(I published this article originally in Arabic on April 20th, 2020).
Location: Sakhalin Island in the far north of Russia, north of the Pacific Ocean.
Sergeant Oleg Lavrentiev of the Soviet Red Army spent his days restless in this remote region of Russia after his shifts were ending. Despite having only completed the eighth grade, he managed to obtain permission to enter the military library in his area of operation, where he would spend time reading and browsing. There, Sergeant Oleg conceived a preliminary idea for a high-power plasma fusion device using static electric fields.
Oleg outlined his concept in a brief letter, which he sent directly to the Kremlin. The letter was forwarded to the then-rising physicist Andrei Sakharov. Sakharov, along with fellow Russian physicist Igor Tam, quickly drafted a scientific proposal. Sergeant Oleg's letter was received at the Kremlin on July 29, 1950. By January 1951, the two Russian researchers had finalized their proposal, seeking funding for the construction of the first nuclear fusion reactor on Earth.
The rest of this story is told over 70 years, during which a large segment of plasma and nuclear fusion physicists were wandering about, devoting their scientific careers and burning billions of dollars to creating nuclear fusion reactors whose design bears no resemblance whatsoever to the alleged method of fusion energy production in stars—including the Sun.
To better understand the flaws in this strange design of energy reactors, which largely resembles the shape of a doughnut, we can take a quick look directly at the Sun (our nearest star), either shortly after sunrise or before sunset (with proper sunglass protection).
We will observe the following:
1- There is no container of any kind of metal surrounding the Sun to contain the burning plasma. Such a container is never found around it.
2- No clouds form to rain on the Sun's surface, nor are there any bodies of water on it. So where does the claim that water, and the plasma formed from it, is the clean, inexhaustible fuel of the future come from?
In fact, the way the Sun (and all stars) are powered is largely theoretical and full of assumptions, such as: If there is no need for a clear, external metal container that can withstand the Sun's extremely high temperatures, what role does gravity play, for example, in maintaining the Sun's mass, shape, and energy supply? But anyway, even gravity effect is not accounted for in classical fusion reactors such as the tokamaks.
Let's focus a little on the physical concept of what heat actually is. The physical definition of temperature differs from the definition of heat capacity (or content). For example, 1 electron volt (eV) of laboratory plasma is equivalent to 11,326.85 degrees Celsius! But when exposed to such high electron temperature (not heat capacity) plasma, we hardly feel any heat at all, because the heat capacity of this plasma is small (heat capacity is related to the density and type of plasma particles).
Therefore, there is another hypothesis regarding the physics of the Sun's temperature and heat capacity. This hypothesis (which is still just a hypothesis) divides the Sun into three regions based on their temperature and heat capacity. These regions are:
1- The Sun's interior: High temperature (15 million degrees Celsius, and extremely high density and heat content).
2- The Sun's surface: A strange hypothesis places the Sun's surface temperature between 2,000, and 6,000 degrees Celsius, based on the appearance of dark spots and a high heat content.
3- The Sun's corona: This has an even stranger hypothesis, placing its temperature between one million and ten million degrees Celsius, but with a very low heat content and electron density and expansive layer outward. These layers behave thermodynamically as source-sink-source of heat. This solar model of energy production is not even acknowledged in mainstream fusion research because of the tokamak fusion reactor research trap in particular.
If everything related to generating energy through nuclear fusion in our nearest star is incomprehensible fully or, at best, vague, how can we build upon it billion-dollar projects that consume decades and drain the budgets of entire nations? This is truly astonishing!
We conclude with the biggest dilemma that atomic physicists and nuclear fusion engineers have not addressed, which is simply redefining the nature of the atomic charge carried by the components of plasma. This definition, which—since its formulation by the French engineer Coulomb some 250 years ago—remains rudimentary and, to a certain extent, arbitrary and limited to only two polarities: negative (-) and positive (+).
For fusion to occur based on this, all that has to happen, according to old-school fusion theorists, is to heat a plasma on earth inside vessels to overcome charged particles repulsion. However, such vessels cannot sustain the million degrees temperature, and even if they attain such high temperatures, they will not hold the kind of heat content necessary for fusion to occur because such heat will pulverize those very metal vessels.
The conclusion is that it may take us decades to overcome the wasteful impact of nuclear fusion engineering research stemming from the tokamak: the illusory energy source from which humanity has not benefited at all for over 70 years.
Only then we might be able to claim that we have arrived at a clean and inexhaustible source of energy.
Image is due to Google's AI Gemini Imagen 3 model.
