My Conversation w/ Bob Hirsch - March, 2002

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Paul_Schatzkin
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My Conversation w/ Bob Hirsch - March, 2002

Post by Paul_Schatzkin »

.
I think this is the right place to post this, because it adds a fresh perspective to all that Richard Hull has posted in this forum based on his interviews with the people who worked in the Farnsworth fusion lab in Fort Wayne in the 1950s and 60s.

I am going to attach a transcript of the conversation I had with Bob Hisch back in 2002.

It is pertinent because I have in the past couple of days spoken with both Richard and Frank Sanns about the Fusion X / Global Invest Conference in Palo Alto next month where all the money and brains interested in fusion will be gathering – and whether it makes any sense to try to have a presence at that conference.

When I am talking about these things, what keeps ringing in my mind's ear is what Bob Hirsch said to me when I spoke with him back in 2002, as I was finalizing the first edition of The Boy Who Invented Television. I wanted to see if I correctly remembered what Hirsch said when I asked him directly why the original fusor effort was abandoned with so many unanswered questions.

Yesterday I converted the original recording of that interview into a digital file that I could upload to Otter.ai to transcribe and, sure enough, I remembered that part of the conversation correctly:
Paul Schatzkin 19:07
The the goal of this work, obviously, is a sustained, beyond-break-even, fusion process, right? Can you say what it was that kept the work that you were doing, the process that Phil was exploring, from reaching that goal?

Bob Hirsch 19:29
Not enough money and not large enough experiments. It was just that simple.
Hirsch had some other choice things to say about the malign neglect that befell Inertial Electrostatic Confinement Fusion (IECF), by the interests that controlled that research in the 1960s and beyond:
Bob Hirsch 29:35
The scandal in the whole thing, and the thing I still do not understand at this date, though, is it's, first of all, it's complicated physics. I ran the fusion program,[1] which means I ran the main line activity, and I understand those people and their strengths and weaknesses. In many respects, I do not understand, and maybe never will understand, how those people would not open up to the possibility of a Farnsworth like idea.

I do not understand that. I simply do not understand that, because maybe I'm a simple person, but you know, good physics and good research should be done with a relatively open mind. And yes, sure, you're gonna pursue things that you like, but when you're dealing with a complicated problem, you should not over constrain yourself, and you should look in a lot of different corners to understand what the possibilities are, and the people in the program were almost paranoid when it came to this particular subject.


Paul Schatzkin 30:51
And do you have any insight on why that was?

Bob Hirsch 30:55
Nope.

I have elements of the reasons, and part of it is they were trained differently, and they were trained in what's called equilibrium plasma physics. And what Phil was doing was non-equilibrium plasma physics, and that is a respectable area plasma physics, but not not applying it to fusion. They just won't allow that for reasons that I don't understand.

So I think they were uncomfortable with something they didn't understand. I think they were also probably uncomfortable with Farnsworth, in the sense that here was an inventor, a farm boy with just dribs and drabs of of education, who in fact, conceived and developed one of the most significant technological advances of the 20th century, and here he was coming along in fusion? And I don't know whether it was ego or or what, but I think that there's something strange there.

_________
[1] Robert L. Hirsch ran the DOE Fusion department from 1972-1977. During that time the budget for fusion research expanded from ~32-milliion to more than $112-million. Despite Hirsch's first hand experience in the 1960s, nary a dime of that money was spent on IECF.
Granted, this conversation was more than 20 years ago. And, in light of all that is going on now, it would be interesting to speak with Bob again and see if he still holds to those sentiments.

But I think this sheds a different - and far more favorable – light on the testimony reported elsewhere in this forum from the crew that worked on the ITT/Farnsworth fusion team in the 1960s.

Coming from one of the most knowledgeable and experienced voices in the field, I think Hirsch's remarks make a strong case that while countless public-and-private billions are being spent on a variety of fusion projects, it now makes more sense than ever to devote some nominal form of actual funding to revisit a promising approach that was abandoned nearly sixty years ago.

Whether or not it makes any sense to go to that conference in Silicon Valley is debatable. As Frank pointed it, "Do we really want to show our hand in that particular shark tank?"

But, really, enough already.

We have to start somewhere.

--PS

Here is the transcript of my conversation with Hirsch, edited only to remove all the "you know"s and "I mean"s and a few other cosmetic fixes.
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020312 Hirsch_Edited.pdf
(143.72 KiB) Downloaded 26 times
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edit: I had some issues posting this. There may well be some typos that need fixing. Later for all that.
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Re: My Conversation w/ Bob Hirsch - March, 2002

Post by JoeBallantyne »

Paul -

Thanks for the transcript. Would you be amenable to also uploading a .mp3 or .mp4 of the audio recording itself?

It would be really cool to be able to listen to the actual spoken words.

Joe.
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Re: My Conversation w/ Bob Hirsch - March, 2002

Post by Paul_Schatzkin »

.
Well, my side of the conversation is very distorted (over modulated), but Hirsch's side is pretty clean.

Let me see if I a clean up the file before uploading.

--PS
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"Fusion is not 20 years in the future; it is 60 years in the past and we missed it."
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Dennis P Brown
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Re: My Conversation w/ Bob Hirsch - March, 2002

Post by Dennis P Brown »

I still feel that Farnsworth really did the breakthrough relative to imaging using an active screen on a modified cathode ray tube. All previous work (and yes, there was a lot) missed his critical insight on using the steering system to image various things - resulting in a TV and a device to visualize electric fields/currents in electronic systems. This, IMO was lacking in earlier versions where electron beams were manipulated via similar processes.

Further, his approch to fusion certainly was creative and original. The fusor he used was deserving of some acknowledgement. Not a breakthrough device nor really a path to anything but a neutron source but still, impressive.

Hirsch is simply mistaken that further experiments and money could have take a fusor arrangement and achieve Q>1 energy (we here have seen that old claim for most fusion programs.) The fact is, using tunneling will always be a dead end for net fusion energy no matter what clever idea is used short of how nature does it. Yes, physicist can be closed minded and this prevents them from seeing some interesting phenomenon requiring many more years before it is 'discovered'. The speed of light being a constant for all observers was such an insight that was missed for nearly 50 years.

But Hirsch's statement about equilibrium and non- equilibrium plasma does not offer any insight in making tunneling a viable process. What is he even talking about? That for me is the entire issue. Could you expand this so we at the forum can follow the logic of this approch and see the physics that others missed that might lead to Q>1 fusion energy?

Aside: particle beam fusion (not as Farnsworth envisioned) is an area that has been ignored for the most part (through DOD looked at electron beam). Could deuteron beams upon a properly designed tritium/deuterium ice/gas target release net energy? Apparently, no one has ever explored this concept. That is from the experts in the field who I've asked have told me. So, using such a system might have possibilities; certainly, direct drive using far UV lasers does show promise (in models and some actual experiments) for net fusion energy. But that is a bridge now too far to cross thanks to NIF's utter failures and blanent lies.
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Re: My Conversation w/ Bob Hirsch - March, 2002

Post by Richard Hull »

I am in general agreement with Dennis.

Fusion is a Quantum tunneling game. This means probability based on fusion cross sections. All of this is related to ion temperature (read velocity in the medium be it in a plasma or in velocity space), density within the plasma or velocity space, and confinement if any over a period of time suitable to do fusion.

Oddly, controlled fusion within a fully contained velocity space is incredibly easy to do. It is how we roll.

I have about zero hope that IECF, no matter how big you build a fusion system around it, will achieve Q>1 fusion for power purposes. It is seemingly in good company as all the other ways to do fusion in a controlled, power ready manner have consistently come up "snake eyes" in the fusion quantum crap shoot.

Stellar cores win solely due to confinement, density and temperature which is relatively low for easy fusion. They work in a controlled manner for billions of years once stable after birth, all through their stable burn cycle until approaching red giant, nova or supernova. The only reason they do fusion for so long is that they fuse protium which has one of the worst fusible fuel cross sections possible. Stars are terrible, inefficient fusion systems, but, just like our fusors working away in velocity space, they do fusion any way.

Thank goodness our sun is doing just enough fusion to keep earth warm, grow plants and support life on a water laden, rocky planet that has a decent magnetic field which helps retain our atmosphere against a constant fusion based solar wind attempting to blow our atmosphere and water away into space. (Mars fate)

On a local stellar neighborhood basis, life is a precious and rare commodity.

Richard Hull
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Re: My Conversation w/ Bob Hirsch - March, 2002

Post by William Turner »

Dennis,

Can you expand upon your comment about particle beam fusion not being fully explored? My understanding is that using stopping power calculations it can be shown that even with a pure tritium gas target (what Shine does) net power isn't possible. Or are you talking about using particle beams instead of lasers in an ICF configuration to heat and compress a target?

Thank you, Will





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Please note: Will is not an alias. I've been named Will all my life.
Disclaimer: I've never posted anything about my fusor project or supporting equipment, so my thoughts about someone else's attempts should be viewed as comments from the peanut gallery.
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Dennis P Brown
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Re: My Conversation w/ Bob Hirsch - March, 2002

Post by Dennis P Brown »

First off, no one in the community wants or would ever consider using a pure tritium target; that is a net energy lost design, by the way. Creates far too many parasitic alpha's that would bleed away far too much energy from the collapsing fuel. That has been well known by the community for decades. Not sure why anyone would consider that terrible fuel today. The correct tritium -deuterium mix has been well established for optimum burn conditions. Long story but that is a very, very critical ratio that can't change so pellets have a 1 day life time.

The target is most certainly not pure gas and it is not a room temperature chemically bound solid. It is a plastic (metal coated special composite) & inner foam layered hollow shell covered with another inner layer of D-T ice. The remaining interior volume is filled with D-T gas. This target type is extremely well understood (decades of testing real targets) and certainly ideal as a target design for any direct drive system. Cost to mfg. complete pellet is $0.25 (with fuel) and surface better than 0.1 micron surface smoothness. Injection is easy and steering to within a few microns of center for a 10 meter chamber is trivial at 5 Hz rate.

No one and I mean no one has any idea if a proper deuteron ion beams using full illumination direct drive of say 30 to 40 beams (covering 4Pi steradians) can create true ignition. That's because there has been zero interest in trying this approch not because there is any model that says it will not work. However, such a type of fusion device is useless for weapons testing (so no DoD funding or funding by congress) and no one wants to build the target chamber and cryo/deuterium beam lines to test such implosions using private funds because frankly, that is billions of dollars (yes, billion with an "s").

For lasers, only two beams have been done on only partially correct targets and yet it shows great promise (10^13 to 10^15 neutrons and they've claimed higher but I have my doubts) using the totally wrong wavelength lasers (creating very non-uniform compression collapse/implosion.)

Aside: Relativistic beams maintain their tight grouping so in principle, it can be done with deuterons instead of photons.
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Re: My Conversation w/ Bob Hirsch - March, 2002

Post by Paul_Schatzkin »

JoeBallantyne wrote: Tue Jan 14, 2025 11:25 am It would be really cool to be able to listen to the actual spoken words.
OK, here ya go.

The MP3 file was nearly 80MB so I had to split it into two parts to meet the 50MB file upload maximum.

Curiously, the place where I rather arbitrarily placed the split, Part 2 starts with Bob saying, "The scandal in the whole thing..."

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020312 Bob Hirsch-1.mp3
(18.12 MiB) Downloaded 30 times
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020312 Bob Hirsch-2.mp3
(15.16 MiB) Downloaded 33 times
Paul Schatzkin, aka "The Perfesser" – Founder and Host of Fusor.net
Author of The Boy Who Invented Television
"Fusion is not 20 years in the future; it is 60 years in the past and we missed it."
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