Bob Weggel is a lifelong avid environmentalist and a trailblazer in the field of magnet design
and magnetic shielding.
His distinguished career spans stints at notable institutions such as MIT's Francis Bitter
National Magnet Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Among his many accolades, Bob is credited with designing the magnet recognized for creating
the world's highest sustained magnetic field.
Bob's academic journey began at MIT, where he obtained his Bachelor's of Science in Physics.
He then continued his studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Engineering and Applied
Sciences.
During his education, Bob embarked on his professional journey at the MIT National Magnet
Lab.
His talent and dedication swiftly elevated him to the position of assistant group leader
of the magnet design group.
His notable contributions to MIT's Alcatur A. Turgomak led to his inclusion in the 1980s
edition of the Guinness Book of World Records for the world's most intense continuous magnetic
field.
Bob later held the position of senior magnet designer at Brookhaven National Lab, specializing
in large cryogenic superconductive resistive hybrid solenoids of 20 Tesla or more.
His impressive portfolio also includes senior roles as the senior engineer of particle beam
lasers, Inc. and the senior magnet designer for Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
In these capacities, Bob concentrated on the electrical and structural analysis of toroidal
and poloidal field coils.
Today, Bob joins us to share his rich tapestry of experiences from his stupendous dive into
magnet design to his impactful work in particle accelerators and beyond.
His insights into the evolution of magnetic technology combined with his philosophical
reflections on science, society, and environment promise to make this conversation not only
informative but profoundly inspiring.
Bob brings unparalleled experience to his role as board advisor at Kronos Fusion Energy.
Bob's experience and understanding play a pivotal role in the development of the smart
fusion energy generator at Kronos.
His invaluable contributions are instrumental in propelling Kronos towards a future of clean
sustainable energy solutions.
Here's Bob.
Enthusiasm.
Nice.
What is Maine's first ship?
What is that?
It's a reconstruction of the ship built by the colonists at Fort St. George in 1607,
1608.
Oh my goodness.
The colony was a contemporary with Jamestown.
Jamestown survived.
Fort St. George did not because the first leader died.
He was the only one who did.
But the second in command found that his brother had died.
He inherited the family wealth and so he didn't need to come to the New World to try to make
his fortune.
And so he went back to England with all the remaining colonists, which only about half
had stayed through the terrible cold winter, one of the coldest on record.
That was the end of the colony.
Archaeologically it was wonderful because anything we found was 1607, 1608.
There was no overlay of subsequent civilization that destroyed the evidence.
So we found the post holes from all the posts in the storehouse.
We found beads and musket balls and shards of Bellarmine pottery and perhaps the most
exciting one from a public relations thing.
My wife and I found a shilling from 1595.
Archaeologically it was not particularly significant because it probably had been moved a bit by
the plow in the lower part of the plow zone.
But it was exciting and we found or others at the site found evidence of smelting metal
out there from bog or iron, something that they weren't sure they had done.
A theory was that all the iron that they needed to build the ship and all the other things
had been transported from England.
Nope, some of it was transported from England as iron, but others were just bellows with
which to raise the temperature of the charcoal fire enough to smelt bog iron.
And so it was very instructive.
You spend a lot of time in nature.
I think when you first Googled it's all these foundations.
Was that something that you started doing after you retired?
I had a very early start in nature when my family took me out camping when I was in single
digit years.
That was great fun, tromping and fishing and hiking and such.
But it went sort of dormant except when I would go to a technology conference I would
try to tack on a week or two of sightseeing which more often than not involved either
driving through the countryside or also hiking mountains of southern Germany and Switzerland
and Austria and such.
And then when I was laid off from Brookhaven in 2002 I had a lot of frequent fire miles
so I went and used them in Costa Rica hiking for two weeks with a 40 pound pack, clean
to our own aloe vera volcano which put on a good show for me.
And then in 2004 I drove out to the west coast and biked Mount Whitney.
In 2005 I took a rock climbing course which I've never used.
What does your foundation do?
Is that what you spend most of your day on with a specific foundation?
No, no, that is simply authorizing my financial advisor to transfer $25,000 or $100,000 to
these various charities.
So no, it's actually even that more hours per month than I'd like to devote because
I like magnet design.
I have a house guest who's been with me for 14 months and he doesn't have any financial
problems he doesn't need to write an income tax because he doesn't make enough money to
file.
I sometimes envy him.
I've had a phase in my life where I was like that.
I understand it.
I understand the soul of this person.
I almost admire it.
I decided early in life that he would not be grubbing for money and he's a wonderful
joke teller and personality so that I can see that I'm not the only family that's willing
to invite him in and pick up the tab.
He helps take care of Diana.
So that's a service that gives me several hours a day of freedom that I might not otherwise
have.
Cool.
Tell me tell me what what brought you to magnet design.
What was the initial what was the initial aha moment that was like this is what I want
to spend my time on.
Which you'll believe utter serendipity that in the summer of my freshman year approached
and I look for a summertime job.
It happened that the there was a Nathan's National Magna Laboratory about to be created
at the campus of MIT and the work sounded exciting certainly a lot better than the usual
hamburger flipping that freshmen do.
And yes it captivated me from day one.
I had never gone to a job formal interview before and I learned later that my employer
hadn't either he was just terrified that they're bringing me as I was being interviewed by
him.
It all went off fine.
I had mathematical background from my studies in physics at MIT which emphasized applied
mathematics whereas the math department at MIT was pure math interested in showing that
there was a solution that it was unique and then they dropped interest.
I as an engineer mentality I assumed there was a solution or I wouldn't be looking for
one.
I would be delighted if there were multiple solutions because that would then give room
for optimization which I loved I always liked efficiency.
And early on I was elbow to elbow with a few other engineers that were just at most a half
a dozen of us.
Designing world class things the first few months were rather routine analyzing iron
magnets which were the name of the game back then except in a few laboratories.
But then soon by the next year I was served right up there designing the coolant hole
placements and magnet plates and choosing materials and generating all this cutting
edge research technology that.
So on the first day at MIT at this national lab was there already a vision of fusion energy
or was it mostly magnet related initially.
This was a solid state research magnets interested in generating very intense fields in small
volumes steady state so that induced currents wouldn't be a problem in the materials.
Those could be conductors whereas the pulse magnets which were the technique for generating
really high fields back then still are.
So it was not until the mid 70s or mid 70s that fusion began to be really considered.
But when it was I was brought in as I analyzed the current density of redistribution in copper
plates as these were cool to liquid nitrogen temperature in order to increase the conductivity
of the copper by a factor of seven or eight at that temperature.
And to analyze the stresses which would be high.
And it was a very exciting project in that it was not being done anywhere else in the
world at this technique.
Elsewhere the fusion programs involved either resistive magnets that were limited because
the power supply would need to be huge to generate an intense field over such a big
volume.
Whereas this because it was pulsed could involve not just the already big power supply at the
magnet laboratory which was almost 10 megawatts but actually use it in overdrive mode in which
they would speed the shaft revolutions from 360 revolutions per minute to something like
400.
And then now these would have the flywheels which were tens of tons each going and storing
like 150 megajoules energy or more that could be extracted over a period of about five seconds
meaning that the power consumption was about 30 megawatts.
And the fact you could energize this to talk about up in fields of 10 tessels or more which
was unprecedented because super vectors weren't able to generate that field back then and
resistive magnets at room temperature, water-cooled power protectors, that sort of thing could
generate field only a Tesla or two, most maybe three Teslas.
We had several times that explored a regime then that was completely unknown and they
discovered a confinement mechanism that had been unsuspected and the success was so great
that the Alcatraz A was followed by an Alcatraz B design which was then before it was ever
built, it was founded by an Alcatraz C.
What year was Alcatraz A?
That was the early to mid 70s.
Mid 70s.
And by then...
By the 70s was the Alcatraz C.
How long had we known that fusion could be enabled with magnets at this point?
And another question, when you say rotating magnets, I imagine like an MRI machine because
I saw an MRI machine without the shell and it was terrifying.
And is that also how a particle accelerator then works?
Is that a rotating magnet?
Because I know you've worked on those before.
To answer the first question, how far back was fusion energy envisioned?
1960, I would say.
Already people were building stellarators down at Princeton and the neuro devices.
These were all attempts to define the plasma.
And from the analyses of hydrogen bonds, it was noted that if you could heat it enough,
confine it long enough, you would get out a hell of a lot of energy.
And the key was getting the initial.
We couldn't allow any fission bonds to be the match that led the process.
Right.
Yeah.
There's a part of me that wants to follow that up by asking what the process is, but
I also don't want to get my video flagged, so I'm not going to ask.
But yeah, interesting.
So how did you start working on particle accelerators from that?
Was that also part of the...
Particle accelerators was not in the picture until the National Magnet Laboratory closed
down having lost the contest for being the next generation magnet laboratory.
So that was not until 1996 that I consulted for Brookhaven on magnets to be components
of particle accelerators.
Let me understand a particle accelerator, Bob, just fundamentally.
And where does the magnet come in?
In the usual particle accelerator, the magnet does nothing more than steer the particle.
A magnet cannot accelerate a particle.
It only diverts it.
The acceleration is transverse rather than longitudinal.
So the acceleration comes from radio frequency microwave chambers that as the particle comes
in, it's attracted by the electric field in the RF cavity.
And as it transits the RF cavity, the phase of the radio frequency is so fast that the
phase shifts that as it passes the mid plane of the cavity, the...
Previously, there was an attractive force evolves to a repulsive force, injecting it
out the front of the other side of the RF cavity with increased energy.
And the problem is that if you have these RF cavities strung out in a straight line,
you need millions of them to get the energies that they're seeking.
This is a problem with electrons when you're trying to accelerate them.
You can't bend a trajectory into circles because they radiate the energy away after you reach
a threshold of energy that's really modest.
So instead, you use a magnetic field to bend the trajectory of the particle, typically
a proton, by a little bit with each magnet.
You may have thousands of these magnets and by the time you're done, the trajectory has
become a circle and you can reuse the RF cavity.
In fact, you can use it thousands of times each time boosting its energy from what it
was before.
The acceleration comes from the electric field of the radio frequency cavity and the magnetic
bending field, which is a steady field that just gradually ramps up and syncs with the
particle energy so that the particle in a low energy accelerator increases in speed.
But for the accelerators that are of interest nowadays, the speed is always very near, enters
at very nearly the speed of light and what changes instead is the mass of the particle
by Einsteinian relationship.
So it goes around the same loop again and again, always with a magnetic field that's
very nearly the same.
Because the mass increases and the charge does not increase, you have to increase the
magnetic field in proportion to the mass in order to get it to stay to the same radius
of curvature of the orbit.
These are the magnets that sweep gradually to full field over many minutes or even hours
and then whenever all the particles are up to as high a speed as the accelerator is capable
of and therefore the reason that the magnetic field is up at the maximum it's capable of,
they tweak the field very briefly as the pulse, as the bunch of particles is sweeping by,
tweak it so that it gets to the other side of the diverter and then act upon it by more
magnetic fields that bend it away from the original circular orbit and toward a target
where it hits something either a massive tungsten target or more commonly it hits particles
that are coming in the other direction because you have really not one loop but two loops
with reverse, one loop has the field vertically upward and the other has the field vertically
downward the same magnitude so that the particles are going the opposite direction likewise
get bent in the same direction to maintain the circular orbit.
Then in the interaction region those two particles which are down some millimeter diameter micron
size diameter have a significant probability of a proton hitting another proton coming
from the other direction and through and steadying mass and energy equivalence generates all
sorts of particles of huge mass and could be a different line instead of the protons
they could be much more massive.
So you can, so what I understand is you can then create new elements, you can create new
isotopes through this particle acceleration process.
You could, however typically they're used to create new subatomic particles rather than
simply converting one isotope to another isotope.
Mainly there are machines that still have that function that rare isotope generation
in Michigan, financing Michigan as that pump function and they there are a few accelerators
that are trying to do that efficiently and they create these isotopes for medical diagnostics
or for medical treatment that takes in case of cobalt-60 where you irradiate the tumor
with radiation coming from an isotope which doesn't exist in nature but was created.
Tritium is used in medical as well as fusion.
Yes.
I know we've had a lot of meetings around this but is that how then tritium could be
produced and why not helium-3?
Can we produce helium-3 in a particle?
Yes you can.
And it's being looked at because it might be economic to do that.
At the moment, helium-3 is extracted primarily from natural gas and my perception is that
remains the economic way of doing it.
Helium-3, tritium on the other hand does not exist in nature because it's half life, it's
too short.
So that you have to create and that there are a few fission reactors whose major function
is creating tritium for well primarily the nuclear arsenal.
Helium-3 being a fuel you need not mere grams, you really need kilograms and so whereas usual
particle accelerators generate micrograms of reactants, if that, you need a particle
accelerator unprecedented current that most particle accelerators have milliamps current
going at very high energy, the creation of helium-3 or tritium would require amperes
at physics at an energy level which is no longer of any interest to physics so it would
be a dedicated machine for making tritium.
And it's just we're talking about hundreds of megawatts of electrical energy in order
to get this conversion because the electrical energy approaches the sort of, you need to
generate the tritium is a non-insignificant fraction of this energy released when the
tritium-3 decomposes into helium or hydrogen or deuterium or protons or neutrons.
So theoretically has there then been talk on using a particle accelerator as an energy
generator that slash particle accelerator so it would do both things, it would be like
a self-sustained ecosystem perhaps?
That had a guest quite a few months ago now who was proposing, he was looking into the
feasibility of that and I think it boiled down to economics and it was marginal and
un-evaluated that feeding off an existing particle accelerator is unlikely because they
operate at energy levels higher than needed in particle numbers that are far, far less
than needed to do the job.
This mining of the moon is not out of the question I understand.
It's not.
I've spoken to quite a few people about it.
Hopefully one of the other folks on our board, Dr. Kulsinski is on the board of two companies.
One is with us and the other one is a company going to the moon to get helium-3 and it's
funded by Jeff Bezos.
It has a lot of potential.
Hopefully there are future partners.
My expectation is that the need to concentrate it at the moon because even there it's very
low concentration, it's not insuperable.
The moon is close enough that if you can launch things at thousands of dollars a pound, many
thousands but it's not millions of dollars a pound and therefore you can bring it back
and if it is worth millions of dollars per pound then it's not as far-fetched as air
fraying strawberries from California once was.
Right?
Right, right.
Yeah.
There has to be a seed planted in the venture community on the upside of turning helium-3
into a publicly traded commodity market.
Were you to do that perhaps, yeah, why not?
Those are the people at this point.
Alcatore A, was that built around, would you call that the birth of fusion?
I watched Oppenheimer so I understand that fusion was the original idea and then it kind
of got sidetracked there a little bit for the better part of four to five decades and
then there were you guys that revived it.
It was Eater and then MIT is how I understand it.
One could hardly point to any single device as being the birth of fusion that the moment
that the physics, viability of the physics became clear, it would intrigue people but
for the first several decades it was definitely research even when, well like Rigatron that
Carl worked on in the early, mid-1980s that was intended to be commercial and the magnet
side of it achieved its goals but the physics has been understood ever more to embody all
sorts of complications that were first recognized so that the stellarators, oh, certainly the
Russian invention of the tokamak, that certainly inspired a resurgence of interest in the field
and Alcatore maintained or extended that interest because it found a new sort of stability mode
that relaxed some of the concerns that might never be able to contain this plasma well
enough, long enough, dense enough to get it hot enough to get more power out and went
in.
Alcatore never was envisioned as a predecessor of a prototype, a commercial machine because
it was inherently pulsed, it took a lot of energy to get up the field, it was known very
early in the game that there would probably have to be superconducting although the Rigatron
was operating on the premise that it might not be, that these weren't supposed to be
plug-in light bulbs that would eventually get radiated so much that they would be weakened
and you'd have to toss them out but like a light bulb you replace it with a new one,
if you generated 10 times as much power during its lifetime than you had needed to get the
reaction going then it could perhaps be commercially viable and now the discovery of high temperature
superconductors has certainly been a re-energized the commercial capabilities.
The more money that's poured into ITER with its low temperature superconductor magnets
more people realize that it's just too big, too costly, whereas high temperature superconductors
can get a higher confinement field that's twice as great, maybe more, the machine can
therefore be much smaller down to the scale where the limit is not the size of the reaction
chamber but the thickness of the breeding wall, there needs to be one either to get
the heat out or to breed the tritium if that's one of the fuels.
Anyway it has an enthusiasm that's more widespread and deeper than ever before, a top scale that's
sooner than the traditional 20 years has been from day one and sort of funding stream that
may bring it online and as far as I know there have been no show stoppers discovered in the
plasma physics, there of course was always a possibility that one will be found, that
would be a disaster, but technologists can analyze things with depth and precision as
never before and anticipate things and as more and more knowledge feeds the system we
understand things better, we have AI to see patterns where human brain, escape the human
brain, so a lot of things going for it, I hope to live long enough to see even more
progress by then.
I think you will, I think there are a lot of companies that are very close, we'll probably
be sixth or seventh hopefully but I think there are a few companies, within the decade
it looks like, within the next five years they should have proved things out.
Tell us about your time at Harvard, what years were those?
How was Harvard back then?
That was from September of 64 through February of 67 and that was not the highlight of my
life, for one thing Harvard had a different approach toward teaching more out of the box
thinking required whereas MIT was more cookbook, you were taught recipes, principles and such
and the talent was to combine these in new ways to solve new problems.
I love that distinction, I don't think that's ever been clearly made to me, because I, you
know, yeah, Harvard was the highlight of my life.
I applied to MIT and did not get in so I think there's a difference between the way you and
I think about this, interesting, wow, interesting.
That you certainly have talents that are rather different from mine, you are an expert, administrator,
executive, manager, I never excelled in that regime, I'm much more a loner, I can do it
myself rather than farming it out, for me that's where the fun is.
But we're a good team.
Yeah, we need everyone, we need each other.
Tell us about particle beam lasers, what are particle beam lasers?
It's a company that employs half a dozen to a dozen people, almost always part time and
most of them are semi-retired people who had important technical or managerial expertise
when they were with the national magnet laboratories or elsewhere.
It has been funded almost exclusively by small business innovative research grants, either
nine months phase ones or two year phase two grants.
The name is actually Ms. Nomer because only the very first project that they worked on
back around 1980 had anything to do with lasers really.
Ever since then it has done most things with magnets, early ones were low temperature super
conducting magnets or some resistive magnets and then recently it's evolved ever more toward
high temperature super conductors.
It's been a design effort, no machine shop or anything like that so that we partner typically
with Brookhaven National Magnet Laboratories Superconducting Magnet Division to do the
fabrication, fabrication is required.
It sounds like you've designed magnets that have a multitude of applications all over
the world, how 40 years from now what are we going to be using magnets for if we were
to go with the same trajectory here?
Throw some AI and quantum computing in the mix?
I really don't know but the trajectory is still up when I entered it was practically
the ground floor and so my career has been one of growth excitement as magnets are used
in more and more applications.
Back in the early days there were magnets primarily iron magnets with energizing coil
to consume 10 kilowatts so that sort of thing.
Iron scale was a magnetic up so low that was able to generate seven Tesla's in a small
bore by having something like a hundred kilowatts of energy and many tons of iron in the circuit
and that's all gone by, was going by the late 60s as now you're being titanium first and
then titanium took over generating fields routinely of seven Tesla's or so and then
the bugs were worked out of titanium which was discovered about the same time as titanium
but it was brittle existed only in tape form like HTS now but in spite of that they generated
some impressive fields with Niobium-10 and now with Eater it has Niobium-10 of form that's
much more handleable in terms of cables, round conductors, very fine filaments and such but
it's still brittle, it has troubles.
Niobium titanium is great you can treat it like an iron wire and can take stretching
and bending and breaking.
HTS is definitely going to take over, it's already taking over niche after niche except
for the very low fields where Niobium-10 and iron go wrong.
Because it can be made smaller, because HTS can enable a higher Tesla and a smaller compact.
It can carry significant current up with temperatures in the teens rather than the difference between
20 Kelvin and 4 Kelvin is quite significant.
The carno efficiency of the cooling plant is the ratio of the temperatures and if you
have 300 degree temperature you're trying to cool down to 20 that's only a factor of
15 whereas if you go down to 3 degrees Kelvin that's a factor of 100 and takes there five
times more energy to get there.
So we're thinking hyper loops, we're thinking magnets in particle accelerators, particle
beam lasers, fusion energy generator.
So like 40 years from now I see like all of these technologies being more easily available
than it is today because of magnets.
I'm quite confident that 40 years from now we will have high temperature conductors that
are at least as tolerant of bending as present day Niobium-10 and if we're very lucky there
might be entirely new material which behaves like titanium and that would open up a realm
of new applicability even if the temperature regime has not been greatly improved and certainly
it's a possibility that the dream of room temperature superconductors will come to pass.
So what is the application that you have designed a magnet for that you are most proud of Bob?
Like what's the highlight here?
Say fusion, it made me happy but be honest of course.
The one that comes to mind is not really an application other than a very small niche
in the research laboratories that's goal is to generate the most intense continuous magnetic
field.
To do this with the resistive magnets you need 10 megawatts or more, the Florida lab
has 50 megawatts now and you need conductors that are strong and very crucially you need
to keep them from melting.
So at Florida lab they have the water supplied at 400 pounds per square inch pressure, about
10 times the pressure that comes out of your faucet.
And at the magnet laboratory we had only about 200 pounds per square inch and so our holes
needed to be rather bigger than those in Florida and it seemed like that be a limitation on
ever getting sort of power densities that you otherwise would be able to sustain inside
the magnet.
There was a technique which involved etching shallow grooves into magnet plates and the
first attempt at generating 25 teslas at the magnet laboratory did involve a magnet that
was able to generate 20.5 teslas with a insert magnet that did use this radio cooling but
it was defective I found out by my analyses that the passages were much deeper than they
ideally would be.
They were fed by an annulus at the inside of the solenoid and the annulus was much too
small, it had to be small in order not to carve away most of the magnet and so the water
velocity in the annulus was much rather bigger than in the passages themselves so the pressure
drop was primarily getting into and out of the annulus.
I found that if you fed the magnet not just from one end but from both ends you could
then taper the annulus from both ends which means that you would only need to be only
half as high maximum and make the passages only about half as high as they used to be
and you'd still get the same volume of water through which would put the magnet in the
passages would be twice as fast as it had been.
Now you'd have some repeat transfer that you'd need to get the very high power densities
and that was the technique that was used in the hybrid magnet inserts that in 1977 generated
30 Teslas with an insert that generated about 23 of those Teslas something that to try and
do it by the conventional technique of axial flow of water would have sacrificed several
Teslas in field.
The record is 45 Tesla right?
Yes that's what they're a magnet to a superconductor generates rather more field than we ever succeeded
at the magnet laboratory.
Is there a physics limitation?
Sorry is there a limitation in terms of how high you can go?
I mean I understand it's dependent on the quality of your rep coat tape and other ancillary
things that go with it but can you build a 100 Tesla magnet is that possible?
Probably not there is a 100 Tesla pulse magnet at Los Alamos that uses copper alloys copper
back up by very strong stainless steel but that generates a field that is only for about
10 milliseconds because the current density that you need in the coil to generate the
field can be sustained only for milliseconds before it overheats.
Interesting is that I've you know I've read of projects where magnets are being used to
launch something into space and that's all you need you need 10 seconds what do you need
that's all you need right?
Yes and so you throw like a I mean for me if I would throw something into space it would
be fusion energy generator components that I throw into space and have a robot catch
it and put it together but 10 seconds is all you need Bob at a 100 Tesla and 10 seconds
can we launch something in space perhaps?
This magnet in Los Alamos is 10 milliseconds.
Even so I mean that's all you need.
Carl was designed a electromagnetic launcher that was a rail gun that achieved a major
fraction of escape velocity that so the this was 40 years ago but it's intriguing to consider
that and there are sorts of techniques that involve such things as taking the rail gun
up to 90 percent of the atmosphere behind that will greatly decrease the losses aerodynamic
losses launching it from there and certainly with new techniques which might involve magnets
not only in the rail gun itself but in the power source that you could have a big Faraday
disk rotating storing hundreds of mega joules of energy and that would be the energy source
that would be transferred to the rail gun to achieve launch or another technique is
a more sophisticated launching mechanism that is used now on some aircraft carriers that's
electromagnetic rather than steam that these are magnets that are energized sequentially
so that the airplane is well not the airplane itself but a magnet that's in the bore of
these that interacts with the magnets in the back of the gun barrel to propel the hook
that's on the plane electromagnetically rather than with piston and steam pressure and that
by extending it to many hundreds of meters or kilometers you can get to escape velocity
we had a little sketch back in the late 80s I think it was of when a co-founder of the
magnet or Henry Colm worked on electromagnetic levitation and electromagnetic launch and
they were to be showed a effectively a gun barrel going up a steep slope from near sea
level to thousands of feet elevation that they would launch a projectile up at escape velocity
right yeah it's all possible it's amazing what technology has done and is proposing
as or presenting as possibilities worth considering right I mean when you so the I think we have
as humanity we have so many space aspirations and the rocket equation is not so conducive
for all of these aspirations we have and if we you know we've landed boosters now so that
that was a big expense that we cut out but if we can yeah I mean there's a there's a
lot of hope out there to use magnets especially I watched a net a documentary on Netflix about
the JWSD telescope and how it was launched up there in a couple of pieces and there were
these robotic arms like gathering them up and putting them together oh what a thing
of beauty what a thing of beauty I'm sure we could have shot those into space rather
than actually put it on something and my goodness the fuel on that and exciting future sure
so Bob for a young engineer who wants to get into magnets what what's the advice why bother
and what's the advice oh do what I did dive in that there's more promise now than ever
I would say that the the future of magnetism was only suspected back then really there
were the intriguing invest discoveries of superconductivity on scale that could lead
to engineering devices rather than the superconductoring lead poked out long before it generated a
field of any interest but now with the fusion as one of the obvious avenues for magnet expertise
it's it's definitely worth getting into that article accelerators were coming along then
but not not to be since they're still sustaining now and they're they're talking multi-billion
dollar successors to the Large Hadron Collider and the Muon Collider would involve new types
of magnet technology because whereas the Large Hadron Collider uses fields of about eight
Tesla's now prospects for their designs for doubling that field using my intent but with
high temperature superconductors you can go to 20 Tesla's 30 Tesla's and maybe even 50
Tesla's of a solenoidal geometry that's needed for a different application entirely not not
diverting the path of the muons but the charged particles focusing the charged particles to
get them in a bunch that's tight enough that when it interacts with another bunch coming
out as a direction the density of the insects swarm is high enough that one insect has a
decent chance of running into another one.
You know I spoke to a scientist out of Caltech about two years ago and he explained to me
that the connection between muons and fusion and if you could have he said in the future
you could have almost a tabletop particle accelerator that creates muons and feeds them
into your fusion energy generator and it would help fuse your isotopes because they would
be attracted to the muon and they would stick to it and it would enable fusion in the way
where your generator would be that much smaller and then I asked him how likely is it can
we that that we can create these muons and he goes maybe a hundred years away he says
like what am I going to do with that now but yeah.
It's a challenge that my first consulting job with Brookhaven National Laboratory was
a 20 Tesla superconducting resistive hybrid magnet that creates 20 Tesla's in a 15 centimeter
bore in which a proton beam smashing into a target of tungsten or mercury would generate
pions which would get in a fraction of microsecond decay into muons which would then be accelerated
which has to be done very quickly because they decay in two microseconds if we're not
for Lorentzian time transformation which enables one to make it appear in the laboratory time
frame is milliseconds but it's still it has to be done very quickly and focusing them
is very problematic you have to send them through a low density material such as lithium
or liquid hydrogen where they lose momentum in all three coordinate systems transverse
and longitudinal then you restore the longitudinal momentum via RF cavity electric fields.
It was a challenge so great that we never succeeded in solving it with the minimal manpower
and funding that we had back then but it's back on the table again the particle accelerator
priority panel just devoted that it was the at or near the top priority for America's
particle accelerator project.
Wonderful something else those young engineers can get into.
Yes.
Why does a magnet need to be shielded like why magnet shielding?
There's the radiation.
There's typically health reasons or safety reasons that magnetic field has to be held
to not much more than five gauss or to avoid triggering pacemakers so they these hospital
magnets typically are either in shielded rooms with people who need pacemakers don't get
the treatment and the doctors and visitors aren't allowed in.
More commonly now they are actively shielded that is the magnet itself has reverse windings
on the outside that cancel the big fringe field of the magnet and that's adds to the
cost but when you consider that the building room can be considerably smaller because outside
the magnet is within short distance from the magnet the field are down to acceptable levels.
The alternative course is iron shielding which the iron magnetizes so as to cancel the fringe
field and otherwise would be there.
What bridges theory and application in the magnet world Bob?
And what factor decides whether something is ready for a real world commercial application
and worth putting money into and what are the ideas that are brilliant as they may be
are 80 years away and get put on the wayside because there isn't a financial incentive
to build it so to speak?
Of course the only need is to make money to have investors confident that they're going
sufficiently confident to make money to that they risk money.
Once I constrained that way the prestige of being the first to get the Nobel Prize is
a driving force or military advantage of this would be very important.
So money or defense?
Yes.
Patents or something those are the driving forces.
I suspect that the transistor would never have made it into the marketplace as quickly
as it did were it not for military applications and minimizing the size of devices that previously
used vacuum tubes and consumed many kilowatts of power.
And certainly computer chips that the commercial market for chips is now so huge that it will
probably advance even without the military motivating force.
And you hear more now of the military taking off the shelf devices for use in their devices
because it's the logical way to go if it's available.
Right.
That was kind of my original thinking when I approached actually building Chromos into
a company.
So basically you know you look at GPS systems, internet, so drones, so many other things
were born out of the military.
It almost feels like that reasoning is so it's almost a formula for corporate success
is to do something that either placates or appeases the military.
And I started off that way and then there were people that I spoke to that shamed me
about it.
And so I didn't you know it's the military we live in a country we need defense so I
get it from a pragmatic perspective I totally get it.
But a lot of people shamed me and they said hey you're building things that are going
to be killing human beings on this planet like how does that sit with you?
You are building it in tokamaks you are building proposing the building of something that is
saving millions.
That's how I saw it but it seems like it seems like people there are people that kind of
view it as like a very bad thing.
I think it's a positive.
Oh it's one of the things that inspires me to participate in the quest for energy that
is inexhaustible by comparison to what we've had to deal with before with wood, dung, coal,
oil, gas, hydroelectric, geothermal, solar, wind.
Whale oil yeah how long ago was whale oil like less than 150 years?
These other techniques have either environmental concerns which are major or a combination
of environmental concerns which are not negligible and economics that's unconvincing or difficulties
of scale.
Right and yep that's a good point like we talk about a levelized cost of energy and
reaching a levelized cost of energy of under 50 cents for an energy technology to be commercialized
but you look at the history of how humanity has been producing energy and we're not that
long into it.
You know we're not even that long into it and we've had this progression all of the
fuels you mentioned has we've done that within the last 200 years.
So when you then extrapolate that 200 years from now you almost think that the person
that then kind of has a corner in the energy markets is the person that builds the best
fusion energy generator because how does any other technology stand a chance when it comes
to the output versus input of fusion energy and the cleanliness of it all.
What drove you then to fusion energy when there was no you know before the high temperature
superconducting magnets when we didn't have all the hope and I want to say commercial
backing financial backing the things that we have the luxuries of in 2022.
What kept you believing in fusion?
I'm an environmentalist very strong environmentalist and so I look for things that will save will
help the environment and without it was definitely a research machine it wasn't going to save
the world through energy production but it would lead to knowledge that would facilitate
that eventual transition and so I'm thrilled to be a part of it.
Those who are involved in fusion seem quite universally to have a passion that is motivated
not primarily by making money it's saving the world.
Right right I've that was very refreshing for me this is the first industry I've really
seen where people are so driven to do it for the right reasons and that resonates within
the entire fusion energy community.
Right yeah something to be really proud of like even even Eater back when America and
Russia were deep into the Cold War they had a conversation about we need one project to
just keep the relationship going like everything has failed but we need one thing that will
keep us just talking to each other and that was Eater and that was fusion and so that's
the fundamental story of fusion that's so beautiful.
Yes great heritage.
Right yeah coming from an algorithmic trading venture capital and management consulting
world oh man this is the polar opposite I come from like a dog-eat-dog world where it's
a revenue it's product going to market within two years generating revenue and if that's
not possible then let's not fund it and to see people spend 30 years on things with no
problem stuff revenue that's a beautiful thing.
But there's the commercial carrot that if you build a better better mousetrap people
will come to use it and most of what I've done through my life has been through on the
path of least resistance taking a match of opportunities and
I'm using my own guide.
We've talked about like obstacles you know we talk about what has the biggest obstacle
for fusion been what what are the huge problems that.
The big problem I see is the absence of multi-kilowatt amp conductors with filamentary material that
allows it to avoid anything like the flux jumps that so break the conductors back in
the 60s and ideally robust mechanically so that they will withstand significantly more
strain than present conductors because the problem of making a structure strong enough
big though that is is torched by that making it stiff enough that the conductor isn't stretched
to the point of breaking or at least to the point of losing much of its current capacity.
Is that a material science.
That's what you're in science issue then I see and and okay.
You know the new material entirely or else a geometry that if you could convert the thin
film into innumerable numbers of thin strands you might find that each strand could cope
with strain bigger than the entire film which the moment appears to get microcracks propagate
and or you know what you have the entire current path broken.
Right yeah material science is like a big frontier as well.
I think if I if I were to do it all over again I would get into material science and the
deepest way possible.
As Yogi Berra said predictions are very difficult especially of the future.
I don't know where it's going I'm just glad to be a part of it of the energy and training
contributes to it.
I've outlived both of my parents by more than 20 years I'm robust so I perceive going on
for well indefinitely.
What did your parents do did they did they encourage you at a young age to pursue science
like why why weren't you a farmer like what.
My father was a civil engineer majoring in hydraulics.
Wow and he was fascinated with quite a range of sciences and mathematics and one of the
memorable events from childhood was teaching me how to take the square root or numbers
via a technique that resembles long division and this was well before the grade school
was even considering division they were back in the day addition subtraction and maybe
multiplication.
He taught me how to do it and I felt a satisfaction of knowing something that the other guys don't
know and that carried on throughout my life and I'm driven by curiosity.
That gets me going that's why I'm so compulsive about it so I can understand it.
Did your father then I assumed he did that with Carl as well did he guide your career
in any way or was that again like did he help you decide on like picking your major in college
I asked for the parents I asked for me as a parent.
Yes more or less that he was had a good bit of wanderlust that for example when he graduated
from high school he got a well-paying job and this would have been in the depression
but he left that job and a girlfriend because he said to himself if I stay here in Bay City
I will die in Bay City.
So he did not went to the University of Michigan got the engineering degree and then worked
in various places Charleston South Carolina and Cleveland and Lantz, Ypsilanti Michigan
and then in 1953 he was offered to be a partner in his little engineering firm and then he
said if I accept this partnership I will die a member of this partnership without having
seen the world so he turned down that offer sought and found a job with the armed forces
settled he looked for one in with the Air Force in Germany but unsuccessful settled
for one the army in France judging correctly that from that base he would be able to transfer
to the one in Germany and so he introduced the three of us kids my sister to Europe for
four years and that certainly a wonderful cultural addition it probably interfered somewhat
my social development that was my age 10 to 14 is sort of one developmental years but
unbalanced I certainly appreciate that but then he came back in 1957 because we were
getting a college age my sister was would have been a freshman in college and we had
we were then in sophomore year so we realized that Boston would be probably the best community
for which to choose colleges so we went to Winchester for nine months and then Arlington
for a couple years and yes indeed we had the choice of we could live at home which was
economically valuable he was still not rich we never become rich and choice of MIT Harvard
and Tufts MIT offered the bigger scholarship so much of MIT without really knowing much
about the cultural difference between MIT and Harvard and Tufts and certainly appreciated
the extent to which it's open doors for me and Boston's a great city Boston's just all
over a great city that's a great place to get educated it's just a great city it's a
great city amazing history yeah interesting you know there is a there's an experiment
with with rats where they do the first round of experiments where they make the rat go
through the tube and get food and then it does it you know it consistently the rat does
it and they do this over a course of time and it gets consistent results and then they
put like a cat on the other side of the tube before it goes to and it's doing this twice
as fast now so it's not just like the the cheese you want in life the catalyst has to
be fear and something has to push you from behind so the fear of living in a city and
dying there not achieving what you would otherwise yeah that's it's a driving force I fear has
been a driving force in my life as well.
I'm being broke has kept me working like I get it I get it anyway that was it for me
Bob anything else you'd want to say to us any any message you would like to leave us
with?
Oh a message that I've been incredibly lucky and I've had Kronos is a contributor to that
long stream of luck and so I'm grateful for the opportunity to be able to do what I can.
That's awesome.
Thank you.