02-24-2008, 05:59 PM
<b>Thorium is the future</b>
<i>Phillip Knightley and Dalbert Hallenstein</i>
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->
There is a nuclear technology called the Energy Amplifier that could provide a safe, cheap alternative to fossil fuel. Its supporters say its power stations would not only produce zero greenhouse gasses but burn up the waste from existing nuclear reactors, thus solving the long-term disposal problem once and for all.
But the Energy Amplifier technology is not in use and is not likely to be in the near future because its development has divided the scientific community so bitterly that any agreement, even on a matter of such global importance, now seems impossible.
The sceptics claim that the system is a fraud, that the amplifier would need more energy to run it than it would produce. They accuse its principal advocate, the Italian physicist Carlo Rubbia, who won the Nobel Prize in 1984, of being a ruthless, ambitious manipulator who did not merit the honour.
His supporters claim that the Energy Amplifier project has been actively sabotaged by the conventional nuclear industry, the oil and coal companies, academic envy and even the Greens who oppose any form of nuclear energy.
Who is right? The authors have spent four years investigating claim and counter-claim. Here are their findings:
Many people have a knee-jerk, negative reaction to any suggestion that nuclear power might be a solution to the problem of global warming. Their memories of Chernobyl and anxieties about long-term nuclear waste and weapons proliferation vastly outweigh the obvious advantage of nuclear generated power. It emits zero greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.
But what if a new nuclear technology were proposed which effectively dealt with all these issues and was a safe, cheap alternative to fossil fuels? In fact such a technology already exists.
In the early 1990s, scientists at Cern (The European Centre for Particle Physics) in Geneva successfully experimented an idea for an entirely new nuclear reactor developed by Carlo Rubbia, co-winner of the 1984 Nobel Prize for physics. This consisted of a reactor which functions with thorium, a mildly radioactive mineral found in great abundance in Norway, India and Australia.
The reactor, known as an Energy Amplifier (EA), is fired by a proton beam created by a particle accelerator, similar to those used in cyclotron experiments. The beam produces a nuclear reaction which occurs far below the dangerous critical levels adopted in the worldâs more than 440 existing nuclear reactors. A Chernobyl-type meltdown is, therefore, impossible. It is enough to switch off the particle accelerator to shut down instantly the reactor.
There are other massive advantages. Because the EA reactor uses thorium and not uranium, it is virtually impossible to produce nuclear bombs from its residues, which remain radioactive for a relatively short term. But perhaps its greatest advantage, apart from its safety, is its ability to burn and transform long-term nuclear waste, lasting for millions of years, into short-term residues which can be easily stored and managed.
If such reactors were situated close to existing nuclear power stations, or to those already in disuse, they could not only produce cheap electrical energy, but burn up the existing waste which previously would have had to be buried for millions of years.
"We are facing a terrible dilemma," said Carlo Rubbia, who was director-general of Cern between 1989 and 1993. "On the one hand, humanity is burning off fossil fuels, oil and coal, at a progressively worrying rate. The Greenhouse effect is now generally recognised as a reality. On the other hand, the use of standard nuclear reactors is causing increasing concern because of accident risks, the accumulation of radioactive waste, and the production of plutonium which is increasing the risks of nuclear proliferation.
"Our goal is to generate cheap nuclear energy which cannot cause accidents, which is not producing long-term radioactive waste, and which is not propagating plutonium. We have the basic technology and we must do all this in the shortest possible time. Humanity has no time to waste." He told us this in 1998 and since then all attempts to build a prototype of the reactor have been frustrated.
Rubbiaâs first attempt to realise a large-scale working prototype of the Energy Amplifier in Spain in 1998 was a dismal failure. This was not because the project in itself was a failure, but was caused essentially by lack of funding by the European Community.
The Spanish project was sponsored by the Spanish government in the form of ENRESA, the state-controlled company responsible for handling Spainâs nuclear waste. A consortium, including Italian and various private companies, was formed to produce the prototype in Saragossa.
Spain, with its nine nuclear power stations, producing 30 per cent of its electrical energy, had by then accumulated 9,000 tons of highly radioactive waste. The government was considering burying this material deep in the ground at enormous expense.
But the cost of developing an Energy Amplifier over a period of from five to eight years was estimated at roughly half of the cost of burying the countryâs nuclear garbage with the added on advantage that it would gradually transmute the waste into relatively short-term nuclear refuse while at the same time produce cheap electrical energy.
The EU Commission, known as the Pooley Commission, named after its chairman Derek Pooley, which decided to withhold funding of the Spanish project, consisted of the cream of Europeâs nuclear industry. Pooley himself was chief executive of the UK Atomic Energy Authority. Another powerful and prestigious member was Sue Ion, then director for technology at BNFL (British Nuclear Fuels). Yet another was Michel Coudray, the senior vice-president for research and technology at Framatome, one of Franceâs leading nuclear industries.
"I donât know how the commission was selected," said Jean Pierre Revol, one of Cernâs most senior and prestigious physicists and coordinating director of the Cern-based ALICE project, which will soon utilise the large hadron collider which spreads, in a vast 27-km circle, under parts of France and Switzerland.
"When governments want to know something about nuclear energy, they always ask the industry, and they obviously get the answer which is most favourable to the nuclear industry," he said, "and this is not the same as a general scientific answer. They should have asked scientists outside the nuclear industry, academics etc. They should have made a serious scientific study."
"I think that what is happening," he said, "is that the world is essentially driven by economical interests so that the nuclear industry wants to capitalise on its investments. They simply do not want to hear about new technologies. What the Pooley Commission actually did was to protect the nuclear industry from a potential competitor like the Energy Amplifier."
He was referring to the present rat race of the nuclear industry to sell its standard technology to the developing world, particularly to China and India. China, apart from completing at least one new, highly polluting coal power station each week, has already 30 nuclear power stations either under construction or programmed and is in the process of ordering many more. Just last December, Westinghouse signed orders to construct four new reactors to be constructed in Guangdong province in southern China.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, the conclusions of the Pooley Commission were distinctly negative as regards the Energy Amplifierâs capacity to produce electrical energy. "The committee inevitably compared the energy amplifier with modern light water reactors, based on those now widely used around the world," reads the concluding report. "We believe that the energy amplifier system would be more complex in engineered reality than currently envisaged and that it would not be economically competitive with the improved light water reactor systems now under development, such as the European Pressurised Water Reactor."
But while the commission was dead against funding research into the energy potential of the Energy Amplifier, it was favourable to financing further research into its capacity to transmute long-term nuclear waste. In so doing, it acknowledged the scientific validity of the Energy Amplifier and proposed EU funding for a tiny transmuter prototype. This was to be based near Rome, but to be built exclusively for research into transmutation of nuclear waste.
This limitation was, in fact, a contradiction in terms. "By the mere act of transmuting (burning) nuclear waste," said Prof. Rubbia in a recent exclusive interview, "you are inevitably producing huge amounts of heat energy which can produce electricity." And yet the Pooley Commission strictly forbade the logical utilisation of this energy. "This is madness," said Dr Yacine Kadi, a senior Cern physicist who has worked closely with Rubbia in the development of the Energy Amplifier, "to waste the heat potential of the EA is criminal."
But not even the project to build the small EA transmuter of long-term nuclear waste was completed for lack of adequate funding. "Until now little has actually happened at the purely transmutation level," said Rubbia in a recent interview. "They have created a smokescreen with transmutation. There are a lot of people working on low-cost transmutation research. Itâs a powerpoint activity: they make nice pictures, they go to conferences... and they pick up a little money from the European Union. There are 54 institutions doing research in this programme, and the total amount of money is 34 million euro for five years. What do you do with 54 institutes sharing this sort of money divided like this. Itâs enough to pay for your computers and thatâs all... and for a bit of socialising at international congresses."
The transmutation "smokescreen", referred to by Prof. Rubbia, also largely explains the opposition of the Green movement to the Energy Amplifier. They are afraid that if a cleaning-up technology comes into effect, the conventional nuclear systems will proliferate even more, using the excuse that there is no longer the danger of accumulating long-term nuclear waste.
Other more recent attempts to build a prototype have also failed for lack of funding and for other reasons. But despite the failure of the Spanish project, the Cern group did not give up. They began to collaborate with Russiaâs impressive nuclear establishment. Russian collaboration was essential because the Energy Amplifier, as conceived by Carlo Rubbia, was to be cooled by molten lead and the Russians had a long and successful experience of lead cooled reactors in their submarines. The Russians also have enormous quantities of long-term nuclear waste, including plutonium from disbanded military weapons, which they wanted to burn in an Energy Amplifier.
By 2003, Rubbia, who was then president of ENEA, Italyâs alternative Energy Authority, and a group of Russiaâs leading nuclear scientists, officially backed by the Russian Academy of Sciences, was on the verge of signing an international agreement to construct a large-scale prototype of the Energy Amplifier with the main objective of transmuting Russiaâs vast accumulation of long-term nuclear waste into short-term residues.
The Italians, together with the Cern group, would perfect and supply the particle accelerators which they were already using in their research at Cern. The Russians would supply the lead cooled submarine reactor. Both would then put these two technologies together to create the Energy Amplifier.
The project was backed by Evjeny Adamov, a former Russian minister for nuclear affairs, who was also convinced that the Energy Amplifier should be exploited to produce electrical energy. The support of Adamov was essential in persuading Russiaâs military establishment to locate and offer one of the countryâs submarine reactors to the scientists. After a long search, the Russian Navy found 16 unused lead cooled submarine reactors in storage.
This was a period when Russian government finances were at an all-time low and Italy was expected to supply much of the money for the project. But, at the last minute, at a disastrous meeting in Moscow between the Russians and the Italians, they discovered that the Berlusconi government had decided not to finance the project, which was immediately called off.
According to a Cern scientist who was present, Rubbia and Adamov went off to get drunk together at Adamovâs Dacha, convinced, as was everybody else at Cern, that pressure from the combined French, German, British and US nuclear industries had convinced the Berlusconi government to sabotage the project.
"Nobody really wants to have a change," says Carlo Rubbia. "The industrialists and their underlings are very greedy about the money they are making. They talk on and on about natural technologies and that gasoline is ecologically polluting. In reality this is all blah, blah. In reality nobody wants to do anything and the oil companies and the existing nuclear industry are in fact holding out against change for their very existence."
"The same thing happened with the computer", he said. "Do you thing that IBM would have backed the personal computer when it was damaging for themselves. No, the big computer was their business, and they didnât. They didnât want to change. The existing nuclear industry does not want to change, exactly like IBM."
Yet another attempt to build a Russian-European Energy Amplifier prototype was attempted in 2004 between a group of French companies and the Russians. This ended disastrously after the main organiser of the Russian French agreement, Prof. Noulis Pavlopoulos, a senior Cern nuclear scientist and vice-chancellor of the Da Vinci University in Paris, was incriminated on a highly dubious money laundering charge. A few months later, Evjeny Adamov, the former Russian nuclear minister, was arrested while visiting his daughter in Switzerland on a corruption charge filed by the US attorney-general and authorised by then US national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.
Whether or not the arrest of Adamov was also motivated by a US government desire to block the Russian-French Energy Amplifier project, as believed by many of its Cern backers, it was the nail in the coffin for plans to construct a large-scale EA prototype. Adamov, who openly advocated the electrical energy potential of the project and who was its most powerful and prestigious sponsor, was effectively silenced and the project died a humiliating death.
Lack of EU and government funding was the basic reason for the failure of the Energy Amplifier to become an industrial reality, but there were other factors, one of which is the extremely difficult character of Carlo Rubbia himself.
At Cern, he is notorious for his bad temper and vitriolic tongue. He is notorious for his explosive temperament, for his appalling impatience and for his total inability to put up with incompetence and stupidity. He is a master of making enemies He is said to have dismissed 14 secretaries in 13 years. A former press officer was sacked virtually once a week in a particularly difficult period of work. He also does not hesitate to throw journalists out of his office if he does not like their questions or faces.
One of these may have been Gary Taubes, a New York Times scientific journalist who early in his career wrote Nobel Dreams: Power, Deceit, and the Ultimate Experiment, which describes Rubbia as a ruthless manipulator who didnât really merit the Nobel Prize he won. This book has had a disastrous effect on the attitude that many scientists currently have towards him.
One distinguished nuclear scientist, a professor in a major British university, dismissed the value of Rubbiaâs Energy Amplifier by stating: "Iâm very suspicious of Rubbia because of how he behaved to win the Nobel Prize: see Nobel Dreams by Gary Taubes." He then went on to add that Rubbiaâs idea "is nuts as you use more energy to power the accelerator than you gain."
Both of this professorâs opinions, which are rife amongst many of his colleagues, are highly questionable. Pierre Darriulat, a retired senior Cern research scientist, recently wrote a long article on the particle discoveries of Rubbia and Van der Meer for which they were awarded a Nobel Prize in 1984. Darriulat was then working with the "rival" Cern team which was trying to make the same discoveries. This rivalry is one of the main themes in Taubesâ book.
In his article, Dr Darriulat criticises journalists and writers who utilise "gossip taken from Gary Taubesâ book. Such citings," he wrote, "do no service to the history of science and only repeat a collection of anecdotes selected for their ability to seduce the general public, but this is not what history is made of. They give a completely distorted and misleading account of what was going on. Worse, they do no service to science, mistaking research for a horse race and scientists for bookmakers."
As for the statement that the Energy Amplifier uses more energy than it produces, all the scientific literature on the subject, including the Cern experiments, demonstrate clearly that the system produces far more energy than in utilises. This is why Rubbia called it the Energy Amplifier. Georges Charpak, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1992, says in his recent book, Megawatts and Megatons on page 156, that the Energy Amplifier "uses only 10 per cent of the energy produced".
But why has much of the scientific community so deliberately ignored or belittled a technology which could play a major role in resolving the problem of global warming and at the same time, render tens of thousand of tons of long-term nuclear waste relatively harmless.
Part of the answer is possibly envy, envy of those who win the prestige and honour bestowed by the Nobel Prize. Envy has always been a major characteristic of academic life.
But far more important than envy is the pressure of industry, not only of the powerful nuclear industry which wants to promote the technology which it has developed over the past 60 years, but also of the petroleum and coal industries which do not want to see a new competing technology threatening the currently widespread use of oil and coal to generate electrical power.
A part of the huge financial resources of these industries funds many of the science faculties of universities in both Europe and America. The pressure to concentrate academic research on programmes favoured by industry is virtually irresistible. Other financial resources are also being spent on lobbying governments and such institutions as the European Community and various other international agencies.
Meanwhile, almost 20 years have been lost for the development of the Energy Amplifier. This delay has given the conventional nuclear industry a technical monopoly of a vast potential market in the developing world and a carte blanche to spurn out long-term nuclear waste which will inevitably poison the planet.
Jean Pierre Revol has not lost all hope, however. "The real question facing scientists today is the following: Is it possible to transform nuclear energy production in such a way as to make it acceptable to society? I believe," he said, "that there is a race against time to get an alternative system, such as the Energy Amplifier, operating as soon as possible in the light of the industrial development now taking place in countries like China and India."
"Think of the Manhattan project, where in the 1940s it took relatively little time to produce the A-bomb because of the vast resources available. In my opinion, Rubbiaâs Energy Amplifier project is of maximum importance for the future of our planet and it should now be properly funded to make a decent prototype as quickly as possible."
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<i>Phillip Knightley and Dalbert Hallenstein</i>
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->
There is a nuclear technology called the Energy Amplifier that could provide a safe, cheap alternative to fossil fuel. Its supporters say its power stations would not only produce zero greenhouse gasses but burn up the waste from existing nuclear reactors, thus solving the long-term disposal problem once and for all.
But the Energy Amplifier technology is not in use and is not likely to be in the near future because its development has divided the scientific community so bitterly that any agreement, even on a matter of such global importance, now seems impossible.
The sceptics claim that the system is a fraud, that the amplifier would need more energy to run it than it would produce. They accuse its principal advocate, the Italian physicist Carlo Rubbia, who won the Nobel Prize in 1984, of being a ruthless, ambitious manipulator who did not merit the honour.
His supporters claim that the Energy Amplifier project has been actively sabotaged by the conventional nuclear industry, the oil and coal companies, academic envy and even the Greens who oppose any form of nuclear energy.
Who is right? The authors have spent four years investigating claim and counter-claim. Here are their findings:
Many people have a knee-jerk, negative reaction to any suggestion that nuclear power might be a solution to the problem of global warming. Their memories of Chernobyl and anxieties about long-term nuclear waste and weapons proliferation vastly outweigh the obvious advantage of nuclear generated power. It emits zero greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.
But what if a new nuclear technology were proposed which effectively dealt with all these issues and was a safe, cheap alternative to fossil fuels? In fact such a technology already exists.
In the early 1990s, scientists at Cern (The European Centre for Particle Physics) in Geneva successfully experimented an idea for an entirely new nuclear reactor developed by Carlo Rubbia, co-winner of the 1984 Nobel Prize for physics. This consisted of a reactor which functions with thorium, a mildly radioactive mineral found in great abundance in Norway, India and Australia.
The reactor, known as an Energy Amplifier (EA), is fired by a proton beam created by a particle accelerator, similar to those used in cyclotron experiments. The beam produces a nuclear reaction which occurs far below the dangerous critical levels adopted in the worldâs more than 440 existing nuclear reactors. A Chernobyl-type meltdown is, therefore, impossible. It is enough to switch off the particle accelerator to shut down instantly the reactor.
There are other massive advantages. Because the EA reactor uses thorium and not uranium, it is virtually impossible to produce nuclear bombs from its residues, which remain radioactive for a relatively short term. But perhaps its greatest advantage, apart from its safety, is its ability to burn and transform long-term nuclear waste, lasting for millions of years, into short-term residues which can be easily stored and managed.
If such reactors were situated close to existing nuclear power stations, or to those already in disuse, they could not only produce cheap electrical energy, but burn up the existing waste which previously would have had to be buried for millions of years.
"We are facing a terrible dilemma," said Carlo Rubbia, who was director-general of Cern between 1989 and 1993. "On the one hand, humanity is burning off fossil fuels, oil and coal, at a progressively worrying rate. The Greenhouse effect is now generally recognised as a reality. On the other hand, the use of standard nuclear reactors is causing increasing concern because of accident risks, the accumulation of radioactive waste, and the production of plutonium which is increasing the risks of nuclear proliferation.
"Our goal is to generate cheap nuclear energy which cannot cause accidents, which is not producing long-term radioactive waste, and which is not propagating plutonium. We have the basic technology and we must do all this in the shortest possible time. Humanity has no time to waste." He told us this in 1998 and since then all attempts to build a prototype of the reactor have been frustrated.
Rubbiaâs first attempt to realise a large-scale working prototype of the Energy Amplifier in Spain in 1998 was a dismal failure. This was not because the project in itself was a failure, but was caused essentially by lack of funding by the European Community.
The Spanish project was sponsored by the Spanish government in the form of ENRESA, the state-controlled company responsible for handling Spainâs nuclear waste. A consortium, including Italian and various private companies, was formed to produce the prototype in Saragossa.
Spain, with its nine nuclear power stations, producing 30 per cent of its electrical energy, had by then accumulated 9,000 tons of highly radioactive waste. The government was considering burying this material deep in the ground at enormous expense.
But the cost of developing an Energy Amplifier over a period of from five to eight years was estimated at roughly half of the cost of burying the countryâs nuclear garbage with the added on advantage that it would gradually transmute the waste into relatively short-term nuclear refuse while at the same time produce cheap electrical energy.
The EU Commission, known as the Pooley Commission, named after its chairman Derek Pooley, which decided to withhold funding of the Spanish project, consisted of the cream of Europeâs nuclear industry. Pooley himself was chief executive of the UK Atomic Energy Authority. Another powerful and prestigious member was Sue Ion, then director for technology at BNFL (British Nuclear Fuels). Yet another was Michel Coudray, the senior vice-president for research and technology at Framatome, one of Franceâs leading nuclear industries.
"I donât know how the commission was selected," said Jean Pierre Revol, one of Cernâs most senior and prestigious physicists and coordinating director of the Cern-based ALICE project, which will soon utilise the large hadron collider which spreads, in a vast 27-km circle, under parts of France and Switzerland.
"When governments want to know something about nuclear energy, they always ask the industry, and they obviously get the answer which is most favourable to the nuclear industry," he said, "and this is not the same as a general scientific answer. They should have asked scientists outside the nuclear industry, academics etc. They should have made a serious scientific study."
"I think that what is happening," he said, "is that the world is essentially driven by economical interests so that the nuclear industry wants to capitalise on its investments. They simply do not want to hear about new technologies. What the Pooley Commission actually did was to protect the nuclear industry from a potential competitor like the Energy Amplifier."
He was referring to the present rat race of the nuclear industry to sell its standard technology to the developing world, particularly to China and India. China, apart from completing at least one new, highly polluting coal power station each week, has already 30 nuclear power stations either under construction or programmed and is in the process of ordering many more. Just last December, Westinghouse signed orders to construct four new reactors to be constructed in Guangdong province in southern China.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, the conclusions of the Pooley Commission were distinctly negative as regards the Energy Amplifierâs capacity to produce electrical energy. "The committee inevitably compared the energy amplifier with modern light water reactors, based on those now widely used around the world," reads the concluding report. "We believe that the energy amplifier system would be more complex in engineered reality than currently envisaged and that it would not be economically competitive with the improved light water reactor systems now under development, such as the European Pressurised Water Reactor."
But while the commission was dead against funding research into the energy potential of the Energy Amplifier, it was favourable to financing further research into its capacity to transmute long-term nuclear waste. In so doing, it acknowledged the scientific validity of the Energy Amplifier and proposed EU funding for a tiny transmuter prototype. This was to be based near Rome, but to be built exclusively for research into transmutation of nuclear waste.
This limitation was, in fact, a contradiction in terms. "By the mere act of transmuting (burning) nuclear waste," said Prof. Rubbia in a recent exclusive interview, "you are inevitably producing huge amounts of heat energy which can produce electricity." And yet the Pooley Commission strictly forbade the logical utilisation of this energy. "This is madness," said Dr Yacine Kadi, a senior Cern physicist who has worked closely with Rubbia in the development of the Energy Amplifier, "to waste the heat potential of the EA is criminal."
But not even the project to build the small EA transmuter of long-term nuclear waste was completed for lack of adequate funding. "Until now little has actually happened at the purely transmutation level," said Rubbia in a recent interview. "They have created a smokescreen with transmutation. There are a lot of people working on low-cost transmutation research. Itâs a powerpoint activity: they make nice pictures, they go to conferences... and they pick up a little money from the European Union. There are 54 institutions doing research in this programme, and the total amount of money is 34 million euro for five years. What do you do with 54 institutes sharing this sort of money divided like this. Itâs enough to pay for your computers and thatâs all... and for a bit of socialising at international congresses."
The transmutation "smokescreen", referred to by Prof. Rubbia, also largely explains the opposition of the Green movement to the Energy Amplifier. They are afraid that if a cleaning-up technology comes into effect, the conventional nuclear systems will proliferate even more, using the excuse that there is no longer the danger of accumulating long-term nuclear waste.
Other more recent attempts to build a prototype have also failed for lack of funding and for other reasons. But despite the failure of the Spanish project, the Cern group did not give up. They began to collaborate with Russiaâs impressive nuclear establishment. Russian collaboration was essential because the Energy Amplifier, as conceived by Carlo Rubbia, was to be cooled by molten lead and the Russians had a long and successful experience of lead cooled reactors in their submarines. The Russians also have enormous quantities of long-term nuclear waste, including plutonium from disbanded military weapons, which they wanted to burn in an Energy Amplifier.
By 2003, Rubbia, who was then president of ENEA, Italyâs alternative Energy Authority, and a group of Russiaâs leading nuclear scientists, officially backed by the Russian Academy of Sciences, was on the verge of signing an international agreement to construct a large-scale prototype of the Energy Amplifier with the main objective of transmuting Russiaâs vast accumulation of long-term nuclear waste into short-term residues.
The Italians, together with the Cern group, would perfect and supply the particle accelerators which they were already using in their research at Cern. The Russians would supply the lead cooled submarine reactor. Both would then put these two technologies together to create the Energy Amplifier.
The project was backed by Evjeny Adamov, a former Russian minister for nuclear affairs, who was also convinced that the Energy Amplifier should be exploited to produce electrical energy. The support of Adamov was essential in persuading Russiaâs military establishment to locate and offer one of the countryâs submarine reactors to the scientists. After a long search, the Russian Navy found 16 unused lead cooled submarine reactors in storage.
This was a period when Russian government finances were at an all-time low and Italy was expected to supply much of the money for the project. But, at the last minute, at a disastrous meeting in Moscow between the Russians and the Italians, they discovered that the Berlusconi government had decided not to finance the project, which was immediately called off.
According to a Cern scientist who was present, Rubbia and Adamov went off to get drunk together at Adamovâs Dacha, convinced, as was everybody else at Cern, that pressure from the combined French, German, British and US nuclear industries had convinced the Berlusconi government to sabotage the project.
"Nobody really wants to have a change," says Carlo Rubbia. "The industrialists and their underlings are very greedy about the money they are making. They talk on and on about natural technologies and that gasoline is ecologically polluting. In reality this is all blah, blah. In reality nobody wants to do anything and the oil companies and the existing nuclear industry are in fact holding out against change for their very existence."
"The same thing happened with the computer", he said. "Do you thing that IBM would have backed the personal computer when it was damaging for themselves. No, the big computer was their business, and they didnât. They didnât want to change. The existing nuclear industry does not want to change, exactly like IBM."
Yet another attempt to build a Russian-European Energy Amplifier prototype was attempted in 2004 between a group of French companies and the Russians. This ended disastrously after the main organiser of the Russian French agreement, Prof. Noulis Pavlopoulos, a senior Cern nuclear scientist and vice-chancellor of the Da Vinci University in Paris, was incriminated on a highly dubious money laundering charge. A few months later, Evjeny Adamov, the former Russian nuclear minister, was arrested while visiting his daughter in Switzerland on a corruption charge filed by the US attorney-general and authorised by then US national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.
Whether or not the arrest of Adamov was also motivated by a US government desire to block the Russian-French Energy Amplifier project, as believed by many of its Cern backers, it was the nail in the coffin for plans to construct a large-scale EA prototype. Adamov, who openly advocated the electrical energy potential of the project and who was its most powerful and prestigious sponsor, was effectively silenced and the project died a humiliating death.
Lack of EU and government funding was the basic reason for the failure of the Energy Amplifier to become an industrial reality, but there were other factors, one of which is the extremely difficult character of Carlo Rubbia himself.
At Cern, he is notorious for his bad temper and vitriolic tongue. He is notorious for his explosive temperament, for his appalling impatience and for his total inability to put up with incompetence and stupidity. He is a master of making enemies He is said to have dismissed 14 secretaries in 13 years. A former press officer was sacked virtually once a week in a particularly difficult period of work. He also does not hesitate to throw journalists out of his office if he does not like their questions or faces.
One of these may have been Gary Taubes, a New York Times scientific journalist who early in his career wrote Nobel Dreams: Power, Deceit, and the Ultimate Experiment, which describes Rubbia as a ruthless manipulator who didnât really merit the Nobel Prize he won. This book has had a disastrous effect on the attitude that many scientists currently have towards him.
One distinguished nuclear scientist, a professor in a major British university, dismissed the value of Rubbiaâs Energy Amplifier by stating: "Iâm very suspicious of Rubbia because of how he behaved to win the Nobel Prize: see Nobel Dreams by Gary Taubes." He then went on to add that Rubbiaâs idea "is nuts as you use more energy to power the accelerator than you gain."
Both of this professorâs opinions, which are rife amongst many of his colleagues, are highly questionable. Pierre Darriulat, a retired senior Cern research scientist, recently wrote a long article on the particle discoveries of Rubbia and Van der Meer for which they were awarded a Nobel Prize in 1984. Darriulat was then working with the "rival" Cern team which was trying to make the same discoveries. This rivalry is one of the main themes in Taubesâ book.
In his article, Dr Darriulat criticises journalists and writers who utilise "gossip taken from Gary Taubesâ book. Such citings," he wrote, "do no service to the history of science and only repeat a collection of anecdotes selected for their ability to seduce the general public, but this is not what history is made of. They give a completely distorted and misleading account of what was going on. Worse, they do no service to science, mistaking research for a horse race and scientists for bookmakers."
As for the statement that the Energy Amplifier uses more energy than it produces, all the scientific literature on the subject, including the Cern experiments, demonstrate clearly that the system produces far more energy than in utilises. This is why Rubbia called it the Energy Amplifier. Georges Charpak, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1992, says in his recent book, Megawatts and Megatons on page 156, that the Energy Amplifier "uses only 10 per cent of the energy produced".
But why has much of the scientific community so deliberately ignored or belittled a technology which could play a major role in resolving the problem of global warming and at the same time, render tens of thousand of tons of long-term nuclear waste relatively harmless.
Part of the answer is possibly envy, envy of those who win the prestige and honour bestowed by the Nobel Prize. Envy has always been a major characteristic of academic life.
But far more important than envy is the pressure of industry, not only of the powerful nuclear industry which wants to promote the technology which it has developed over the past 60 years, but also of the petroleum and coal industries which do not want to see a new competing technology threatening the currently widespread use of oil and coal to generate electrical power.
A part of the huge financial resources of these industries funds many of the science faculties of universities in both Europe and America. The pressure to concentrate academic research on programmes favoured by industry is virtually irresistible. Other financial resources are also being spent on lobbying governments and such institutions as the European Community and various other international agencies.
Meanwhile, almost 20 years have been lost for the development of the Energy Amplifier. This delay has given the conventional nuclear industry a technical monopoly of a vast potential market in the developing world and a carte blanche to spurn out long-term nuclear waste which will inevitably poison the planet.
Jean Pierre Revol has not lost all hope, however. "The real question facing scientists today is the following: Is it possible to transform nuclear energy production in such a way as to make it acceptable to society? I believe," he said, "that there is a race against time to get an alternative system, such as the Energy Amplifier, operating as soon as possible in the light of the industrial development now taking place in countries like China and India."
"Think of the Manhattan project, where in the 1940s it took relatively little time to produce the A-bomb because of the vast resources available. In my opinion, Rubbiaâs Energy Amplifier project is of maximum importance for the future of our planet and it should now be properly funded to make a decent prototype as quickly as possible."
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