Chương 111: Book 4 - Chapter 5 B

Oprah's studio audience offered vigorous applause at my safety demonstration. Before it could go on too long I put up my hands imitating a late-night TV infomercial.

"But wait, there's more!" I said, getting the expected laugh. I leaned in toward the camera.

"The plant in Satsop, Washington is doing all of this at two cents per kilowatt hour!" Oprah's jaw dropped, turning to the audience.

"Two cents! John, electricity here in Chicago is about ten cents. What does that difference actually mean for people's bills?"

"Easy math then," I told her.

"Imagine your ten-cent bill. Roughly sixty percent of that is the cost of generating the power. Another thirty-five percent is distribution—the lines and upkeep. Five percent is administration." I held up two fingers.

"If you reduce the six cents you're paying for generation down to two cents, suddenly your total electricity bill drops to six cents per kilowatt hour. Oprah looked out at the audience, throwing her hands up in amazement.

"That is a forty percent drop in electricity prices! Forty percent!"

"Now Washington isn't seeing that benefit yet. Maybe when the local power company that's buying our electricity pays off all its old debts they will drop it. Maybe they won't. It's hard to say. The only electricity that is cheaper is hydroelectric but unfortunately you can't build those where you need power the most. With the ISPBR you can." Oprah turned back to me, serious and reflective.

"John, this is about more than just money. What would the country be like, what would the world be like, if we switched to just nuclear and hydroelectric power?"

"If we closed all the coal and gas electricity plants in the country, replacing them with ISPBR, the air pollution would drop by half overnight. Power bills might drop as much as forty percent as well."

"That's incredible. What will it take to do that?"

"It will take everybody here and everybody watching, to speak up and demand clean air and clean electricity. If We the People demand it, We the People will get it." Oprah looked thoughtful for a moment, letting the message sink in. She turned to the camera with her signature hopeful sign-off tone.

"I can imagine someday people will say, Dr John Cook gave the entire world clean energy, clean air and clean water. I eagerly await the day that happens here in America." I came back from Chicago to find Dr Agnew, President of General Atomics, waiting for me in the main executive foyer. He was standing by the reception desk, his body language taut and coiled, like a man guarding an unstable secret.

"I need to talk to you in the room," he said the moment he saw me, his voice a low, urgent murmur that cut through the polished silence of the atrium. I nodded, the familiarity of his tone instantly signaling that this was not a routine briefing. I followed him to the secure room, a concrete bunker deep inside the building's core. He closed the heavy, armored door behind us—and the world outside simply ceased to exist. Only then did he pull the cord to turn on the battery powered lights.

The LED lights cast stark shadows that stretched and warped across the seamless surfaces of the room. No wiring or other cables entered the solid concrete box that made up the room's exterior. Nor did any pass through the multiple layers of metal mesh designed to create the perfect Faraday cage. It was the only place trusted for certain conversations.

"Is this about the secret project?" I asked, my voice echoing slightly in the sterile space. I gestured toward the desk where the planning documents and blueprints had lain for months.

"No, the engineering and design work is done," he said, shaking his head.

"We know it works and how to build it. We are just waiting on the final construction and installation. It'll be ready a month before New Year's."

"Then what's the issue?" I asked, leaning back against the cool concrete wall.

"No issues, I just want to report what's happening at D-three-eye-D."

"The fusion experiment?" I asked.

"Yes. We've fully replaced all the tiles with diamond-coated carbon," he confirmed, a flicker of pride in his eyes.

"Right," I replied, crossing my arms.

"You started that in 1986, after I got back from Chernobyl and showed everybody the big diamonds. It solved the long-term ablation problem." Agnew smiled faintly, regaining some of his professional composure.

"We've quietly set runtime records since then. Not quite five minutes. The previous record was under thirty seconds."

"That's very good Dr Agnew, truly revolutionary for materials science," I told him.

"But I don't understand the need for the secure room."

"We've been diamond-coating the YBCO superconductor materials to solve the heat and brittleness problems. In early testing, it has had no trouble standing up to the incredible Lorentz forces involved and the diamond has become the perfect structural support and heat sink."

"That doesn't sound like a secret, that sounds like a patent application," I countered, pushing off the wall.

"Why does that matter?" I asked. I knew where the conversation was going and I didn't mind the time. The problem was the lack of air movement in the sealed room. It always left me feeling suffocated. A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation. Dr Agnew took a breath, letting the moment hang.

"Because when we turn it on next year, we expect to be able to keep it running for hours at a time."

"That is very impressive," I said, a slow, grudging respect entering my tone.

"We also expect that we will be able to stop and restart without having to rebuild the entire containment vessel first."

"Congratulations. Only a few more problems to solve," I said, my voice immediately pulling the conversation back to hard reality.

"We will have fusion power within the next fifty years."

"What other problems?" he asked, the sudden drop in enthusiasm clearly visible on his face.

"The big one is how do you generate energy?" I asked, walking past the heavy door.

"You've got this very sealed, very hot process running that's making more heat than energy you're pumping into it. But I've yet to see a proper explanation of how you cleanly extract that energy and turn it into electricity. Then, even if you do, how does the price compare to our new ISPBR? The newest standard ISPBR design has a build cost of under $400 million and we're profitably selling electricity at two cents a kilowatt-hour."

Dr Agnew paused to consider, running a hand over the smooth, unpainted concrete wall of the secure room. The solitary battery operated graphene flake light cast a long, unsettling shadow from the table, emphasizing the cold, practical nature of our surroundings.

"You are absolutely right. The DIII-D is a scientific marvel, but it is not a power plant," he conceded, the enthusiasm from moments before entirely gone.

"But you solved the materials science problems for us, so now we are focused on the engineering. When we turn on continuous operation, the game changes for extraction." He then outlined his engineering vision, speaking with the authority of a physicist who believes he has found the final step: "Twenty percent of the released energy is alpha particles. They keep the reaction going. The other eighty percent is neutrons. They escape right through the magnetic field and the diamond.

We will wrap the fusion chamber with a meter-thick layer of molten material. This blanket will be heated by the neutrons. That stops the neutron radiation and becomes the working fluid for heat transfer to a traditional steam turbine." I shook my head in immediate disagreement, leaning my weight onto the steel table edge.

"With the ISPBR, we're even designing a portable unit for the military to deploy or put on their ships to replace their diesel generators. What you're talking about is a $10 billion mega-structure that has the same design flaw that Chernobyl had: a working medium that can solidify if it cools too much. Plus, it doesn't produce as much power as an ISPBR for equal dollars invested. We only spent $200 million completing the Satsop WNP-3 plant and are generating 2, 000 megawatts."

"But the beauty of fusion is that once you get it going, it is self-sustaining. You just add deuterium, which is cheap," he argued, grasping for the idealism of the project.

"I understand all of that," I insisted, matching his intensity.

"But I don't think you get my point. It is still fifty years away. You're putting out so much neutron radiation that the whole thing practically needs to be rebuilt every five years, and you'll have to do it with a robot as it will be too radioactive for people. It might even be cheaper to just run it until it finally fails, then entomb it in concrete and build a new one." I understood his dream. Fusion is a glorious dream and someday the torch that lights the universe.

But that lamp wasn't getting lit today, or even this century. I paused to make absolutely sure he was listening.

"I picked the ISPBR design from the beginning to be one of the energy sources for this," I said, pointing at the pile of documents for the secret project we built the secure room for.

"It is the absolutely cheapest way to safely and cleanly produce power anywhere in the world. Most of them will be solar thermal. ISPBR lets everyone have one, especially our needed European partners who don't have the solar resources. It also gives the initial idea that it might be rare or expensive which slows our opposition. That is the true energy revolution. The feedstocks are air and water. It is basically free." I put a hand on his shoulder, a gesture of respect that softened the harshness of my critique.

"I'm sure we'll get fusion someday. But it is not cost-effective now, or for another fifty years or more," I said bluntly.

"So, announce your success. Don't keep it a secret. If anything, it will distract people from what we're doing at Satsop with WNP-3."

"Okay. I guess I got excited," he admitted, finally letting his guard down.

"I know we've been keeping the diamond technology somewhat secret, but with your Oprah interview explaining how we use it." He paused to bring his frustration under control.

"People saw how big the diamond pebbles are and there is no secret there anymore." He closed his eyes then walked to the stack of documents on the table, placing a hand on them.

"This is really going to change the world, isn't it, not fusion," he said softly.

"It changes everything," I confirmed with every fiber of my being.

"I do think that fusion is the ultimate answer, but not with tritium. The goal is Helium 3. With Direct Energy Conversion no radioactive blanket is needed and neutron production is minimal.

"Since you're having such success, start working on raising the temperature. You should work on getting to 500 million degrees. I'll have a stable source of He3 from the moon when you're ready." I gave him a big smile, seeing the two future moon colonies in my mind's eye. Glorious, yet so very odd, Lunar North and Lunar South. I shook off the memories and gave him the challenge.

"I'd offer to make it a race, but I know getting to the moon is easy. They did it in the sixties after all," I said with a grin, finally allowing myself an ounce of levity as I turned toward the door.

"Oh, there's something else we should discuss since we are here," he said before I could escape the stifled air. I turned to wait.

"We've had a bit of an issue with ITAR. They didn't like that we put your email program on laptops that were going out of the country."

"You did explain that it is only for us and our partners right?" I asked.

"I did, but they don't like it not having backdoors. I came up with a solution, but I don't know if you'll like it."

"I'm listening," I said.

"I need authorization to use the code I write without having to jump through legal hoops."

"The CIA wants to use your system for communication. Internal and external. I've agreed to port a version of it for them to use, in exchange for neither version having a backdoor. We won't be allowed to sell the software commercially, and have to list everyone who gets a copy. Foreign partners may get blocked from using it, but any wholly owned division of GA can."

"That sounds like a great compromise," I said.

"There is one last thing. They came after your paper was published. The final agreement is that you don't publish any further papers on Elliptic Cryptography for five years."

"I can write them, just not publish them?" I asked to confirm.

"Yes," he agreed. I gave him a big smile.

"That sounds like a perfectly acceptable compromise."