Robert Bussard, 1928-2007: Physicist known for pusuit of nuclear fusion

Santa Fe man worked to decrease world's reliance on fossil fuels

Anne Constable | The New Mexican

11/3/2007 -

Robert Bussard, a physicist known to his wife and even in some academic circles as "Doc," died from cancer Oct. 6 at his home in Santa Fe.

Until his death at age 79, Bussard was working on how to produce clean, cheap energy through nuclear fusion. Success would help end the world's reliance on fossil fuels and halt global warning.

"I've met and worked with a lot of really smart people. Not many were real innovators, and that's what he was," said Rick Nebel, a physicist on entrepreneurial leave from Los Alamos National Laboratory to continue developing Bussard's concepts. "He would try to do things other people said you couldn't."

"He was a first-class guy, a super person, extremely innovative, a wonderful engineer," confirmed Robert Hirsch, former director of the Atomic Energy Commission's Controlled Thermonuclear Reaction Division.

Scientists have been trying for decades to harness nuclear fusion, the same process by which the sun produces energy.

Bussard's idea is to convert hydrogen and boron, a widely available material, directly into electricity, producing helium as the only waste product.

Two years ago, just as his federal funding was running out, Bussard believed he had achieved a "breakthrough."

According to Bussard, data collected during experiments in the fall of 2005 by scientists from his company, Energy Matter Conversion Corp. (EMC2), suggest they had developed a fusion process that was 100,000 times more efficient than previous designs.

The device they were using was the latest version of the Polywell, conceived in 1983 by Bussard and tested with funding from the U.S. Navy.

The WB-6, now resting in the company's Santa Fe office, is shaped like a polyhedron with six tightly welded circular stainless steel cross sections about 1 square meter in size. The rings contain copper wires wound into an electromagnet. During tests, the reactor is placed inside a vacuum chamber.

In the final test, on Nov. 11, 2005, the device shorted and blew up one leg of the machine. The following Monday, Bussard began shutting down the lab in San Diego. The scientists didn't begin looking at the data until December.

Months later on the fusor.net forum, Bussard declared, "We really have solved the last engineering physics problem that has plagued our work for 12 years or so."

Ironically, the development occurred as the Navy energy program was being abolished in 2006 because of funding issues.

Last August, as Bussard was losing his battle with cancer, the funds were restored with the support of Alan Roberts, EMC2's longtime Navy contract monitor. The company now has $1.8 million to pursue his work. If it is successful verifying the 2005 results, it would seek funding for a full-scale model, big enough to make net power, Nebel said. Bussard has estimated that such a demonstration model would cost about $200 million to build.

"Unless somebody can repeat and show other people that it's operating, it's really not scientifically acceptable," Hirsch said. But "if the idea works the way he thinks it could, and there's a good chance he's right, it will not take very big machine to show net energy."

The latest device, WB-7 (the WB refers to the children's toy Wiffle Ball), is currently under construction at a machine shop in San Diego and will be shipped to Santa Fe, where a small group of scientists is setting up a testing facility in an office park off Rufina Street. The device, like previous ones, was designed by engineer Mike Skillercorn.

"These are garage-scale experiments," said Nebel, pointing to the stock tank purchased at a local feed store. "We shop at interesting places," he added, mentioning both Home Depot and the Black Hole in Los Alamos.

Although Europeans are building a huge device to demonstrate the scientific and technical feasibility of fusion power, the U.S. has spent relatively little — about $300 million a year — on fusion research. Much of that has been focused on a competing idea called Tokamak, a program that Bussard and Hirsch started at the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1970s, which uses deuterium and tritium as fuel. Later both determined that the concept, which produces a lot of radioactivity, was impractical from an engineering standpoint.

With his own device, Hirsch said, Bussard was "swimming upstream as far as fusion community was concerned." Still, he was able to get about $14 million in funding from the Navy for his work.

Bussard felt enormous pressure to solve the fusion problems. In a letter to an Internet forum on his 2005 results, Bussard wrote that he believed that "the survival of our high-tech civilizations depends on getting off of fossil fuels ASAP, and — if we do not — we will descend into a growing series of 'oil wars' and energy confrontations that can lead only to a huge cataclysm. Which CAN be circumvented if only we build the clean fusion machines in our time."

But, he conceded, the political reality is that oil companies have no interest in supporting fusion research. "There is only one thing the oil companies want, and that is to sell oil, and more oil," he said.

"The only way to stop oil, from their view, is when it does run out. And then they'll go for deeper drilling, new fields, Gulf geopressure gas, LNG, etc. etc., and keep raising the price, until finally foolish solar and windmills become competitive," he wrote.

Nearly a year after shutting down the lab, Bussard presented his work — for the first time in more than a decade — to the International Astronautical Congress. He later discussed his results with Google, the online search engine company in a talk titled, "Should Google Go Nuclear?" that is widely available on the Internet. Before his death, he also set up a nonprofit organization to solicit donations to restart the work. Information is at www.EMC2Fusion.org.

Bussard's wife, Dolly Gray, who co-founded EMC2 with him in 1985 and served as its president and CEO, has helped assemble the small team of scientists in Santa Fe. Besides Nebel, 54, the group includes Jaeyoung Park, a 37-year-old physicist who is also on leave from LANL; Mike Wray, the physicist who ran the key 2005 tests, and Wray's brother, Kevin, who is the computer guru for the operation.

"If this works, it's going to be a big deal. It could take the entire energy market," Nebel said. "And drag the oil companies into the 21st century," Gray added.

Someday, they said, if they're right, a machine just 20 times bigger than the one sitting in the corner on Parkway Drive could run the city of Santa Fe.

Dreams of the stars

From early childhood, Bussard was interested in traveling to the stars. In 1960, he conceived the idea for Ramjet, a fusion machine that uses a magnetic scoop to collect fuel in interstellar gases as it moves through space. The conceptual device captured the imagination of scientists and science-fiction writers. On the television series Star Trek, it was known as the Bussard Collector, and astronomer Carl Sagan described the Ramjet as a way humans might travel around the galaxy in his 1980 Cosmos series. "It's still the only known way to travel between galaxies," Park said.

Bussard was born in Washington, D.C., in 1928. His mother was one of the first architecture graduates at Carnegie Tech. At age 7, he moved to California where his father, a civil engineer, had a company, and he grew up in Westwood.

Though clearly blessed with a fine mind, Bussard flunked out of Cal Tech, then entered the University of California at Los Angeles after a road trip to Chicago with friends. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in engineering in 1950 and a master's two years later. After working on the FALCON missile program at Hughes Aircraft Company and on solid rocket propellants for the Whirlajet Corp., he joined the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where he did design work on the Aircraft Reactor Experiment. In June 1955, he moved to Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he helped develop the Rover nuclear rocket program.

In the fall of 1957, with support from the lab, Bussard began graduate school at Princeton University, earning a master's degree in physics in 1959 and a doctorate in 1961. His was one of the first doctorates in the college's new plasma physics program. He returned to the lab, working there until 1962, when he left to re-enter private industry. He worked on concepts such as nuclear space propulsion for a variety of companies including Space Technology Labs, a division of Xerox and CSI Corp. He came back to the lab briefly before becoming assistant director for development and technology at the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in 1973. There he worked with Hirsch on the development of the controlled fusion energy program, reorienting the agency from physics research to engineering objectives and helping to build the fusion budget.

In 1976, Bussard founded the company Inesco to build small Tokamak fusion reactors called Riggatrons. He holds numerous patents and has published widely in leading journals.

Bussard is survived by his wife, four children and five grandchildren.

Contact Anne Constable at 986-3022 or aconstable@sfnewmexican.com.