The Dark Side of Nuclear Fusion: A New Generation of Weapons of Mass Destruction?

In December 1938 the atomic era was born in Otto Hahns beakers at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften in Berlin, now Max Planck Institutes, where fission of uranium and thorium was discovered. In the image, the discovery as shown in Walt Disney's movie "Our Friend, the Atom" in 1956

This is a guest post by Giuseppe ("Pepi") Cima, retired nuclear researcher. It summarizes a number of facts that are known, in principle, but largely hidden from the public. Basically, research on nuclear fusion, sometimes touted as a benign technology able to produce energy "too cheap to meter," is often financed because of its military applications. The search is for an "inertial confinement device," that would detonate without the need for a trigger in the form of a conventional fission bomb. These devices could cover a range of destructive power that could go from tactical warheads to planet-bursting weapons. Fortunately, we are not there, yet, but Cima correctly notes how the current situation is similar to the way things were in the 1930s, when a group of bright scientists started working on nuclear chain reactions with the objective of unleashing the awesome power of nuclear fission. At the time, it was an enormously difficult challenge, but the task could be accomplished by means of the lavish financial support provided by the psychopathic criminals who were in power at the time, who were motivated by the perspective of developing an enormously powerful weapon. Today, we do not lack money for military research, nor do we lack criminals at the top, so we can only hope that the task of turning nuclear fusion into even more powerful weapons of mass destruction will turn out to be unfeasible. Unfortunately, we can't be sure about that and, if they are making good progress at that, surely they won't tell us. (U.B.)

By Giuseppe Cima

In February 1939, Leo Szilard, who had already thought of the chain reactions for energy in 1934, conceived the possibility of a bomb of extraordinary power. In September 1939 Szilard, with Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller, the soul of the H-bomb and the only one with a driving license, all Hungarians, went to see Albert Einstein who was on vacation on the New Jersey shore: it was already clear what to be afraid of. Szilard knew Einstein well from the Berlin years; they had jointly patented a new type of refrigerator. This time the idea was a device that could destroy an entire city in one blast. Together, they wrote a letter to President Roosevelt and almost nothing happened for about two years.

I can visualize the three Hungarians with a strong European accent, in Washington, trying to convince the Uranium Committee: a general, an admiral, and some mature scientists. "We canna make a little bomba and it will blow up a whola city." How could they believe it? But, in August 1945, six years later, nuclear power had changed the world, quickly ended world war two, and started an industry the size of the automotive one.

After a few years, Otto Hahn became a fervent opponent of the use of atomic energy for military purposes. Even before Hiroshima, Szilard, one of the most brilliant minds of the time, was ousted from anything to do with nuclear power, he devoted himself full-time to biology and in 1962 started the Council for a Livable World, an organization dedicated to the elimination of nuclear arsenals. In a 1947 issue of The Atlantic, Einstein claimed that only the United Nations should have atomic weapons at their disposal, as a deterrent to new wars. 

Why should we recall these episodes now? Because something similar is occurring today with nuclear fusion.


The essential fusion

Today, most people probably have some idea of what nuclear fusion is, even the Italian prime minister, Mr. Mario Draghi, spoke about it at a recent parliament session. Although energy can be produced by splitting uranium nuclei in two, it can also be produced by fusing light atomic nuclei. We have all been taught that this is the way the sun works and it has been repeated to boredom by people with a superficial knowledge of these processes, such as the Italian minister for the ecological transition Roberto Cingolani. But not everyone knows that if helium could be readily generated by two hydrogen atoms, our star, made of hydrogen, would have exploded billions of years ago in a giant cosmic bang. Fortunately, the fusion of hydrogen involves a "weak" reaction and is so slow and so unlikely that, even with the extraordinary conditions of the sun's core, the energy density produced by the reaction is about the same as that of a stack of decomposing manure, the kind we see smoking in the fields in winter.  To radiate the low-level energy produced in its giant core the sun, almost a million kilometers in diameter, must shine at twice the temperature of a lightbulb filament when is on.

To do something useful on Earth by means of nuclear fusion, one can't use hydrogen but needs two of its rare isotopes, deuterium and tritium, not by chance the ingredients of H bombs. The promoters of fusion for pacific purposes don't mention bombs, but this is precisely what I want to talk about, the analogies between fusion now and what happened in the 1930s and 1940s.


Peaceful use?

Reading what was written by the scientists who worked in nuclear fusion in the early years of the "atomic age" shows that the development of an energy source for peaceful use, energy "too cheap to meter", is what motivated them more than anything else. The same arguments were brought forward by Claudio Descalzi, CEO of ENI, a major investor in fusion, addressing the Italian Parliamentary Committee for the Security of the Republic (COPASIR) in a hearing of December 9th 2021: fusion will offer humanity large quantities of energy of a safe, clean and virtually inexhaustible kind.

Wishful thinking: with regard to "inexhaustible," we cannot do anything in fusion without tritium (an isotope of hydrogen) which is nonexistent on this planet and most of the theoretical predictions, no experiments to date, say that magnetic confinement, the main hope of fusion, will not self-fertilize. Speaking of "clean" energy, Paola Batistoni, head of ENEA's Fusion Energy Development Division, at reactor shutdown envisages the production of hundreds of thousands of tons of materials unapproachable by humans for hundreds of years.

However, the problem I am worried about here is a military problem, mostly ignored, even by COPASIR, the Parliamentary Committee for the Security of the Republic. There are many reasons to worry about nuclear fusion: the huge amount of magnetic energy in the reactor can cause explosions equivalent to hundreds of kilograms of TNT, resulting in the release of tritium, a very radioactive and difficult to contain gas. On top of it, with the neutrons of nuclear fusion, it is possible to breed fissile materials. But the risks that seem to me most worrisome in the long run will come from new weapons, never seen before.


New Weapons

To better understand this issue, let's review how classical thermonuclear weapons work, the 70-year-old ones. Their exact characteristics are not in the public domain but Wikipedia describes them in sufficient detail. For a more complete introduction, I recommend the highly readable books by Richard Rhodes. There exist today "simple" fission bombs, which use only fissile reactions to generate energy, and "thermonuclear" bombs, which use both fission and fusion for that purpose. Thermonuclear bombs are an example of inertial confinement fusion (ICF), where everything happens so quickly that all the energy is released before the reacting matter has the time to disperse.

The New York Times recently announced advances in the field of inertial fusion at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California with an article reporting important findings from NIF, the National Ignition Facility. What really happened was that the 192 most powerful lasers in the world, simultaneously shining the inner walls of a gold capsule of a few centimeters, vaporize it to millions of degrees. The X-rays emitted by this gold plasma in turn heat the surface of a 3 mm fusion fuel sphere which, imploding, reaches ignition. Ignition means that the fusion reactions are self-sustaining until the fuel is used up. As described in the article, without an atom bomb trigger, a few kilograms worth of TNT thermonuclear explosion occurs as in the conceptually analogous, but vastly more powerful, H-bomb of Teller and Ulam from the fifties. 

Fig. 1 Diagram of the Teller-Ulam thermonuclear device. The explosion is contained within a cavity, technically a "hohlraum", in analogy to the gold capsule of the NIF experiment but hundreds of times bigger.

We don't have to worry about these recent results too much, for now, NIF still needs three football fields of equipment to work, nothing which one could place at the tip of a rocket or drop from the belly of an airplane, but its miniaturization is the next step.

In fusion, military and civilian, particles must collide with an energy of the order of 10 keV, ten thousand electron-volts, the 100 million degrees mentioned everywhere speaking of fusion. Regarding the necessary fuel ingredients, deuterium is abundant, stable, and easily available. Tritium on the other hand, with an average life of 10 years, can't be found in nature and only a few fission reactors can produce it in small quantities. The world reserves are around 50 kg, barely enough for scientific experiments, and it's thousands of times more expensive than gold. The fusion bombs solved the tritium procurement issue by transmuting lithium 6, the fusion fuel of Fig. 1, instantaneously, by means of fission neutrons. In civilian fusion, instead, the possibility of extracting enough tritium from lithium is far from obvious. It is one of the important issues expected to be demonstrated by ITER, a gigantic TOKAMAK, the most promising incarnation of magnetic fusion, under construction in the south of France with money from all over the world but mainly from the European community. The Russians, who invented it, and the Americans, the ones with most of the experience in the field, are skeptical partners contributing less money than Italy. The NIF inertial fusion experiment, instead, is financed by the Pentagon with billions of dollars, the most expensive fusion investment to reach ignition. 

Along the lines of NIF, there is also a French program, another country armed with nuclear weapopns. CEA, the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique, Direction des Application Militaires, finances near Bordeaux the Laser Méga-Joule (LMJ), three billion euros and operational since October 2014. Investments like these show the level of military interest in fission-free fusion and so far they are the only ones who have achieved self-sustaining reactions.


Private enterprises

In the private field, First Light Fusion, a British company, has already invested tens of millions to carry out inertial fusion by striking a solid fuel target with a tennis ball size bullet. The experimental results consist, for now, of just a handful of neutrons. The amount of heat generated is, so far, undetectable, but the energy of the neutrons, 2.45 MeV, corresponds to the fusion of deuterium, the material of the target. I cited First Light Fusion to indicate that there is interest in inertial fusion even in private companies outside nuclear weapons national laboratories. Marvel Fusion, based in Bavaria, is another private enterprise claiming a new way to inertial confinement ignition.

For those wondering if the 12 orders of magnitude of difference for the density of the fuel needed in comparison to that of solid matter, and that of TOKAMAK, the one of a good lab vacuum, hide alternative methods to carry out nuclear fusion for peaceful and military purposes, the answer is certainly positive. Until now, in academia, before the advent of entrepreneurs' fusion, no proposal seemed attractive enough to be seriously pursued experimentally. The panorama could change in years to come, the proposal of General Fusion, Jeff Bezos's company to be clear, is of this type: short pulses at intermediate density. One wonders if the CEO of Amazon is aware of sponsoring research with possible military applications.


Experiments

The idea of ​​triggering fusion in a deuterium-tritium target by concentrating laser radiation, or conventional explosives, has long fascinated those who see it as a potentially unlimited source of energy and also those who consider it an effective and devastating weapon. At the Frascati laboratories of CNEN, the Comitato Nazionale per l'Energia Nucleare, now ENEA, Energia Nucleare e Energie Alternative, we find examples of experimentation of both methods in the 70s, see "50 years of research on fusion in Italy" by Paola Batistoni.

According to some sources, the idea of ​​triggering fusion with conventional explosives, as in the Frascati MAFIN and MIRAPI experiments of the mentioned CNEN review report, was seriously considered by Russian weapon scientists in the early 1950s and vigorously pursued at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory during the 1958-61, the years of a moratorium on nuclear testing, as part of a program ironically titled "DOVE".

According to Sam Cohen, who worked at the Manhattan Project, DOVE failed in its goal of developing a neutron bomb "for technical reasons, which I am not free to discuss." But Ray Kidder, formerly at Lawrence Livermore, says the US lost interest in the DOVE program when testing resumed because "the fission trigger was a lot easier". It didn't all end there though, it is instructive to read now an article that appeared in the NYT in 1988, which describes a nuclear experiment carried out in order to verify the feasibility of an inertial fusion explosion not triggered by fission, such as Livermore's NIF. In addition to showing the unequivocal military interest in these initiatives, the article gives an idea of ​​the complexity, and slow pace, of their development. Nevertheless, the initiatives of the 80s seem to be bearing fruit now.

Modern nuclear devices are "boosted", they use fusion to enhance their yield and reduce their cost but the bulk of the explosive power still originates from the surrounding fissile material, not from fusion. However, there are devices where energy originates almost exclusively from fusion reactions such as the mother of all bombs, the Russian Tzar Bomb. With its 50 megatons, a multi-stage H, the addition of a tamper of fissile material would have greatly enhanced its yield but it was preferred to keep it “clean”.

It is important to underline that the H component of a thermonuclear device, unlike fissile explosives, contributes little to long-term environmental radioactivity. Uncovering the secrets of the ICF could indicate how to annihilate the enemy while limiting permanent environmental damage. It is the same reason why civilian fusion is claimed to be more attractive than fission: the final products, mostly helium, are much less radioactive than the heavy elements characteristic of fission ashes. As mentioned earlier, radioactivity nonetheless jeopardizes the usefulness of civilian fusion in other ways: a heavy neutron flux reduces the already precarious reliability of the reactor, and radioactivity protection greatly increases its cost.

Despite the rhetoric of some press advertising, the relevance of ICF for energy production is minimal for many reasons: first of all, as in the case of NIF, the primary energy, the supply power of all devices involved, is hundreds of times higher than the thermal energy produced by the reactions, the quasi-breakeven reported refers to the energy of the laser light alone. Even more importantly the micro-explosion repetition rate and the reliability necessary in a power plant constitute insurmountable obstacles.


Where do we stand?

Back to ICF, the Lawrence Livermore National Lab's NIF experiment is funded by the Department Of Defense aiming at new weapons while complying with yield limits imposed by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT). The Question of Pure Fusion Explosions Under the CTBT, Science & Global Security, 1998, Volume 7. pp.129-150 explains why we should be concerned about pure fusion weapons presently under investigation.

With nuclear fusion, we are witnessing a situation similar to what appeared clear to many of the scientists who participated in the development of weapons at the time of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: nuclear energy is frighteningly dangerous while potentially useful for producing energy and as a war deterrent.

With fusion, the balance between weapons and peaceful uses seems to be even more questionable, making further developments harder to justify. Fusion weapons, which will arrive earlier than reactors, are potentially more devastating than fission with a wider range to both higher and lower yields. Low-power devices, while remaining very destructive, would not carry a strong deterrent power, and the super high-power ones, hundreds and thousands of megatons, would have catastrophic consequences on a planetary level. On the other hand, electricity production by fusion seems now less and less likely to work out, economically less attractive than the already uninviting fission.

The wind and photovoltaic revolution, rendering the already proven nuclear fission obsolete despite the urgency of decarbonization, are making fusion unappealing even before it's proven to work. At the same time, possible military applications should discourage even the investigation of fusion tritium technologies. At the very least, new research regulations are needed.


It's a collective choice

Is "science" unstoppable in this instance?

First of all, I would characterize these developments as a purely technological development than a scientific one. We are talking of applications without general interest, not a frontier of science. Fusion is a "nuclear chemistry" with potentially aberrant applications, in analogy to other fields which are investigated in strict isolation. Fortunately, fusion is an economically very demanding technology, impossible to develop in a home garage. Working on fusion can be, at least for now, only a collective choice that reminds the story of the atomic bomb at the end of the 30s, but at a more advanced stage of development than when Szilard involved Einstein to reach Roosevelt. Is the genius is about to come out of the lamp?

Author's CV - I researched nuclear fusion in labs and universities in Europe and the US, publishing around 100 peer-reviewed papers in this field. After losing faith that a deconstructionist approach to fusion could yield better reactor performances than already indicated by present day experiments I started an industrial automation company in Texas. I have now retired in Venezia, Italy, where I pursue my lifetime interests: environmental protection, energy conservation, teaching technology and science, and, more recently, mechanical watches. Giuseppe Cima

Previously published in Italian on Scenari per il Domani, sep 14 2022

The Tortuous Way to Nuclear Fusion

Giuseppe Cima discusses the real perspectives of fusion energy

By Giuseppe Cima

Newspapers make you think that nuclear fusion for electricity production is within reach and that, unlike fission, it is cheaper, cleaner, and safer. Okay, it's not online yet, it is argued, but it's up to us how fast it will supply useful energy. Things appear more complicated than that as soon as we take a look at the extraordinary variety of methods adopted by all the initiatives proposed.

Some use fuel from nuclear warheads, such as Commonwealth Fusion Systems, of which ENI is a shareholder. Others use the boron-proton reaction, such as the TAE, financed by ENEL, Tokamak Energy promotes magnetic confinement, and First Light Fusion of Oxford has been inspired by the "claw" of Alpheus heterochaelis, the gun shrimp claw. There are about thirty companies in this market and just as many, very different, methods. For the most part, these methods have been already studied, and discarded, by the academic community, and yet the industry has not decided which path to follow. This confusion indicates how distant the goal is. Let's revisit the story of fusion and the origin of this explosion of promises.

The inspiration for nuclear fusion came from looking at the sky, it originated with the mystery of the energy that powers the stars. At first they thought of gravity, a non-trivial idea for a body as large as the Sun. Jupiter, for example, a gaseous planet, has a surface temperature twice that of the Earth, powered by gravity while the planet shrinks of a few millimeters per year. Gravity was also Lord Kelvin's hypothesis for the Sun's power during a famous meeting of the Royal Society on January 21, 1887. The surface temperature of the Sun made him deduce that our star had been shining for about twelve million years, much longer than the Bible states.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin


Paleontologists were upset, gravitational energy doesn't fit the data, fossils on Earth are evidence of a Sun that has been shining for at least several hundred million years. The discussion remained on hold for a while until Arthur Eddington in the 1920s hypothesized that the heat originates from the fusion of hydrogen into helium. It was already known that helium weighs significantly less than four hydrogen atoms and we now know that this difference accounts for the solar radiation. But something was still wrong, the internal temperature seemed too low to support the relevant nuclear reactions. A few years later, new hypotheses emerged on the decay of hydrogen into helium and in Cambridge, in the 1930s the first accelerators experimentally proved the existence of fusion reactions. In the 1940s some illustrious veterans of Los Alamos - the physicists who worked on the atomic bomb - studied the problem, correctly identifying the main reactions and stellar nucleosynthesis was satisfactorily understood. Recent observations of solar neutrinos confirm the hypotheses of the 1940s: fusion of ordinary hydrogen, the same of H2O, provides all the energy radiated by the Sun.

What does this story have to do with the nuclear fusion that is now being talked about so much in the newspapers? Almost nothing. It's surprising but the stars, thanks to their enormous size and mind-blowing pressure, shine at 5,000 degrees while burning exasperatingly slowly, with the power intensity (ratio of power to mass) of a compost pile. If not, they would rapidly explode and disappear. We, on Earth, with our energy range of ten kilowatts per capita, would not know what to do with stellar fusion which has the power of our basal metabolic rate. What could be used on Earth comes from another branch of science: weapons.

After the development of fission nuclear devices in World War 2, we also developed the fusion of light atoms and in the 1950s, in order to overcome the power limits of fission, the first fusion bombs were developed in secrecy. This time hydrogen, the main component of the Sun and of the water molecule, is not the fuel but two of its rare isotopes are. From these isotopes, deuterium and tritium, come the most powerful weapons, such as the mother of all bombs, the Soviet 40 megaton Tsar Bomb (hopefully none is left in stock) that uses a conventional fission bomb to trigger the hydrogen fusion. Cheaper fission weapons, the so called boosted bombs, use the same principle. Now we know what's the ideal fuel for applications of fusion, the one that burns most easily, a mixture of deuterium and tritium, (DT). Almost immediately people started to think of using fusion for electricity production and started research programs, unclassified, from the 1960s.

Magnetic Confinement Fusion, MCF, turned out to be the method that attracted the favor of those looking for continuous combustion of deuterium-tritium and until now, it has remained the preferred way. The most popular MCF device is called TOKAMAK, a Russian acronym attributed to its inventors, Igor Tamm and Andrei Sakharov, (the latter is the same person who developed the H-bomb and civil rights fame- the world of physicists 50 years ago was smaller.)

Fusion is closely linked to thermonuclear weapons: they have in common the raw material, sophisticated and rare components - deuterium and tritium - certainly not just seawater, as we often hear. Deuterium, about .02 % of hydrogen, is readily available and costs only $ 4 per gram. Tritium, on the other hand, is not present in nature, has an average life of ten years, and is produced only by CANDU nuclear reactors. Stocks of tritium in the world consist of about 50 kg accumulated over the years, barely enough for future experiments and it is a thousand times more expensive than gold.

The weapons solved the tritium scarcity by creating it from an isotope of lithium bombarded by their own neutrons. It is the same lithium that is used for modern cell phone batteries and electric cars, but fusion would burn it in such modest quantities as not to increase its scarcity. Nevertheless, for civilian applications of fusion, the possibility of extracting enough tritium from lithium is far from obvious, the theoretical predictions are not good, experiments have never been made, and it is one of the most relevant results we expect from ITER, a gigantic magnetic confinement experiment whose construction in southern France will produce results hopefully in a couple of decades.

It must also be borne in mind that, if fusion ever proved possible, these 1 GW reactors would have to line up by the thousands to supply themselves with the tritium they need to contribute to the 16 TW global energy hunger.

It is already clear that three common statements about fusion, namely that it is near, cheap, and safe, are premature at best. The fuel is not seawater but it is hard to find and is the same stuff as most nuclear devices use, those same weapons which would be so dangerous in the wrong hands.

For now, there are still no fusion weapons, currently, they need a fission trigger, but explosions of pure deuterium-tritium would be very attractive because, at equal destructive power, they are "cleaner", with less radioactive leftover than the plutonium ones. It's no coincidence that the second-largest fusion project in the world, nearly $ 10 billion in funding, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's NIF in California, has been arranged by the Department of Defense and not by the Department of Energy. NIF has shown it can detonate millimeter-diameter deuterium-tritium capsules triggered by the world's largest laser, the size of three football fields. For now they are not explosions of a kiloton, a thousand tons of TNT, but of a milliton, a thousandth of a ton, a stick of TNT. However, we know that, as in all detonations, the difficult operation is to trigger them. NIF is also promoted as a method suitable for a continuous energy production reactor. I leave it to you to imagine how realistic it would be to string hundreds of explosions per minute with sub-millimeter precision for decades, explosions that individually already stress to the limit a steel vacuum vessel the size of a gymnasium.

Inertial Confinement Fusion, ICF, of which the NIF is the best-known example, is not the only alternative to ITER's magnetic confinement, MCF. Between the very high fuel densities of the ICF, hundreds of times the solid, and the very low densities of the MCF, tens of thousands less dense than our atmosphere, intermediate densities could be employed by fusion by exploiting the magnetic field of MCF and the fast compression of ICF. There have been a few attempts in this direction in the history of fusion but at Colleferro, Italy, in the CNEN laboratories, in the 1960s, experiments were carried out with promising results. High-intensity sources of fusion neutrons were produced by imploding magnetized plasmas with the aid of conventional chemical explosives. The reason for the limited popularity of this method as a potential energy source is found again in how difficult it would be to produce high-frequency explosions, for years and years, as would be required in a reactor. Low-powered, low fallout, tactical bombs immediately come to mind as a possibility for the intermediate-density method. From the 1960s onwards there has been little mention of medium density fusion, until a few years ago when a small private initiative was born in Canada: General Fusion (GF).

GF offers something similar to those earlier Colleferro experiments, but with mechanical pistons instead of explosives. According to General Fusion, the new technique would allow the combustion of deuterium-tritium to be repeated cyclically at a potentially attractive rate and cost. In Colleferro, using explosives, they had not even reached ignition and no one would have noted General Fusion, one of the dozens of private fusion initiatives, were it not that Jeff Bezos, of Amazon fame, decided to invest up to two billion dollars in this venture. Regarding the General Fusion proposal, it is a real shame we can't seek the opinion of the CNEN, now ENEA, researchers who carried out the Colleferro experiments. Unfortunately, the signatories of the publications of those times are no longer with us. This observation reminds us of the very long development times of fusion experiments, a crucial problem in this field. Almost equally interesting it would be to ask Jeff Bezos if he ever noticed that the devices whose development he finances could also help to invent new nuclear armaments.

Military applications of civil fusion should certainly be a major drawback, but the inevitable radioactive activation of fusion reactor structures is even more so. Unlike the solid core of a fission reactor, the thin fuel of a magnetic confinement fusion reactor is transparent to the neutrons it produces and they are stopped only by the first solid wall they encounter. Even ITER, just an experiment, will generate tens of thousands of tons of radioactive material whose disposal would certainly contribute to the cost of the kilowatt-hour of a conceptually similar reactor.

The price of energy will ultimately decide the development of nuclear fusion. The comparison, for now, is with natural gas, which produces electricity in the US at the unbeatable cost of 2 ¢ per kilowatt-hour and with the new renewables, wind and solar, now only three or four times more expensive than gas and, in some cases, even less expensive. Nuclear plants are too large to enjoy the economies of scale of mass-produced gas turbines, solar panels and wind turbines. This feature penalizes fusion enormously and there are solid physical and safety reasons to make us think that this situation will not change. Fusion is now too far behind in its industrial development to be able to participate in decarbonization in this century, which is why it must be pursued with a very long-term perspective and kept away from financial speculation.

Giuseppe Cima, I researched nuclear fusion in labs and universities in Europe and the US : Culham labs in UK, ENEA in Frascati, CNR in Milan, University of Texas in Austin and published more than 70 peer reviewed papers in this field. After loosing faith that a deconstructionist approach to fusion could yield better reactor performances than already indicated by present day experiments I started an industrial automation company in Texas. I have now retired in Venezia, Italy, where I pursue my lifetime interests: environmental protection, energy conservation, teaching technology and science, the physics of mechanical horology.