Bob Guccione and Small Nuclear Power – Fusion Promoters Seduced Him
I keep close tabs on developments in small nuclear reactors, so I was intrigued this morning to notice that many returns in a news search with that phrase kept turning up obituaries for Bob Guccione, the founder and long time publisher of Penthouse Magazine. Here is a quote from the New York Times version:
The dissolution of the Guccione empire took years. A $200 million Penthouse casino in Atlantic City never materialized, and he lost much of his investment. A $17.5 million movie containing hard-core sex scenes and graphic violence, “Caligula,” was shunned by distributors, and Mr. Guccione lost heavily. He once hired 82 scientists to develop a small nuclear reactor as a low-cost energy source, but it came to nothing and cost $17 million.
One of the people that I follow on Twitter (@plutoniumpage) also noticed that comment and tweeted
Things you didn’t know about porn moguls: “He once hired 82 scientists to develop a small nuclear reactor…” http://nyti.ms/bTpHes
I have spent quite a bit of time in front of investors trying to persuade them that small nuclear reactors are a promising technology worth supporting; I had to find out more. What I could have done with an initial injection of $17 million . . .
It took just a few tries to find an excellent source of the rest of the story. Guccione was a fusion fan who was convinced that Robert Bussard was on to something that could be developed if only it could attract a sufficient level of funding.
In March 1980, Guccione formed a partnership with Bussard and turned over, as he recalled later, some $400,000 in startup funds. Engineers, computer programmers, and metallurgists were hired, and Inesco set up a new shop in La Jolla, California, with eighty-five employees. Over the next four years, as design work progressed and the search for investors continued, Guccione poured in $16 million or $17 million, by his accounting. Predictably, the Inesco scientists who attended international meetings endured considerable ribbing about working for one of the most successful purveyors of adult magazines in the world. Physicists and pinups seemed so hilariously incongruous.
Guccione was a true believer in fusion, but he was also a sophisticated investor with a decent sense of marketing; he recognized that the Bussard led developments would be a continued drain on his resources if he did not get some additional investors excited enough to jump into a public offering. Part of his marketing effort – in addition to sending his engineers and scientists to international meetings – included a wry sense of humor and skilled branding.
To oversee Penthouse’s interest in Inesco, the publisher created a subsidiary, which he dubbed Penthouse Energy and Technology Systems, thus creating the acronym PETS. It was a conscious reference to Penthouse’s nude centerfold, “Pet of the Month,” and a way for Guccione to acknowledge the uninhibited women who in truth, were creating the profits to finance fusion research.
Even Guccione and his PETS money, however, could not convince other investors to commit themselves to fusion. Inesco’s project was just too speculative. Guccione said he also grew to suspect that the nuclear power industry, the fission plant owners, were putting pressure on Washington to ignore projects like Inesco’s, which threatened to replace fission power. Guccione had no direct evidence of this, but it was a theme commonly sounded by frustrated fusion researchers.
In 1984, an attempt to take Inesco public flopped after the underwriter failed to sell the last 400,000 shares. Bussard’s dream and Guccione’s gamble were crushed.
It is interesting to hear that fusion researchers would blame fission supporters – after all, oil, coal and gas suppliers control 90% of the world’s energy market. Fusion has received far more of DOE’s R&D money than fission; that is probably because it is no threat to the politically powerful coal, oil and gas industry. Fusion will not begin taking any markets away from the established fossil fuel suppliers until everyone currently in those industries is long dead.
Bussard was still looking for money in interesting California locations as late as November 2006 when he gave a tech talk at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA. He also successfully pitched my former employer and convinced a key decision maker that polywell fusion was something real enough for continued support. That effort did not result in any real progress towards the fusion dream either. Dr. Bussard passed away in October 2007, but there are still fusion visionaries out there happily spending money from whatever sources they can seduce.
There are a number of extreme risk, extremely high payoff approaches to fusion(such as polywell). You can’t count on any of these approaches to ever be useful; you certainly shouldn’t plan a grid around them, but that doesn’t mean they should be written off entirely.
I don’t know if the lack of control of the fusion process can be overcome in the near future. Even a large tokamak, like the planned ITER, may be able to contain plasma for only a few seconds. And with fission, the issue of scale up (and again control) and energy balance (how much you put in v/s what you get out) will always exit.
The national ignition facility is, IMHO, a waste of taxpayer money. Problems in fusing a small pellet with a lot of lasers are going to become more difficult to deal with as you scale up the facility, if it ever comes to that.
As an aside, for those interested, the book “Sun in a Bottle” by Charles Seife is a decent review (and critique) of all past and present fusion attempts.
A small correction here — while most everyone arees ITER and NIF will never lead to economically competitive fusion power, the same is not true of Bussard’s Polywell, or the FRC efforts being financed by a Paul Allen. These are “high beta” designs, which means they will have plant power densities much better than those planned on the ITER path, and are much more likely to be economically competitive if they work.
When in doubt about the process don’t use the F U S I O N word. This keeps the critics in the dark about the magical process going on inside your steam power plant. After all W O R K is the other word many hate to here. An operating steam power plant doing W O R K via some dark process is at least doing something. Whilst work is being done the magicians just smile and paint the plant green. What ever is the word for F U S I O N in Russian?
They presently call it the green Steam Machine and let it go at that.
According to google translator it’s: ???????
In the context of nuclear power, it is “??????”
The NIF has never been about sustained fusion for power. It is and always has been about maintaining our nuclear weapon stockpile. The value to the taxpayer is the confidence that our leaders and allies have in our ability to maintain a nuclear deterrent. We could resume underground nuclear testing, but I doubt the public would support that.
@John – that is certainly true, but the people who have been pushing funding for the NIF certainly have no qualms about selling the need for the investment as an energy program.
I would support a return to actual testing to ensure stockpile reliability. Of course, I am generally in the minority.
I’m still a fan for the DPF approach which our government has totally ignored. I’m sure that it will be the best approach which why the government shows no interest. DPF doesn’t use a turbine but a kind of transformer so it ain’t your grandpa’s fusion reactor design.
You are certainly right what nobody for the next 20-50 years should be planning any grid around fusion.
LFTR should be receiving the most funding but I frankly think that all nuclear R&D needs to be stepped up. Contrary to what most people think the government is not revenue constrained and they are more than willing to spend trillions on oil and geopolitics around the world. I think main problem is the ignorance of basic science. Cupidity and Stupidity make the world a needy place.