The Fusion Cage

XXV

‘Wow.’

Lopez’s voice sounded small as they climbed out of the car they had leased for cash, in Euros, from a small dealership in Roquemaure alongside the Le Rhone river that wound its way through the picturesque valleys of southern France.

The flight out of Abu Dhabi that Ethan had booked had resulted in them abandoning Agent Willis in the city, an act for which Ethan felt some degree of shame. However, Stanley and Amber were his priorities and he felt certain that Majestic Twelve would have located them before Huron had gotten far from the docks. Jarvis had texted him and warned of a possible breach, confirming Ethan’s suspicions and urging him to make alternative plans. A commercial flight out of the city using the cash and fake documents Jones had provided a better option, and they had landed in France tired but beyond the reach of the Saudi authorities, for now at least.

‘It’s a temporary victory,’ Lopez had warned him. ‘The Saudis have strong ties with our own administration. They could easily demand our arrest and extradition to face charges.’

‘One thing at a time,’ Ethan had replied with more confidence than he had felt. ‘Let’s just get back to America first — we’ll be better able to operate on home ground.’

A vast facility was arrayed before them containing many huge buildings, many of which were still under construction. Ethan could see heavy trucks moving to and fro, cranes operating and countless workmen labouring beneath the warm sunshine.

Stanley Meyer looked up at the vast construction site with his hands on his hips and a scowl on his features.

‘Biggest waste of the world’s money I’ve ever seen,’ he muttered.

‘What is this place?’ Lopez asked.

‘ITER is Latin for ‘the way’,’ Amber explained, apparently well enough versed in her father’s work to know about the site. ‘It’s an international research and engineering project to build the world’s first nuclear fusion reactor.’

‘The project is funded and run by seven member entities,’ Stanley said as they began walking toward the massive site. ‘The European Union, India, Japan, People’s Republic of China, Russia, South Korea and the United States. All of them have agreed to waste enormous sums of money building what is really just a giant plasma accelerator using a tokamak chamber.’

‘A torus to contain the plasma in magnetic fields,’ Ethan recalled from a previous investigation for the DIA, deep beneath the waves of the Florida coast.

‘Indeed,’ Stanley said, raising a surprised eyebrow at Ethan. ‘The reactor uses deuterium fuel, which is easily extracted from seawater, and tritium which is generated once the fusion reactions begin, thus creating a runaway reaction which is effectively self — sustaining. It’s being designed to produce five hundred megawatts of output power while only needing fifty megawatts of ingoing power to operate.’

‘Free energy,’ Lopez remarked. ‘How come that’s possible?’

‘It’s the same process going on inside our sun,’ Stanley explained as he glanced up at the bright orb in the hard blue sky. ‘The sun’s gravity is so immense that it attempts to crush itself under its own weight. This compresses the nuclei of hydrogen that mostly make up the sun so much that they fuse together, a process known as nuclear fusion. Immense volumes of energy are emitted during this process, in line with E=mc2, and are emitted from the sun as the heat and the light that we feel on our faces right now.’

‘Isn’t that what all nuclear power stations do?’ Lopez asked.

‘No,’ Stanley said. ‘They use nuclear fission, the opposite process: once again, mankind chooses to use the opposite method to nature for producing energy. They split the atom, releasing vast amounts of energy but also radiation with it. A fission reactor can melt down in a runaway chain reaction should it overheat, as witnessed at Chernobyl in 1986. A fusion reactor, however, will simply cease to operate if the temperatures or pressures fall below the required level. Fusion also produces very little waste product — it’s the perfect energy supply for mankind if it can be harnessed.’

‘Then why are you so against it?’ Ethan pressed.

‘I’m not against it, I’m against the methods employed to achieve it,’ Stanley insisted. ‘All of this, some sixteen billion dollars of investment, all to produce what is in effect nothing more than a proof of concept. This reactor won’t be able to power the world even if it works perfectly and confounds the critics who say it’s a waste of time. Our National Ignition Facility in California has already proved the concept on a smaller scale and initiated nuclear fusion reactions, and the aerospace giant Lockheed Martin has announced plans for a fusion reactor small enough to fit on the back of a truck that may be commercialized within a decade, long before this monstrosity even gets fully completed.’

Stanley huffed and puffed his way to a low ridge of dirt alongside the edge of the compound where the reactor was to be built and surveyed it through the high fences that surrounded the enormous site.

‘I have witnessed energetic reactions emitting excess heat phenomena in an apparatus made from things you could buy in a local hardware store,’ he said gloomily. ‘It’s all about efficiency, not a free lunch. Our governments are building this not because they need it, but because they want to show the people how much they need their governments and leaders to achieve such things. If only the people knew that they don’t, that if they simply made an effort to research these things themselves they could take their own futures into their own hands and shake off these ridiculous gestures of power.’

The reply to Stanley Meyer’s oratory came from one side of where they stood.

‘The cynic as ever, Stanley.’

Ethan turned to see an elderly man watching them from the foot of the ridge, his hands in the pockets of his jacket and a kindly smile on his face.

‘Hans!’

Stanley hurried down the ridge with remarkable agility for one so old and the two men embraced briefly.

‘This is Hans Furgen,’ Stanley introduced his friend, ‘the best electrochemist I ever knew and somebody who knows more about nuclear reactions than everybody else in the world combined.’

Furgen appeared to almost blush as he shook Ethan’s hand.

‘That’s something of an exaggeration,’ he murmured in reply.

‘Blah blah,’ Stanley said, more animated than Ethan had ever seen him. ‘You’re the top dog, Hans, it’s why these damned fools picked you to run this project.’

‘You’re ITER’s project leader?’ Lopez asked.

‘I’m in charge of developing the tokamak chamber,’ Hans replied. ‘It’s a crucial part of the assembly and one so large has not been built before. Stanley’s right that excess heat phenomena have already been achieved at the NIF in California, but only on a very short time scale and at lower energies than we plan to achieve. This facility is to prove that it can be done at a commercial scale, and thus will hopefully pave the way to a future devoid of fossil fuels and the dangers of fission meltdowns and radioactive waste.’

‘That’s a big responsibility,’ Ethan noted with considerable admiration for Han’s role. ‘And if somebody else were to come along and do the same thing on a desktop with some beakers and electrodes they bought at Walmart, how would that go down at ITER?’

Hans sighed and his shoulders slumped as he glanced at Stanley.

‘I wondered why you had come all the way out here,’ he said to his fellow scientist. ‘I thought that you’d given up on that pipe dream a long time ago.’

Stanley offered his friend a tight smile. ‘That’s the thing — I didn’t, and it paid off.’

Hans shook his head. ‘That’s what you said the last time, and the time before that, and the time before that. You do realise the entire Department of Energy has been studying cold fusion for years and they’ve come to the same conclusion as I did: it doesn’t damned well work.’

‘They fudged it all,’ Stanley argued in desperation. ‘It worked, Hans. I powered an entire town for weeks with it and everybody had all the power they needed for nothing more than the water I was siphoning out of the stream that ran through the middle of Clearwater.’

Hans peered at Stanley for a long moment and then looked at Ethan.

‘It’s true,’ Ethan said, ‘as far as we can make out. Their only mistake was to disconnect from the National Grid and draw attention to what they had achieved. A few days later, the entire town was paid off to disappear and remain silent about what had happened. Stanley here fled, along with his wife, and Amber witnessed the whole thing.’

Hans looked at Amber in surprise, and she nodded.

‘They made the town look as though nobody had lived there for decades,’ she said. ‘They’re covering it up, Hans. They don’t want this out because they know what it will mean for projects like this, for the amount of control that governments have over their people.’

Hans looked across at the massive construction site to his right and then back at Stanley once more.

‘Why are you here, Stanley?’

‘We need your help,’ Ethan replied for Stanley. ‘There’s no way that this is going to get out without somebody on the inside. Every scientist, every builder, everybody working on this project would be likely opposed to anything like Stanley’s device getting out. The fusion cage is the greatest threat to all energy producing corporations in the world, not to mention every oil — producing nation and countries like Russia with vast gas reserves. Every single ounce of those fossil fuels will be worth nothing, less than bare rock, if Stanley’s fusion cage goes public.’

Lopez stepped forward. ‘We want you to help make that happen,’ she said.

Hans took an involuntary pace back from them and his pale skin turned even whiter than his eyes as they wobbled in their sockets.

‘You don’t know what you’re doing,’ he uttered in disbelief. ‘Even if Stanley had managed to do what you say he has done, it would require months or even years of testing to validate, to ensure that there was no mistake. Such a delay could call into question this entire project and many others like it. The public would jump upon the chance to have free energy, and there would be a massive outcry and political pressure to stop investing in major projects that are so essential to our survival. If Stanley turned out to be wrong, or even just mistaken, or if the reactions could not be sustained for long enough, or if the devices are found to blow up due to the heat and pressure over time, and proved themselves unsafe and incapable of commercialisation, then ITER would have lost years of research data, perhaps even the chance to develop a new form of energy before oil, coal and gas run out or a runaway reaction occurs in our atmosphere and environment. It’s just too damned risky.’

‘No risk without gain,’ Ethan observed quietly.

‘That statement that makes no attempt to measure the sheer magnitude of the consequences of failure,’ Hans shot back. ‘Many Western countries are already facing blackouts during periods of high demand due to the fact that we simply cannot maintain an energy supply across such a vast population addicted to electrical devices and in need of heat and light. ITER is not some immense monstrosity designed to keep the populace under the thumb of their politicians: it’s a potential lifesaver for the entire planet and it operates on the basis of physics that is well understood. Nuclear fusion does work, whereas Stanley’s supposed fusion cage is based on a science that has long ago since been invalidated by peer review.’

‘There was no peer review!’ Stanley almost shouted. ‘There was a whitewash!’

‘There always is, when a scientist begins to believe instead of needing to know,’ Hans replied quietly. ‘You say that it’s a conspiracy against you, but the whole cold fusion science debacle has continued ever since the Fleischmann and Pons experiments of the 1980s. They give it a different name now, low — energy nuclear reaction research or something, but it’s the same thing.’

‘Doesn’t that validate what Stanley’s saying?’ Lopez argued. ‘That’s it’s real science after all, worth investigating?’

‘No, it reveals only that we’re desperate as a society for an alternative to fossil fuels! It’s not about the environment, some noble crusade by governments to clean up our planet no matter how they might choose to dress it up. It’s business. Governments make money from fuel, and they’ll be powerless if the lights go out worldwide. Fossil fuels are running out, and they’re terrified of the consequences of that happening.’

‘Everybody is,’ Stanley replied, ‘all the more reason to help me.’

‘All the more reason to ignore you and work here at ITER!’ Hans retorted. ‘This is the future Stanley, real science, a chance at real change! Independent laboratories continue to research cold fusion and attempt to replicate the results because it’s just too valuable to ignore if there’s any truth in it. There’s not a government in the world that wouldn’t want to get its hands on a free energy device such as the one you’re describing, one that could be assembled on a desktop, to power the world, but they wouldn’t hide it. Hell, they be the first to package and then sell it, to slap a label on the box and ship it out to billions of people. You’re living in the past, Stanley, in a dream world of conspiracies that simply don’t exist. If your device was so amazing, why the hell did you waste your time powering some backwater in Missouri? Why not build a couple of hundred of the damned things and ship them out to friends across the country and get the ball rolling? Why didn’t you send one to me to test out for you?’

‘I didn’t have time,’ Stanley lamented. ‘We shouldn’t have disconnected from the National Grid, I know that now. I fully intended to build more of them, to create a wave of the devices that would not be stopped by any government, but they were on to me before I was able to do so.’

‘Isn’t that always the way?’ Hans lamented. ‘Somebody supposedly invents something amazing, and then they do something stupid and it mysteriously disappears into thin air.’

‘The big corporations are intent on shutting me down!’ Stanley yelled. ‘They’d be insane not to!’

‘That’s crap!’ Hans snapped back. ‘They’re as interested as anybody in developing alternatives. The electric car maker Tesla in America is about to commercialize batteries that store solar energy as back — ups for consumers during blackouts. They’re rechargeable lithium — ion units, designed to be paired up with solar panel energy supplies. General Electric and LG Cherm in South Korea are also now in on the emerging energy — storage market. Even the environmentalist groups have started singing the praises of these companies for what they’re doing. The whole thing is a move away from fossil fuels and away from government controlled energy supplies. You really think that would be happening if there was some shadowy corporation hell — bent on keeping us slaved to their whims?’

‘Battery storage isn’t quite the same as free energy,’ Stanley snapped. ‘You’re talking about products that will take years to filter into use, that require major investments! I’m talking about a device that people can install for themselves, overnight, and never need buy a battery again!’

‘Pah!’ Hans scoffed. ‘You’re living in a dreamworld.’

‘They’ve shot at us,’ Amber defended her father. ‘We’ve been chased across the Middle East by people who want this to remain silent. There is a conspiracy, not perhaps by the government but certainly by people who don’t want to see their livelihoods and their earnings threatened by something like the fusion cage.’

‘Help us,’ Stanley begged his friend. ‘This could be the beginning of a revolution that will make your ITER facility look like a farce. What we have to do is be stronger than those who seek to protect their money rather than our planet, and give it away, to everybody, for nothing.’

Hans stared at Stanley in disbelief for a long moment. ‘You’re going to give it away?’

‘To everybody,’ Stanley acknowledged. ‘To every man, woman and child on the planet, to every single person who needs it the most, and deny the profits to anybody who puts greed before altruism. This is the future, Hans. Be a part of it, go public and support me.’

Hans stared at them for a long moment and then he shook his head.

‘I have a family,’ he uttered. ‘I have a career, a life, a future. Do you really think I’m going to jeopardise that for your pipedream? My career would be over the moment I announced any such thing. I may as well go out there and say that climate change is a fallacy, that we never landed on the moon and that the Earth is actually flat after all.’

Stanley’s hands clapped against his forehead in exasperation.

‘You’re walking away from the future of mankind,’ he gasped. ‘You’ve lost your humanity.’

Hance backed away further from the group and shook his head as he turned to leave.

‘No, Stanley. You’ve lost your mind. Now get out of here, before I’m forced to call security and have you removed from the premises.’

Hans turned his back on them and hurried away as though afraid to be seen anywhere near them.

Lopez turned to Ethan. ‘We need to get out of here and back to America. If he fears for his career as much as he appears to, he may be the first person to pick up the phone to somebody we don’t want to meet.’

Ethan nodded and looked at Stanley.

‘Is there anywhere we can go? Do you know of anybody who might be willing to let us hold out for a while and figure out a new play?’

Stanley nodded slowly, his shoulders sagging in despair as he watched his friend walking hurriedly away. ‘There’s only one person I can think of who might listen to us, but it’s a long shot.’

‘Where are they?’ Lopez asked.

‘Virginia.’