KMS Fusion was the first private company to attempt to produce a fusion reactor using the inertial confinement fusion (ICF) 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 (AEC) 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 Kip Siegel 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 (AEC) 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 (DOD) 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.
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