Eisen-Suppressed-Inventions-and-other-Discoveries-True-Stories-of ...

Sunbeams From
Cucumbers
Richard Milton
He had been eight years upon a project for
extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers.
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
No other scientific endeavor has consumed so much talent, so much cash
and so many years of sustained effort as the race to harness the power that
makes the sun shine. Billions of pounds (and dollars, rubles and yen),
more than four decades of research and the careers of thousands of physicists
have been expended on the search for a nuclear reactor that will generate
limitless power from the fusion of hydrogen atoms. There are grayhaired
professors with lined faces still poring intently over the equations
they first looked at eagerly with bright young eyes in the 1940s and 1950s.
They will go into retirement with their dreams of cheap, safe power from
fusion still years in the future, for the obstacles in their paths are as formidable
now as ever.
Fusion is the process taking place in the sun's core where, at temperatures
of millions of degrees, hydrogen atoms are compressed together by
elemental forces to form helium and a massive outpouring of energy in the
thermonuclear reaction of the hydrogen bomb.
It is not difficult, then, to imagine how people who have invested their
talent and their lives in the quest to tame such forces are likely to react
when told that fusion is possible at room temperature, and in a jam jar.
Hydrogen atoms repel each other strongly—so strongly that no known
chemical reaction can persuade them to fuse. There are, though, heavier
isotopes* of hydrogen, such as deuterium, which together with oxygen
makes heavy water and which under the right circumstances can be made
to fuse in nuclear reactions. When they do so, they release energy. However,
* Atoms that have the same number of protons - atomic number - but different mass numbers.