglas,
thought to stack the arrays. Boom ! Two hundred trillion watts in a single
pulse! Short of a nuclear blast, it was the most energy ever released on
earth, and suddenly, in 1998, after five decades of chasing the illusion
of high-yield fusion, of regarding it as some far-off Atlantis or dark
galaxy's edge, the Z Machine was a third of the way there.
-
- In science, if you do something once that's never been
done before, it's considered a mistake. Do it twice, and it's simply a
mirage. But the third time it becomes the truth. With Z's new, seemingly
impossible results came the first flickering sign that some deep, unknowable
power resided in the Machine. And so today, the Z Machine is considered
one of the world's best hopes for achieving fusion. 'We may not understand
how we get these huge pulses of power, the meaning may still elude us,'
says Yonas. 'But it's still a fact.'
-
- One that Yonas himself, at first, had a hard time grasping.
After he was handed the results, he remembers squinting at them, and sitting
back at his desk as if blown by a solar wind. 'My God,' he said in a small
voice. 'This could work. This could really work.'
-
- Listen to the Z scientists, to their best idea ('The
use of stark-shifted emissions to measure electric-field fluctuations and
acceleration gaps'), and their dream ('To remedy plasmic instability and
create higher temp- eratures'), and you enter a kind of friend country
that becomes an Andean prison from which it gets harder and harder to escape.
The scientists admit that, at moments, their whole selves are inseparable
from the Machine, that the pull of the Machine is so great that re-entering
normal life can be nearly impossible.
-
- Jim Bailey, a handsome, soft-spoken, loafer-wearing plasma
physicist whose conversation is peppered with references to spectroscopy
and 'the visible regime', says sometimes it's even hard to go to a neighbour's
barbecue - can't make small talk, can't communicate what you do - let alone
talk to your wife. Mark Derzon, a boyish, bearded nuclear physicist, says
he works a system with his wife: when he walks through the door at the
end of a day, he says green light ('Yes, everything is fine, I'm ready
for the kids'); yellow light ('Give me 15 to decompress'); or red light
('I need time'). Melissa Douglas says that there's no line drawn at all
between the Machine and her private life - that the Machine, her place
inside of the Machine, studying something called Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities,
is her private life. And now, at the age of 36, she's watched her friends
get married, have families, settle, and on occasion she's wondered to herself:
'what am I doing? Can we really make fusion work?'
-
- Since the 1950s, the US government has invested nearly
$15bn to find out, always with the promise that fusion is just around the
corner - two, three, five years away - and, with it, a fusion revolution
that would hurtle us to the centre of the earth, the deepest trenches of
the ocean, and the farthest reaches of space. A revolution that would morph
the Third World into the First World until we are simply One World.
-
- After all, how many wars have been fought over oil? And
then, with oil reserves expected to reach full depletion by 2050, how many
more will be? Remove oil as a vital component of our speed-driven, chip-fitted
age and, sure, people would find things to brawl over, but energy wouldn't
be one of them.
-
- And with limitless, cheap energy, the development of
poorer nations wouldn't be one of them, either.
-
- And with development, the have-nots and pariahs of the
world would theoretically join the haves, and so food and housing and education
wouldn't be one of them.
-
- And with a higher standard of living would come a new
freedom for humanity. For at its heart, fusion, as a Utopian ideal, has
always symbolised freedom; freedom from the mistakes and waste of our past,
the Hanford Reservations and the Savannah River Sites - those vast, spooky,
radiating underground storage facilities chambered with containers of plutonium
and iodine waste, on top of which America is built. Though left unsaid,
the race for fusion has always been about democracy or a democratic alternative.
-
- And yet one of the biggest threats to fusion comes from
the same group of people responsible for the Hanford Reservations and the
Savannah River Sites: the US Government. Recently, Congress and various
federal agencies have become disenchanted by the fusion dream. Critics
have lambasted it as a waste of time and money. If we haven't achieved
it in the last 45 years, they argue, we never will. The US has dropped
out of a proposed $10bn international fusion project called ITER, leaving
the facility in doubt of completion. Meanwhile, the government has spent
$3bn, with as much as an additional $43bn to come, on developing Nevada's
Yucca Mountain as a vast nuclear-waste site - despite well-documented problems
- and continues its commitment to fission reactors despite the fact that
radioactive waste can be lethal up to 600 millennia after burial. Leaders
in fusion field, like the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, have mothballed
their big machines, laid off staff, and now are fighting simply for their
own survival.
-
- 'You have to find a way to justify doing something that
you may never see accomplished in your lifetime,' says Jim Bailey, who
has a penchant for reading Hume. 'I mean, instead I could be working for
a cancer cure, with at least a greater hope of finding one. But I'm OK
with this. I've made my peace with it. Fusion will be the greatest scientific
achievement of our time.'
-
- Yonas, with the Super Bowl confidence of Joe Namath,
predicts that usable high-yield fusion will be made available to the American
public by an accelerator called X-1, a generation or two beyond Z, within
three decades - maybe sooner. Mark Derzon, a member of what's called the
Advanced Concepts Group at Z, has designed what would be the first practical
Z-pinch reactor - 'A zero-miracle power plant,' he cheerfully proclaims,
and believes that the Z technology is rougher and tougher, able to sustain
more of the constant rock and roll of such a plant, than are the sensitive
lasers and vacuums necessary for magnetic confinement. But optimism usually
carries the day only past lunch; the request to draw up preliminary plans
for X-1, with its price tag of up to $1bn dollars, is likely to be approved
by the Department of Energy.
-
- 'Every day, it's a leap of faith,' says Neal Singer,
a science writer at Sandia. 'Adding wires to the array - where did that
idea come from? From the outside it makes no sense. It's incredibly complex
and difficult to string tungsten wires 1/10th the diameter of a piece of
hair and space them perfectly. And they did it and got tremendous results.
Then they added more and more, spaced them a little differently and now
we're a third of the way there. It takes these little steps, this day-by-day
thinking. Hour after hour. Ten, 12, 14 hours a day. The constant question
is, Can you just make a little change to influence the result?'
-
- Thus the world inside the Machine is driven down to its
smallest, most maddening detail. For in the end, fusion - its possibility
and reality, its attainment and capture - comes out of this finely tuned
call-and-response with the universe itself, the channelling of some great
unknown, copulating force that calls for the perfect alignment of human
and Machine. That is, the human culture surrounding the Machine attempts
to mimic the Machine itself , which is trying to mimic the universe. The
mannerisms of the Machine become the mannerisms of its minions - people
rage and tyrannise, overheat, relent, synergise, procreate, vanish, and
recur. One idea seems brilliant and fails, while another may start as a
quail but then, compressed by other ideas - electrons stripping off, ions
colliding - transforms into something sharp and fast, something agitatingly,
beautifully right. And then, of course, it is shot into the Machine to
see if it is.
-
- Still there is Melissa Douglas's nagging doubt, which
is the nagging doubt of everyone here. On certain days, it is possible
to believe that you are merely trapped in the rubble of some cosmic joke
with no punch line, that Godot is eating chilli dogs somewhere and won't
be able to make it. After all, Jim Bailey's lab books are full of 13 years'
worth of jottings; Mark Derzon has pulled countless all-nighters in the
name of what may or may not be the reactor of the future; Melissa Douglas
has spent entire months of her life obsessing over a single equation, the
pallor of her face reflecting only pale computer light - all of this thought
and activity and faith belying the possibility that their efforts might
be for nothing. And yet as much as the race for fusion is a race against
the Russians at Triniti labs, or the Germans at FZK labs, or other American
scientists at Lawrence Livermore, it's also literally a race against the
ticking internal clocks of each scientist who entertains the question:
will I live to see it?
-
- 'History forgets the individual,' says Mark Derzon pensively,
surrounded by no fewer than 30 photographs of his young daughters. 'One
day Plato will be forgotten. Ultimately, the name you make for yourself
is not the important thing. It's what you did, what you stood up for, what
you acted on. Did you try to make the world a better place? In order to
do it, the world needs fusion. I just happen to think that Z is the best
way to get there. And we're going to have one serious pizza party around
here if it is.'
-
- Jimmy Potter stands inside the Machine, glaring down
into the half-million-gallon pool of water at the submerged refrigerator-sized
capacitors where, he suspects, there may be a broken, bubbling gas switch.
Potter, a Texan, is the keeper of the Beast, the man who oversees the whole
shebang for today's shot. 'Are those bubbles down there?' he asks out loud,
vexed. 'We already sent the divers in. I sure hope not.'
-
- If Potter is driven by perfection, then he is merely
a reflection of the culture at Sandia National Laboratories. And if the
quest for fusion is intensely competitive, Moonily quixotic, and at times
downright nasty, then Sandia mirrors, among its myriad projects, many of
those same contradictory characteristics. Top secret or otherwise, spread
over the dusty 27-square-mile patch of Kirtland Airforce Base, the projects
include the training of honeybees to detect land mines, the invention of
a foam that kills anthrax, the making of a synthetic sludge, and the perfecting
of various micromachines, some so small as to be undetectable by the human
eye, which might be used to lock down nuclear weapons. Sandia is the home
to Teraflops, the fastest computer in the world, as well as the birthplace
of moly-99, a radioactive substance widely used in medical procedures.
On the east of the base, behind three rows of concertina wire, is a cluster
of foothills rumoured to be now-empty nuclear silos. They seem to stand
as a reminder of how closely the isotopes of Thanatos and Eros can be held
in the same idea, for it to be a real idea, a saving idea, both have to
be there, threatening to undo us and remake us at once. To obliterate and
immortalise.
-
- Potter couldn't care about all that. 'My job is to work
with the personalities here,' he says, now pacing the high bay, twitching
with pent-up energy. He slips behind a pig (a radiation shield), and checks
a silver box that houses a cryogenic pump. He monitors the tech crew, confers
with the lead scientist on the shot, keeps everything running on time.
'You've got your top of the Ivy League class,' he continues. 'You've got
prima donnas with huge egos. And you've got technicians who at least graduated
high school. Nobody can operate without the other. The first thing that
happens with two strong personalities is clash. It's my job to go to one
and bring him up and maybe bring the other one down and then bring them
together.'
-
- Of course, there are days when everything feels charged
with Shakespearean plots and counterplots, days when tension fills up around
the Machine. All of it is caused by the Machine, which rarely exists, of
course, in its aluminum-and-Rexolite grandeur, oblivious. There is head-butting
between the young comers kicking with ideas and the upper echelon of Z
veterans, who ultimately hold the power here. There are Iagos trying to
ice someone else's idea in order to promote their own. (The lab rewards
the best with bonuses.)
-
- 'I've become a lot more aggressive,' says Melissa Douglas,
one of only three women among the 60 full-time scientists who work on Z.
'You have to really stand your ground. It was very hard for me to do that
at first.' In four years on the project, she remembers her worst day as
the one when she delivered a seminar and a colleague heckled her mercilessly.
Why? Was she that stupid? Did her PhD in plasma physics and her postdoc
at Los Alamos make her that inept? So she took her weakness, her insecurity,
her lack, and shot it into the Machine, and it came back as power, 290
terawatts' worth.
-
- As have others. Marriage is shot in. Love is shot in.
Innocence and experience and numbers are shot in, and come back as something
almost holy.
-
- While many of these scientists consider themselves agnostic,
they are quick to admit that they still find themselves in thrall to the
unknown, to the force that pulses through the Machine. 'In a deep sense,
I would say that my greatest satisfaction here comes from the act of creation,'
says Jim Bailey. 'Because what we're trying to do is create knowledge that
didn't exist before. Whether that brings us closer to God or not, I don't
know. It brings us closer to an understanding of the universe, and if you
want to think of God in those terms, then I suppose you could define it
that way.'
-
- Melissa Douglas describes the charge of joy she gets
from a perfect photograph of a Rayleigh-Taylor instability taken inside
the vacuum chamber by a pinhole camera at the moment of the wire array's
implosion. 'A beautiful picture!' she says, holding up a snapshot that
looks more like a Rorschach test - kind of blobby with spikes and valleys.
'It sounds ridiculous, but when I first saw it I jumped and hopped around
the room. Ecstatic. Just amazing. Being around this machine, you can't
help but feel awe. The universe is mathematical and, you know, God is a
mathematician.'
-
- And Jimmy Potter - Jimmy Potter is clearing the high
bay as sirens sound for all personnel to vacate the Machine and retreat
to the control room. Today's shot will attempt to find a way to bombard
the wire array uniformly with electricity, so that each last kilovolt of
energy can be accelerated into the Machine and come back as more. 'I mean,
how do you explain all this to someone outside of this place?' he says,
gesturing toward the Machine. 'We don't make a product that can be sold.
You can't really see what's going on on in that vacuum chamber. I usually
just tell people I work with X-rays. That we've got a big machine doing
big things, and one day we're gonna change your life.'
-
- Dawn inside the Machine, and it's silent. The frogmen
and the men in white and blue jumpsuits are arriving, shaking off their
sleep, downing coffee. Jimmy Potter got the shot last night, downloaded
the diagnostics, sent everyone home saying they'd take apart the Machine
today, and then drove the half hour to his house, over the mesa and the
beautiful landscape, to his wife and kids, trying to forget this place
for a few hours. At 5.30am, he was back, rallying the crew, which now has
sluggishly begun its work, drilling and hammering at the vacuum chamber.
-
- The people of Z admit there's a new inten sity, especially
given the Machine's recent exponential gains. There's something to prove
- and they need to prove it fast. Plans to win funds to build a cheaper,
intermediary machine named ZX, one that will lead to X-1, are the stuff
of new worry and hope. And, like life on the edge of any new frontier,
there is still the possibility of danger.
-
- But there are dreamy days here as well. There are times
when some Z scientists find it hard not to let there minds wander, to entertain
versions of fusion-propelled rockets arcing the local solar systems, of
fuel stations on the moon or Io or Pluto, wherever you can pick up a little
lithium and water. And there are others who imagine it as the Peace and
Love Machine, who've put their trust and idealism for the best possible
world in Z. And to get Peace and Love from the Machine, they have to shoot
in their souls, holding nothing back.
-
- Now the crane groans over its huge tracks above the Machine,
preparing to lift off the 8,000lb crown of the vacuum chamber. Last evening,
the Machine inhaled the sun, this room filled with lightning, and then
everything exploded. Now, when the crown is unbolted, hitched to a hook,
and lifted away by the crane, a group of men tentatively peer down into
the Machine, goggle-eyed, perhaps expecting to find some traces of gold
dust or, more absurdly, a pile of confetti - or, by some miracle of the
universe, maybe a fully formed angel, sleeping with its white wings pleached
and sooty, its legs twisted under its body, both comical and impossible.
-
- So the men look and look, down into the centre of Z,
the womb of the Machine, for some message there sent back from the invisible
world. But it is just a well of black space - plasma and atoms unable to
hold the weight of their gaze, the chill of their wonder.
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