This is a rather incredible peak into the modes of thinking that atomic scientists were comfortable with. In it, AEC chairman (he of the “too cheap to meter” comment) asks Alvin Weinberg, director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory to try and get some kind of fusion demo ready for a UN conference on atomic energy.
“We are now engaged in this enterprise,” he wrote in a letter to his staff. “We have mobilized people from every part of the Laboratory for this purpose and, with complete assurance of unlimited support from the Commission, we have put the work into the very highest gear.”
In the end, all they built was the model you see below, which demonstrated “operating principles,” not, you know, fusion. Here’s the longer excerpt from Oak Ridge’s official history:
Planning for a second United Nations Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy coincided with the Laboratory’s advance in fusion research. AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss, determined that the United States should achieve a triumph equal to that of 1955 at the 1958 scientific olympics, threw the AEC’s full support behind fusion research. He hoped that American scientists could display an operating fusion energy device at the 1958 Geneva conference, just as they had displayed a successful nuclear reactor three years earlier.
Components of the DCX exhibit for the 1958 Geneva Conference are loaded onto an airplane. “I have received a letter from Chairman Strauss exhorting the Laboratory to do everything it possibly can to have incontrovertible proof of a thermonuclear plasma by the time of Geneva,” Weinberg informed Laboratory staff. He went on to say:
We are now engaged in this enterprise; we have mobilized people from every part of the Laboratory for this purpose and, with complete assurance of unlimited support from the Commission, we have put the work into the very highest gear. I can think of few things that would give any of us as much satisfaction as to have Oak Ridge the scene of the first successful demonstration of substantial amounts of controlled thermonuclear energy.
I can not agree with you in 100% regarding some thoughts, but you got good point of view.
Thanks, Sophie. That’s a nice compliment!
Instead of fusion, Weinberg went on to support and develop the molten-salt breeder reactor, which unlocked the limitless potential of thorium energy for the world. Much better than fusion in my opinion. But then the Atomic Energy Commission had him fired for showing how safe and efficient nuclear energy could really be, and they made sure research of thorium-fluoride reactors came to an end.