Iran’s fission programme normally gets all the attention, but over the weekend, claims of fusion made the headlines. The problem is that nobody seems to know exactly what the claims were about.
As far as I can tell, it started with this press release from the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran. Unfortunately, the press release appears to be in Farsi, and Google Translate’s “Persian-English” feature has a long way to go. The one thing I think I can confidently say is that it appears to be about laser fusion, which uses laser radiation to crush tiny pellets of hydrogen fuel until the atoms fuse together and form helium and neutrons. The clue is in the few English acronyms contained in the release: ND:Glass stands for neodymium glass, a technology used in high-power laser physics. NIF is the “”https://lasers.llnl.gov/“>National Ignition Facility,” the US’s mammoth laser fusion experiment. Shiva, Argus, Cyclops and NOVA were names of previous high-power lasers at Livermore. The AFP broke the story along these lines, quoting the web statement as saying: “By the method of inertial confinement lasers, significant research has been successfully conducted in the field of nuclear fusion.”
But follow-up stories by the English-language Iraninan outlets Press-TV and Tehran times have called the technology “Inertial Electrostatic Confinement Fusion”, a very different technology from the one mentioned above. IECM uses electrostatic fields to smash ions together at its core. A variant was invented by Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of the television, and it has had a cult following ever since. Unlike laser fusion, though, IECF has remained more of a “fringe” technology pursued by a few scientists at the edge of the fusion community. Those stories seemed to have spawned a similar post on the Guardian website.
It may all sound like semantics, but the difference is important. It’s no coincidence that the US is building NIF at Livermore, which is one of the nation’s two nuclear weapons laboratories. NIF can be used to simulate conditions inside a fusion-driven thermonuclear bomb—a far more powerful device than the uranium fission bomb that Iran is currently suspected of pursuing. Electrostatic fusion, by contrast, has relatively few national security implications.
There’s another weird tidbit in the press release. As the AFP says, Iran claims to be the sixth country to master the technology after the US, Japan, France, Australia, and South Korea. The last two members of that list are odd ones to mention when talking about inertial fusion, as they don’t (as far as I know) have active programmes. However, Australia and South Korea, along with the others, have mastered another, non-fusion technology called Atomic Vapour Laser Isotope Separation (AVLIS), which uses lasers to enrich uranium. If Iran was working on AVLIS, this would be quite a big deal. The technology is much lower profile than uranium centrifuges and could be hidden anywhere. It’s so dangerous, that a couple of US scientists called for an all-out ban on AVLIS technology a few months back in Nature.
Given what little I can see, there’s no reason to panic about AVLIS development. But it does show that nuclear research in Iran is about more than just centrifuges.
In related nuclear/Iranian news, Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, a nuclear scientists who was nearly assassinated late last year, has been named as chief of Iran’s nuclear operations.
If there are any Farsi/Persian readers out there who can translate the press release, please give it a go!
Updated: I’ve found a Persian-speaking colleague who tells me that the press release is about a 100 joule Nd:Glass laser (or laser complex) the Iranians have completed and are planning on using for fusion studies. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to NIF, which focuses over a million joules onto its target.