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Greek Fire: Nicholas Christofilos and the Astron Project in America’s Early Fusion Program

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Abstract

The Astron project, conducted from 1956 to1973 at Livermore National Laboratory, was the brainchild of Nicholas Christofilos, a Greek engineer with no formal physics credentials. Astron’s key innovation was the E-layer, a ring of relativistic electrons within a magnetic mirror device. Christofilos predicted that at sufficient E-layer density the net magnetic field inside the chamber would reverse, creating closed field lines necessary for improving plasma confinement. Although Astron never achieved field reversal, it left important legacies. As a cylindrical device designed to contain toroidal plasmas, it was the earliest conception of a compact torus, a class that includes the Spheromak and the FRC. The linear induction accelerator, developed to generate Astron`s E-layer, is now used in many applications. Through examination of internal lab reports and interviews with his colleagues and family, this research charts Christofilos’ career and places Astron in its historical context. This paper was originally prepared in 2004 as an undergraduate Junior Paper for the Princeton University History Department.

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Notes

  1. [6].

  2. In his book Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, Peter Galison [5] describes and gives a number of examples of the phenomenon of recycling material in the industrial-style post-war labs. His examples include television cameras incorporated into spark chambers, medical X-rays used as films for atomic physics, and preparatory apparatuses for hydrogen bombs blended into other experiments.

  3. [8].

  4. [32].

  5. [3, 49]. Christofilos apparently returned to his radio hobby during WWII—Fessenden recalls Christofilos telling him that in Nazi occupied Athens, “During the war he listened to the BBC on a little radio he had built [34].”

  6. [36].

  7. That Christofilos opened his own firm is mentioned in Teller to Kraus, April 8, 1959. It is corroborated by an article in the San Francisco chronicle, October 29, 1959, that reports a lawsuit filed against Christofilos by his former business partner for payment of debts related to their firm [47]. The Bay Area press exhibited an odd fascination with all aspects of Christofilos’s personal life.

  8. Teller to Kraus; [10].

  9. [19].

  10. [12].

  11. [50].

  12. [19].

  13. Crease, 220.

  14. Teller to Kraus; [43].

  15. A third concept, the pinch, was investigated at Los Alamos. Very early on, however, the pinch exhibited gross instabilities and was therefore viewed as less promising than the other two major concepts.

  16. [2].

  17. “Stiffness” is Fowler’s terminology. Fowler interview. For pinch instability and stability calculations on the stellarator, see Bromberg, 50–51.

  18. [7]. Teller also recounted the story to me in person shortly before he died, and Richard Post relayed it in an interview.

  19. Post interview.

  20. [48].

  21. [32].

  22. Teller to Kraus; [33].

  23. [41].

  24. At the time, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was called the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, but for clarity I will always refer to it in the text as LLNL.

  25. Courant interview.

  26. Fessenden interview.

  27. [15].

  28. [39].

  29. [18].

  30. [31].

  31. [27].

  32. [28].

  33. [30].

  34. [42].

  35. [31].

  36. Westwick, 16.

  37. Bromberg, 135.

  38. Rosenbluth was incredibly prolific and over the course of his career devoted attention to virtually every existing fusion scheme. Never convinced that Astron was a viable concept, he was one of Christofilos’ most important critics.

  39. The rapid evolution of the stellerator from the tabletop Model A to the large Model C is a good example of the early way of doing fusion. For discussion of the stellerator models, see Bromberg, 45–48.

  40. Bromberg 135.

  41. Bromberg attributes anti-Astron sentiment to Paul McDaniel, who was head of the AEC’s Research Division. Bromberg, 122.

  42. [25].

  43. N.C. Christofilos, “Comments on the Report of the Astron Ad Hoc Panel.” February 21, 1968. Addendum to TID 24513.

  44. Paraphrased from interviews with Fessenden and Briggs.

  45. [17].

  46. [24].

  47. [25].

  48. [36].

  49. [40]. Convinced that the project’s challenges were insurmountable, Langdon left the Astron group shortly after completing his model.

  50. [29].

  51. Ibid, 8.

  52. [20, 35].

  53. [14].

  54. [35].

  55. [36]. The term “steady state reactor” refers to a reactor which can operate continuously and burns a self-sustaining “ignited” plasma. It is opposed to the short-pulse reactor, which creates a short-lived plasma that gives off a burst of energy before it dies and must be rekindled. .

  56. Interview with Fowler. For Christofilos’ conscience attention to economics, see [16]. Moir and Fessenden also stressed the point in interviews.

  57. In 1971 Astron had absorbed approximately 25 million dollars of AEC money over its 15 years of existence. L.D. Smullin, “Report of the Astron Review Committee,” March 8, 1972. Quoted in Bromberg, 203.

  58. [34].

  59. L.D. Smullin, “Report of the Astron Review Committee,” March 8, 1972. Quoted in Bromberg, 203.

  60. “America’s Fusion Director,” The New Scientist, April 12, 1973, 88. Quoted in Bromberg, 199.

  61. Bromberg, 204–205.

  62. Much later, Hirsch himself did an about-face on the tokamak issue. In 1997 he wrote an article for Issues in Science and Technology in which he asserted that because they produced power so inefficiently tokamaks had no promise as commercial reactors, and that the search for fusion power needed to turn elsewhere. Instead he recommended fusion concepts that lent themselves to smaller reactors—the very types of ideas that he had worked to shut down during his time at the AEC. [13].

  63. [4]. Fowler’s viewpoint on placing all fusion's eggs in one basket became much more widespread in the 1990s after two decades of relative disappointment from the tokamak. At that point the Department of Energy, which took over the fusion program from the AEC, switched to a policy of funding small experiments with innovative ideas in the hope of finding a better model. The debate is still current, especially regarding the issue of what percentage of the US fusion budget should go to ITER.

  64. [23].

  65. Bromberg, 201–204.

  66. Bromberg, 202. The comment is from Stephen O. Dean, the AEC CTR Division’s Assistant Director in charge of confinement systems.

  67. [20].

  68. Aside from Briggs, everyone I interviewed was shocked that the project had ever achieved 50% field reversal. They remembered only the 15% results Christofilos had obtained before his death.

  69. [37].

  70. [1].

  71. [22], T.S. Green, “Evidence for the Containment of a Hot, Dense Plasma in a Theta Pinch,” Phys.Rev. Lett 5 (1960): 297.

  72. The first person to do experiments specifically intended to maintain the reversed field appears to be Kurtmallaev, at the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow [9].

  73. [36].

  74. [38].

  75. [44].

  76. [23]. Advantages of the FRC include: potential for high power density, reduced complexity, potential for small-scale reactors, potential for advanced (non-deuterium/tritium) fuels.

  77. Christofilos' significance as an American scientist was recognized by no less than a sitting Vice President and future President. Richard Nixon, “The Scientific Revolution,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 16:9 (1960): 348.

  78. [42].

References

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Interviews

  1. Richard Briggs, Personal Interview. July 29, 2003

  2. Elly Christofilos, Personal Interview. July 24, 2003

  3. Ernest Courant, Telephone interview. June 17, 2003

  4. Thomas Fessenden, Personal Interview. July 24, 2003

  5. Hans Fleischmann, Telephone Interview. July 9, 2003

  6. T. Kenneth Fowler, Telephone Interview. June 25, 2003

  7. John Greenly, Personal Interview. October 28, 2003

  8. Alan Hoffman, Personal Interview. July 27, 2003

  9. Charles Hurley, Personal Interview. July 30, 2003

  10. A. Bruce Langdon, Personal Interview. July 24, 2003

  11. Ralph Moir, Personal Interview. July 24, 2003

  12. L. Don Pearlstein, Personal Interview. July 25, 2003

  13. Richard Post, Personal Interview. July 23, 2003

  14. Loren Steinhauer, Telephone Interview. July 21, 2003

Newspaper Articles

  1. “A-Scientists Ignored ‘Crazy’ Inventor, but….” San Francisco Chronicle. February 14, 1958

  2. “Senior Scientist at LLL Found Dead.” Livermore Herald News. September 25, 1972

  3. “U.C’s Christofilos Is Sued.” San Francisco Chronicle. October 29, 1959

  4. “U.C. Physicist Files Suit for Divorce.” Oakland Tribune. April 1, 1959

Other

  1. Edward Teller to C.R. Kraus, April 8, 1959. Livermore Archives

  2. N.C. Christofilos, US Patent 2,736,799

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported, in part, by DOE Contract No. DE-AC02-76-CHO-3073. I am enormously indebted to Dr. Samuel Cohen, whose curiosity and vision launched this project and who taught me all the plasma physics I know, as well as to the late Prof. Michael Mahoney, who taught me how to place scientific developments in a historical context. I must also thank the many people who agreed to interviews and plumbed the depths of their memories—without them this project would have been impossible. Finally, my gratitude goes to the archivists at Livermore for their patience in unearthing countless boxes of old documents.

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  1. Albert Einstein College of Medicine, 1300 Morris Park Ave., Bronx, NY, 10461, USA

    Elisheva R. Coleman, Samuel A. Cohen & Michael S. Mahoney

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Correspondence to Elisheva R. Coleman.

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Coleman, E.R., Cohen, S.A. & Mahoney, M.S. Greek Fire: Nicholas Christofilos and the Astron Project in America’s Early Fusion Program. J Fusion Energ 30, 238–256 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10894-011-9392-5

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