Consider this quote:

Where have we heard this?

Charles Seife in his book, “Sun in a Bottle” says this over and…repeatedly.

Over and over again, the dream of fusion energy has driven scientists to lie, to break their promises, and to deceive their peers.  Fusion can bring even the best physicists to the brink of the abyss.  Not all of them return.  (p. 2)

Is it true?

Let’s see.  “Over and over again” - does that mean twice, or three times?  From the book we read about:

“The monomaniacal and Strangelovean” Edward Teller:

Teller was so ridiculously optimistic that fellow physicists measured enthusiasm in “Tellers” just as they would measure mass in kilograms or time in seconds.

Ronald Richter, “the secretive physicist whose lies embarrassed an entire country.”  The country was Argentina.  Richter convinced president Juan Peron and others that he had discovered a way to get controlled nuclear fusion.  In a speech, he announced:

What the Americans get when they explode a Hydrogen bomb, we in Argentina achieve in the laboratory and under control.

Alas, he was mistaken or delusional. 

The infamous Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, “the two chemists behind the greatest scientific fiasco of the past hundred years” aka “Cold Fusion.” 

Was this really the “greatest” scientific fiasco of the century? 

And who could forget Rusi Taleyarkhan‘s sonofusion confusion?

OK.  Five guys.   

Another way to look at it:

The bad news is that Scientists are human.  Some slip. 

The good news is that if they do, they can’t get away with it.  Not in fusion.  As we see, these few deceptive incidents in fusion history were quickly identified and discredited at little cost to anyone.  Peer review catches it soon enough as all the “fiasco” stories demonstrate. 

You just can’t fake fusion. 

Instead, you create an awkward incident.  Egos get bruised.  Some careers end.  Some money is lost.  How much?  Very little. 

If “cold fusion” (a very cheap experiment) was the greatest scientific fiasco of the century, science hasn’t had many fiascos.  I would think the side effects of certain pharmaceuticals are a bigger fiasco, “But it’s worth it, for the drugs I need.”. 

It would be useful to have a chart that provides perspective on deception, corruption and fraud in other industries and scientific pursuits.  “Transparency International” - “a global coalition against corruption” produces a “corruption perception” index on the public sector. 

The perception of corruption in fusion seems high.  We suspect that if there is a way to measure actual corruption, fusion would fare well compared to other sciences, industries, and certainly the finance sector.

Looking on the bright side

The poster boys for fusion deception above aren’t entirely without merit.  Regarding Richter, Seife notes:

Richter’s claims marked the official beginning of a quest that had been in the planning stages for a long time - the quest to liberate the energy of fusion for the benefit of mankind.  (p. 77)

He was off to a false start, but we could at least thank him for the kickoff. 

They say, “there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”  It comes down to how you leverage it.  These incidents had dramatic, entertainment appeal and could have been leveraged better for PR purposes.  For example, you could use them to highlight the difficulty of fusion and the need for more funds.  All of these “deceptive” incidents show us that wishful thinking and secretive science just don’t work for fusion - it needs serious determination.  The fact that they discredited the whole of fusion is a PR management problem.

As for Teller, Seife tells us that his deception was responsible for kicking off the arms race. 

Teller and his allies sought funding to work on a fusion bomb, while Oppenheimer et al resisted.  But then Klaus Fuchs, a Los Alamos physicist was arrested for spying and selling weapons secrets to the Russians.  Teller then promoted the idea that he was close to figuring out a fusion bomb, and if we didn’t figure it out first, the Russians surely would. Truman took the bait.

Truman’s hand had been forced, but had just made a dangerous decision.  He had committed the United States to an arms race with the Soviet Union that would make both countries insecure and lead the world to the brink of destruction, all for the sake of a fusion weapon that, at the time, was merely a figment of Teller’s fertile imagination.  (Seife, pp. 22)

This was at the beginning of 1950.  Yes, Teller had bluffed Truman.  “Just weeks before, calculations from Los Alamos were starting to prove that Teller’s fusion bomb was a flop.”  But then, in just one year, Stanislaw Ulam figured out a different way that made it work, and on May 9, 1951, the first fusion bomb was exploded.  (Seife, pp 26-27)

The bomb is a terrible thing, but the issue here is bluffing to buy time.  Teller bluffed Truman on the specifics, but the general narrative was accurate.  From the point they were at, it only took another year to figure out the fusion bomb. 

We can only speculate now, but if Truman hadn’t bought the bluff, how long would it have taken Russians to figure out an H-bomb?  Would they have relaxed and not bothered, seeing that the Americans weren’t going to bother? 

The point here is that net energy from controlled fusion is likewise still a “figment” of physicists imaginations.  Some of the ideas have been “flops”.  Should we stop working on it?  Should we stop at the bomb?  Controlled fusion is much harder to pull off than a fusion bomb, but infinitely more worthwhile.