Bussard Fusion Search - Askmar

Bob Guccione and Inesco An excerpt from “Fusion: The Search for Endless Energy,” by Robin Herman, 1990, Cambridge University Press, pg. 193-196, [email protected] Relatively few individuals outside the scientific and government fraternity worked on their own for a fusion future. Some who did considered it a personal discovery, even a personal crusade. In the federal belt tightening 1980s, most of those who tried in their own distinct way to promote the research eventually succumbed to the apathy of the marketplace. They were a quirky collection, displaying virtually nothing in common except a desire to advance the cause of fusion energy.

Guccione had more than a passing interest in science. In 1979, he launched a new publication, Omni, a magazine of science fact and fiction. After reading an Omni interview with a fusion physicist and innovator named Robert Bussard, the wealthy and restless Guccione became personally involved in the fusion mission.

Bob Guccione, the founder and publisher of Penthouse magazine, came to fusion in the great entrepreneurial tradition of America, with an eye on a quick profit from an historic technological breakthrough. He had a colorful image, one that he helped perpetuate by wearing his shirts opened to mid-chest to show oL ropes of gold chains and medallions. He had a marbled Manhattan townhouse decorated in Renaissance splendor with original paintings by the masters. His net worth was about $250 million, he said, and he was always looking for serious projects in which to pour the steady cash flow from his magazine. When fusion caught his eye, Guccione became the most committed private investor in the history of the research. Over the course of five years during the 1980s, Guccione spent $16 million to support research on an oVeat miniature tokamak design that promised to revolutionize the world’s energy economy. It was a venture capital risk that could have given Guccione more influence than OPEC had it succeeded. His experience illustrated the marketplace hurdles that fusion faced beyond the scientific challenges.

Robert Bussard, 1981, Photograph by Norman Seeff

Bussard had worked for Los Alamos lab and then as an assistant to DOE’s Bob Hirsch before striking out on his own. He had started a private company incorporated in Maryland, International Nuclear Energy Systems Company (Inesco), through which he hoped to build a small, compact tokamak using ex-

Excerpt from “Fusion: The Search for Endless Energy” 

1

tremely powerful electromagnets. Bussard’s partner in the design work was the Italian Bruno Cappi, who had found no money to support his little invention in the government program at MIT, his home lab. The compact tokamak would generate tremendous heat in a very small space. The large tokamaks like Princeton’s used costly shielding to protect expensive electromagnets from the damaging neutrons of fusion reactions. Bussard and Cappi’s innovation sought to do away with the shielding and make the tokamaks small, relatively cheap and disposable. The interior vessel, once it became radioactively weakened by the fusion reaction, could be thrown away and replaced by another modular unit, much as one replaces a burnt out lightbulb.

Bob Guccione

Guccione recalled thinking that, economically at least, this made absolute sense. He wanted to hear more, so Bussard was invited to dinner at the publisher’s New York townhouse.

Over the meal, Bussard described the difculties he was having obtaining government funding. After all, the Department of Energy had committed $314 million to the tokamak at Princeton and $100 million to the mirror machine at Livermore. Guccione urged Bussard to seek industrial and business investors, but Bussard had already exhausted that route. The trouble was, Bussard told Guccione, he could not stir any enthusiasm because he could not say definitively when a marketable product would be ready. Bussard believed he could produce a commercially viable mini-reactor in ten years, but there would be no guarantee. Bussard was unaware that his host was already a true believer in ion. Guccione said he had long since concluded that fusion was “the only way to go” to solve man’s energy problems, and he felt it was absolutely crucial to the future security and technological strength of the United States that it achieve fusion power first. “Who creates the first fusion reactor literally controls the world’s energy supply,” Guccione said in an interview, “and if it wasn’t this country, who was it going to be? Russia? Communist China?” For an individual investor, fusion held a golden promise, Guccione believed. “Imagine having a unique patent on the telephone system and the electric light system combined, because the whole world uses it, especially Third World countries,” he said. “It would totally transform the world.” Bob Guccione decided to finance the minitokamak project, hoping that his personal weight might serve as the gravity to draw in other investors. He was not naive about the prospects. The conventional wisdom held that a fusion reactor would take two or three decades to build, not the ten years Bussard was predicting. And the research would cost a few hundred million dollars. But if it worked, the consequences would be nothing short of spectacular. In March 1980, Guccione formed a partnership with Bussard and turned over, as he recalled later, some $400,000 in startup funds. Engineers, computer programmers, and metallur-


2

gists were hired, and Inesco set up a new shop in La Jolla, California, with eighty-five employees. Over the next four years, as design work progressed and the search for investors continued, Guccione poured in $16 million or $17 million, by his accounting. Predictably, the Inesco scientists who attended international meetings endured considerable ribbing about working for one of the most successful purveyors of adult magazines in the world. Physicists and pinups seemed so hilariously incongruous. But the Inesco team knew Guccione was a serious investor and a sincere proponent of fusion. That’s what really mattered. Guccione saw the incongruity, too, and he was not without a sense of humor about it all. To oversee Penthouse’s interest in Inesco, the publisher created a subsidiary, which he dubbed Penthouse Energy and Technology Systems, thus creating the acronym PETS. It was a conscious reference to Penthouse’s nude centerfold, “Pet of the Month,” and a way for Guccione to acknowledge the uninhibited women who in truth, were creating the profits to finance fusion research. Even Guccione and his PETS money, however, could not convince other investors to commit themselves to fusion. Inesco’s project was just too speculative. Guccione said he also grew to suspect that the nuclear power industry, the fission plant owners, were putting pressure on Washington to ignore projects like Inesco’s, which threatened to replace fission power. Guccione had no direct evidence of this, but it was a theme commonly sounded by frustrated fusion researchers.

If only the government would mount a “flatout, do-or-die, Manhattan-style project that we had for the development of the nuclear bomb,” Guccione lamented. With that kind of commitment fusion could be conquered in a decade or even less, he believed. Fusion would be “the single biggest boon to mankind ever,” he said, “the sort of thing a president should get behind.” Like the space program, fusion could “put this country right back on top ... the number one industrial nation in the world.” Two years after the Inesco collapse, Guccione had not lost his fervor. Fusion is “the ultimate source of energy for this planet,” he said. “It obviously can be done. If it exists in nature, it can be recreated by man.” He spoke with as much conviction as the fusion pioneers. Guccione had the litany down pat. Fusion was clean. Fusion was safe. Fusion was a natural process. Fusion was inevitable. He had become one of them, one of the fusion proselytizers, a believer in the mission. Only the money fell short. Outside of the U.S. Department of Energy, there was simply no market for fusion.

In 1984, an attempt to take Inesco public flopped after the underwriter failed to sell the last 400,000 shares. Bussard’s dream and Guccione’s gamble were crushed. The two men salvaged a few patents that might someday prove valuable and took with them an undying hope for fusion’s future. That hope lay with government, Guccione had to concede. Only national governments possessed the resources and the freedom to invest in research projects at such a basic stage and with such expensive tools.


3

About Robin Herman

Robin Herman

Born in New York City in 1951, Robin grew up in the post WWII suburbs of Long Island. She was a member of the first class of women admitted to Princeton University in 1969, graduating in 1973. She joined The New York Times in 1973 as its first female sports reporter. In 1975 she crossed a line in pursuit of the same post-game player quotes that her male colleagues routinely obtained. At the National Hockey League’s AllStar game in Montreal, she became the first female reporter to enter a male professional sports locker room. She left sportswriting after five years to become a political reporter for The Times and then a health and medical writer for The Washington Post. She wrote a history of science book, “Fusion: The Search for Endless Energy” between 1985 and 1990 and lived in France for seven years. She is currently assistant dean for communications at Harvard School of Public Health, prior to which she was its Director of the Ofce of Communications for six years. She married the man who edited with special care a New York Times article she wrote about the counterculture 10 years after Woodstock in August 1981. As of 2006, they have two teenaged children, a boy and a girl.


4