The Release Of Thermonuclear Energy By Inertial Confinement

This page intentionally left blank Friedwardt Winterberg University of Nevada, USA World Scientific NEW JERSEY • LONDON • SINGAPORE • BEIJING • SHANGHAI • HONG KONG • TA I P E I • CHENNAI Published by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. 5 Toh Tuck Link, Singapore 596224 USA office 27 Warren Street, Suite 401-402, Hackensack, NJ 07601 UK office 57 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9HE British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. THE RELEASE OF THERMONUCLEAR ENERGY BY INERTIAL CONFINEMENT Ways Towards Ignition Copyright © 2010 by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission from the Publisher. For photocopying of material in this volume, please pay a copying fee through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. In this case permission to photocopy is not required from the publisher. ISBN-13 978-981-4295-90-1 ISBN-10 981-4295-90-6 Printed in Singapore. Dedicated to Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann Discoverers of Nuclear Fission Edward Teller Father of Man-made Thermonuclear Fusion Willard Bennett Founder of Magnetic Plasma Confinement and Wernher von Braun who first thought about nuclear rocket propulsion This page intentionally left blank Preface My interest in space flight can be traced back to the time I was about 10 years old, when as a birthday gift I got a popular book about the feasibility of space flight. There I heard for the first time about Oberth and Goddard, and of the possibility to reach the moon with a multistage rocket. It was the same time when Hahn and Strassmann had announced the discovery of nuclear fission with the possibility of an atomic bomb by a fission chain reaction. Having been born in Germany in 1929, I received my PhD in physics under Heisenberg in 1955. Inspired by the 15 Megaton hydrogen bomb test conducted in 1952 by the United States, I have been since 1954 deeply interested in the non-fission ignition of thermonuclear reactions by inertial confinement. At this time all fusion research in US was still classified, but I had quite independently discovered the basic principles of inertial confinement, the Guderley convergent shock wave, and the Rayleigh imploding shell solutions. In 1956 I presented my findings in Goettingen, at a meeting at the Max Planck Institute, which was organized by von Weizs¨acker. The abstracts of this meeting still exist and are kept in the library of University of Stuttgart. Due to the fact that in 1958, I had delivered at the 2nd United Nations Conference on the Peaceful Use of Atomic Energy, a paper which turned out to be the importance for Nerva-type nuclear rocket reactors, I was invited by the US government under