KMS Fusion
KMS Fusion was the first private company to attempt to produce a fusion reactor using the inertial confinement fusion approach. The basic concept, developed in 1969 by Keith Brueckner, was to infuse small glass spheres with a fuel gas and then compress the sphere using lasers until they reached the required temperature and pressures. In May 1974 they demonstrated neutron output consistent with small levels of fusion events in a D-T filled target, the first published success for this technique.
Unknown to the company when they proposed the idea in 1969, several of the US Atomic Energy Commission labs were also working on the same concept, which at that time was highly classified. The labs continually agitated against KMS's efforts. When the successful tests met the lab's predictions, far below KMS's own predictions, the AEC used the success as proof their designs were better. The company attempted to arrange funding from the AEC for continued development, but the company founder, Kip Siegel, died in 1975 while testifying to congress on the topic.
The company continued on mainline ICF for the next several years, first using Siegel's life insurance policy and then funding from the AEC. By the late 1970s, the programs simulating the ICF process demonstrated much larger lasers were needed, and KMS's continued funding into the 1980s was related almost entirely to fuel pellet fabrication and expertise in handling tritium. In 1991, this program moved to General Atomic in California and KMS closed.
History
KMS Industries
started KMS Industries on 8 February 1967. Siegel had previously started Conductron to develop side-looking radar but the company become better known for the development of holography. Siegel sold Conductron to McDonnell-Douglas in 1967 and almost immediately began arguing with their management over the future of the division. He quit and formed KMS. Using the money from the sale of Conductron, he purchased several companies and formed a mini-conglomerate.Siegel also formed a research division in El Segundo, California, and hired Keith Brueckner, one of the founders of the physics department at UC San Diego, to run it on a consulting basis. Brueckner also consulted for a number of other organizations, including the Department of Defense and with the Atomic Energy Commission's magnetic confinement fusion program.
Initial idea
As part of his work with the AEC, Brueckner was able to travel to the 1968 meeting of fusion researchers in Novosibirsk. Today this meeting is known as the coming-out party for the tokamak, although at the time it was not considered terribly important. Many other novel fusion concepts were also presented at this meeting. Among these were Soviet experiments using lasers to directly heat gaseous fuels to fusion temperatures, tens of millions of degrees. British, Italian and French teams also reported on similar experiments, with both the Soviet and French experiments reporting the production of fusion neutrons.KMS's work in holography made them experts in laser technology and this topic naturally caught Brueckner's interest. On his return to the US, Brueckner came up with a new concept for laser-induced fusion that involved compression and implosion, as opposed to direct heating. Brueckner based his concept on the Teller-Ulam design of a hydrogen bomb, which he was aware of due to some contract work he performed at Los Alamos just after the Ivy Mike test in 1953.
In this concept, the fusion fuel is both heated and compressed by an external force. The compression greatly reduces the reaction time of the fusion events and allows the entire fuel burn to take place in microseconds. In a bomb, the compression is provided by the X-rays released by a small nuclear bomb known as the "primary". Brueckner's idea was to replace the x-rays with light from a laser; this would be far less powerful but seemed sufficient for a small amount of lightweight fuel.
Department of Defense contract
In the fall of 1968, shortly after returning to the US, Brueckner wrote a report for the AEC on the laser systems and the focus fusion concepts also presented at the meeting. He proposed a small research program to further study these concepts, but the AEC proved uninterested. He then approached the Department of Defense's Division of Nuclear Applications, and they proved willing to fund an initial study. As this was classified information, he was not allowed to tell Siegel about his idea.Working with mathematical physics expert John Faulkner, and later Raymond Grandey, they produced a one-dimensional computer simulation that considered the energy input from the laser, the conduction of this energy by electrons in the resulting plasma, and the formation of shock waves due to the rapid heating. To their surprise, the number of reactions was much higher than they initially expected, and this meant the required laser was some 10,000 times less powerful than the British and French teams had calculated; about 1 kilojoule of laser energy would be needed to create ignition. At the time, lasers were just reaching about 100 J energy levels, up from about 10 J only a few years earlier. This suggested lasers of the required energy would be available in the next few years.
Brueckner returned the result to the DOD and explained that it appeared to be extremely important with near-term commercial applications.
Classification
Given the OK by the DOD, Brueckner revealed the work to Siegel in 1969. However, he also felt that the AEC would likely classify it. Siegel went to Washington to confer with the director of research at the AEC, Paul McDaniel, on the condition that the AEC treat it as a commercial secret. McDaniel stated they should first apply for patents on the concept before continuing. Brueckner returned to California and wrote several patents that were filed in the summer of 1969.Brueckner later learned that the AEC had sent the patent applications to Livermore and Los Alamos, which sparked off "a major storm of criticism and worry." As if this were not enough, there was also considerable negative feeling towards the government's fusion program from within the ranks of the AEC; the fission reactor divisions were upset that the fusion people would invariably frame the advantages of fusion over fission in terms of reactor safety. James Tuck wrote to AEC director Glenn Seaborg after one such event stating they were "...jittery about any mention of the relative advantages of fusion over fission and especially about any mention of reactor hazards." Chet Holifield, one of the members of Congress' Joint Committee on Atomic Energy put his feelings to the fusion side bluntly, "I don't want this fusion thing, this pie-in-the-sky deal to distract AEC or Congress from going ahead and doing ." This all led to considerable ill-will by almost everyone in the AEC orbit against this sudden announcement of a near-term fusion system that might render all of the government's efforts moot in a few years.
Unknown to KMS, as early as 1960 LLNL researcher John Nuckolls had been developing an almost identical concept. Livermore's primary purpose was designing nuclear bombs and Nuckolls' concept had developed as he considered what would happen as the desired nuclear weapon yield was reduced. At the point where the yield was similar to a hand grenade, the amount of energy needed to start the fusion reaction was small enough that it could be produced by a laser. Nuckolls' version differed from Brueckner's only in design details, the underlying physics was identical.
Due to Nuckolls' work, the AEC considered laser fusion to be directly related to classified weapons development. Of particular concern was that Brueckner had access to information through work he had done for the DOD. Holifield was incensed that KMS was applying for patents on concepts that might have been developed using this data. He wrote to the company stating:
I and the other members of the Joint Committee have supported and obtained the authorization of hundreds of millions of dollars for controlled fusion research over the years. It is, at the very least, distressing to contemplate the entire CTR discipline being put in a position of economic disadvantage relative to an individual or group whose main source of information has been from research funded by the United States Government.
Later that summer, Brueckner was part of a secret meeting in West Palm Beach organized by the DOD on the use of high-power lasers in anti-aircraft and anti-missile roles. While there, the head of security of the AEC arrived and told Brueckner everything was to be considered classified and they had to stop work on it immediately. Although annoyed, Siegel also saw this as proof that the ideas had merit.
In the short term, his lawyers were able to get the AEC to agree to allow Brueckner, alone, to continue working on the concept. Over the fall and into the next spring, Brueckner filed twenty more patent applications on the concepts. Siegel's lawyers continued working on the problem and in February 1970 the matter eventually reached Seaborg's desk. Seaborg agreed to allow the company to begin work on the concept on the condition that it would be treated as classified and be subject to the same level of security seen at the national labs.
KMS Fusion forms
In spite of Siegel's prodigious sales efforts, including claims of using holography for everything from 3D television to road signs, the holography field produced few major markets and almost no repeat customers. By 1969 the market had dried up and the company was running primarily on the income from various other companies he had purchased with the Conductron sale.Brueckner continued working on his concept through 1970 and into the spring of 1971. By that time, Siegel had decided to bet the company on fusion. Using the proceeds from selling several of KMS Industry's divisions, he set up a new company, KMS Fusion, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Siegel convinced Brueckner to join them through a substantial profit-sharing arrangement, and Brueckner moved to the lab in the fall of 1971.
As was typical for Siegel, he announced the company's formation with great fanfare, claiming that they would bring fusion power to market "in the next few years." KMS wanted to achieve scientific breakeven by 1976, engineering breakeven by 1977, an operating high-repetition rate laser system by 1978, and an operating pilot plant by 1981.
At the time, just after the "tokamak rush" of 1970, the magnetic fusion field was exiting "the doldrums" and was also gaining considerable public attention. The KMS announcement in the midst of this caught the attention of the public, which led to a "violent reaction" in the ICF field.