The way of the future is fusion. I dream of a world where humans have harnessed the power of the Sun. Clean, safe, energy. But there is no clear path to fusion. The most exciting possibility for a future with fusion may be the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor or ITER. ITER is not the only option of course. Previously, I have discussed the National Ignition Facility or NIF which has pioneered unique technologies is the field, but their success is not ensured. Many small research projects around the world are also struggling to realize the dream of fusion, but with budget shortfalls and increasing pressure to produce results we as a society may shortsightedly end the dreams of a fusion future.
Fusion is what powers the Sun and all stars in our Universe. Fusion is the joining of two or more separate atomic nuclei into a larger nuclei. Fusion can create energy because the mass of the input and output nuclei are not necessarily equal in mass. An overview of what fusion is and why it is so important can be seen on my previous post on Fusion for the Future. Many scientists in the field acknowledge that a rapid development of fusion is unlikely, much less a commercial development, but there is hope. A reasonable time frame may be half a century before we see a world powered by the same process which drives the Sun. It will be an almost entirely clean, limitless, reliable, and safe source of power.
Christopher Llewellyn Smith states some cold hard numbers that are worth mentioning again. The price of ITER is at least 13 billion Euros or $17 billion. This cost is justified and dwarfed by the magnitude of the energy usage on Earth which amounts to a $5 trillion dollar a year market (I checked some of these numbers and they seem approximately correct. Did you know that you can download the International Energy Agency's annual reports as an iPhone or iPad app?). Particularly shocking are the subsides to fossil fuels which are over $500 billion a year worldwide (I am not so sure about this number, but the United States alone subsides fossil fules to the tune of $10 billion a year) while the subsides to renewables are only $45 billion worldwide. Smith says that the renewable energy sources of wind, bio, geothermal, and marine will never be able to meet the world's energy needs a current consumption rates. We must use solar, fission, or fusion energy.
It is a curious thing to ask a scientist to speculate on the future, but these two scientists have indulged us with a time frame for achieving fusion. Maybe the middle of this century at best they say. What makes fusion so difficult?
The key to releasing the energy of the Sun is forcing the nuclei of atoms close enough together for them to overcome their electrical repulsion and allow the strong force which binds nuclei to merge the nuclei together. Such favorable conditions for atoms to smash into each other can only occur under extreme temperatures and pressures, like say at the center of a star, but it is almost impossible to hold a star on earth. Anything which is hot enough to undergo fusion is also hot enough to burn through any container, thus we must contain something without quite touching it. Enter the magnetic doughnut known as the tokamak. A tokamak is a toroidal or doughnut shaped container that uses magnetic fields to confine plasma. Plasma is a state of matter where all the atoms are ionized (the electrons that normally orbit the protons in the nucleus have escaped)—and at these temperatures the atoms contained in the tokamak are definitely ionized. Magnetic fields apply a force on the charged particles of plasma such that the plasma can be corralled and kept away from the walls of the container. In an actual tokamak huge magnets encircle the enclosure as shown in the figure here where the magnetic coils and the ITER plasma surface is shown. The colors and contour lines indicate the magnetic field strength which is not quite perfect, the lines are wavy, due to deviations from perfect symmetry in the structure because the tordioal magnetic field is made of a finite number of magnetic coils. The ITER tokamak will be huge. Check out the tiny little person (bottom left) in the image below.
The complexity of this machine is astounding. One key challenge that must be overcome is the confinement of the plasma in a controlled manner. The Confinement Topical Group will determine exactly how to accomplish the confinement and avoid the performance degrading effects of Edge Localized Modes or (ELM modes). The hotter the plasma is the more internal plasma pressure is that must be balanced by stronger magnetic pressure fields; we could view this system in analogy to a balloon where that the plasma is the air under pressure and balloon's walls are the magnetic fields. The exact ratio of the plasma's internal current, the physical size of the tokamak, and the torodial magnetic field is a carefully tuned parameter to balance the gas temperature and magnetic pressures which does not yet have a known optimal configuration (the goal is I/aB < 2.5 where I is the plasma current, a is the minor radius, and B is the toroidal field on axis). It has been observed that the ELM modes periodically become unstable and have breakouts. This creates a large energy flux in a short time, like that of a solar flare on the Sun, where hot plasma breaks free of the magnetic fields. When this occurs the plasma may touch the side walls of the tokamak and overheat the internal surfaces to many thousands of degrees. The side wall surfaces will be evaporated and eroded inside the plasma chamber. In this way the ELM modes result in the introduction of plasma impurities which contribute to raising the effective atomic number (the number of free protons per particle) of the plasma which results in greatly reduced fusion efficiency or even the halting of the fusion reaction entirely; the target is to keep the effective atomic number below two. The aggregate erosion is large and the lining of the tokamak walls may need be replaced often. In order to operate the machine continuously and cost effectively the ELM modes must be controlled. The control of ELM is paramount for a successful fusion tokamak. In the video below Alberto Loarte tells us a little more about the control of ELM modes and clever ways that the ELMs are dealt with.
The plasma instabilities inside a fusion reactor are a serious engineering challenge, but they are not a safety concern at all. Unlike a fission reactor, when a fusion reactor is compromised it does not go critical in a dangerous explosion (like a fission reactor would), instead it just fizzles out harmlessly. This technology is not perfect though because while some may claim that a fusion reactor would create no dangerous radioactive material in fact it would produce some radioactive material that would need to be handled. It is the walls of the reactor which will become slightly radioactive (through neutron activation). Conveniently though the half life of such radioactive waste materials is less than 100 years and could be entirely handled on site.
We should all be hoping for fusion. I spoke with Michel Claessens, the head of communications for ITER, and one of the questions I asked him was, what should the public know about fusion and ITER?
As much as possible. More seriously, I would be happy if people understood the differences between fission and fusion.
And he has a point I think. Most people simply don't understand what is at stake and what our options our. If you are reading this then you are already more informed than most. Tell people about the difference between fusion and fission and encourage your government (no matter what country you live in) to follow a wise energy policy. While I was writing this article the United States changed its funding proposition for ITER which was a welcome change because at one point the United States looked like it would falter on its commitment to fusion research and ITER completely. This is an investment in our future and the Earth. I asked Claessens a question about this topic too, how important is worldwide collaboration in achieving a successful ITER project?
Worldwide collaboration is useful and even necessary - to pool and ensure the best use of resources (human and financial). The ITER project is so complex that no single country has the scientific and technological skills to build the machine alone. In addition, the international collaboration was seen by ITER fathers (Gorbachev and Reagan) as a way out to cold war.
The idea of harnessing the power of the Sun on the Earth is so much more than just a scientific endeavor. It is a very human dream to hold the Sun (what culture does not have some kind of original creation story or explanation for the sun?) and it is possible that realizing this dream may bring us together for all of the right reasons.
Peter Kareiva has surprisingly radical ideas on conservation. He is the chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy and is serious about protecting the Earth and all the creatures that depend on it. His views are unconventional in some ways. He argues that enviromentalism is on the decline and that we need to choose our environmental battles.
Fusion is only 50 years away and it will solve all of the worlds energy problems. That is the good news. The bad news is that it has been 50 years away for the last 50 years. If that situation is maddening to you then you are not alone. Leonardo Mascheroni, a retired Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist, wanted funding to build a colossal laser for producing energy from fusion and was willing to trade the United States' nuclear weapons secrets to realize his dream. Mascheroni was recently indicted on charges of treason concerning selling nuclear arms secrets and is awaiting trial sometime this year. In the meantime the United States is pressing forward with a completely separate laser fusion project called the National Ignition Facility or the NIF which uses 192 lasers fired in unison to recreate the energy source of the stars harnessed on Earth.
In this post I am going to talk about the basics of fusion and the NIF. I also have questions and answers with a physicist on the project, Siegfried Glenzer, at the end of the post. I asked him some hard questions not just about the science, but also about the politics going on around the project. Physicists would like their experiments and budgets to work in a vacuum, but alas they never are. I deeply thank doctor Glenzer for answering my questions.
What is fusion?
Fusion is the joining of two or more separate atomic nuclei into a larger nuclei. Fusion can create energy because the mass of the input and output nuclei are not necessarily equal in mass. Specifically, if the mass of the output nuclei is less than the total mass of the input nuclei then the mass difference is made up by the production of energy as Einstein taught us E=mc2 (conversely if the output nuclei are more in total mass than the input nuclei then the reaction would consume energy). In particular, stars like our Sun fuse lighter elements into heavier elements up until the point the star is attempting fusion of iron which does not produce energy because iron has the largest binding energy per nucleon. Actually fusion processes in stars normally involve several intermediate nuclei or elements. The most important process for our Sun is the proton-proton chain which fuses four hydrogen nuclei, 11H, to form a single helium nuclei 42He with a mass difference of ΔM. Einstein's mass energy relation shows us how much energy this process releases.
4 ⋅ 11H -42He = ΔM
ΔM c2 ≈ 27 MeV
The key to joining two nuclei together is overcoming the repulsive electric Coulomb force between nuclei. The positive charge on nuclei repel each other until the two nuclei actually meet and then the attractive short range strong nuclear force takes over to bind the two nuclei into new larger nuclei. The fewer the number of protons in the nuclei the easier it is to fuse. The repulsive force between nuclei may be overcome in several ways. Inside stars heat and pressure, which comes from the stars gravitational contraction, occasionally forces two nuclei close enough together for them to fuse and all together the star burns consistently for a very long time. The more massive the star the hotter and denser it is at the center so larger nuclei can be fused. The production of heavier elements by stars fusing hydrogen is essentially the origin of all elements heavier than lithium; massive stars occasionally explode, and thus we are all made of stardust. The input elements for the first fusion reactors will be the hydrogen isotopes of deuterium (H with a neutron) and tritium (H with two neutrons) because this reaction has the highest nuclear cross section and high energy yield.
Why is fusion important?
Fusion is very important; this is the kind of physics that future presidents should understand. In this post I am focusing on the basics of fusion and the prospects for the National Ignition Facility and a in a future post I will talk about another project known as ITER. I should clarify that there are effectively many different kinds of fusion machines and an important distinction is net energy positive and net energy negative machines. The ratio of fusion power to input power (often denoted Q in the field) must be positive to have a viable energy solution. There exist at this moment very many fusion machines which take more input power than they make in output power (they have a fractional Q value). Some of the current machines seem fantastic like 'table top' pyroelectric fusion devices, but the reality is that they take energy to run and have no foreseeable future in the energy game. These devices play a role as portable neutron generators in labs for various research purposes or in security as nuclear material detectors. Net energy positive machines have not yet been invented. The NIF will not produce energy, but will be a testbed for fusion technologies. The fusion technology goal is the sustainable production of energy from abundant raw elements such as hydrogen, helium, or related isotopes (Helium 3, deuterium, tritium). Fusion using these light elements is cheap, safe, and green. Fusion is cheap (however the technology development is expensive!) because the raw elements like hydrogen are abundant, further as a consequence of this virtually infinite supply (one in every 6,500 atoms on Earth is a deuterium atom) it can be considered a renewable energy. Fusion is safe because when a fusion nuclear reactor malfunctions unlike a fission nuclear reactor the reaction will snuff itself out rather than proceed uncontrollably to the point of a thermonuclear explosion. Finally, fusion is green or environmentally friendly because it produces no climate altering products.
There are so many reasons fusion is important. Fusion is the future. It is the next step in humanity's technological evolution. This video from the BBC Horizons series with physicist Brian Cox gives a cursory look at the NIF, and puts the entire endeavor into perspective (and to boot in finishes with The Kinks This Time Tomorrow which has the most appropriate lyrics ever).
How do we use fusion to make energy?
Under the correct conditions of incredibly high density, pressure, and temperature a self sustaining fusion process can occur. These conditions are of course exactly what you find at the center of a star, but on Earth these conditions are engineered via the use of confinement and heating mechanisms. The NIF will use a symphony of lasers to simultaneously heat and compress a pellet of deuterium and tritium to simulate the conditions inside of a star. A deuterium and tritium target has been chosen for this first experiment because the fusion cross section between deuterons and tritons is three orders of magnitude larger than for any other atoms. Other fusion projects like ITER will use a toroidal (or doughnut shaped) chamber known as a tokamak to confine a deuterium and tritium plasma which is then heated through magnetic field confinement or radio frequency heating kind of like a big nuclear microwave. Once the fusion process is begun radiation and fast neutrons will be emitted which will be absorbed by the walls of the machine in order to gather heat to drive a steam-turbine generator to produce electricity pretty much just like every power plant.
How does NIF work?
It all starts with a single primordial laser source with very low power which is slightly preamplified and split into 48 parts. These pulses are then amplified by a factor of 10 billion in another set of preamplifiers then they are split into 192 parts and sent to the main amplifier. Then electrical energy stored in capacitors is dumped into 7680 xenon flashtubes which operate pretty much like the flash on your camera, except they are over 6 feet tall and take 30 kilojoules of input power each. The bright incoherent full spectrum light from the flashtubes passes through Neodymium doped glass and in a stupendously inefficient process amplifies the laser beams. The lasers bounce back and fourth a few times and finally go through the amplifier and the main optics system again before heading to the target chamber. At this point the primordial laser has been amplified by a factor of 1015 (in the video below he says quadrillion which apparently doesn't even have an agreed upon meaning, I think 1015 is right). The beams travel equidistant paths into the final optics assemblies which convert the original infrared light in to UV light that enters the target chamber. Inside the chamber the light focuses onto a little cylinder called a hohlraum and then, maybe, fusion starts. This process is very complex, this video explains it way better than I can.
Finally the lasers converge in the center of the laser chamber on the hohlraum. What is a holraum and what happens next? This was one of the questions I asked Dr. Glenzer and he responds,
A hohlraum is a radiation enclosure. The laser irradiates the inside of the hohlraum wall and is converted to soft x-rays. The soft x-rays homogeneously ablate the outer layer (the ablator) of a 2.2 mm spherical fusion capsule in the center of the hohlraum. Due to Newton's third law, the dense fuel on the inside the ablator layer is accelerated towards the center producing a hot plasma surrounded by dense deuterium and tritium (1000 times solid density). The center will get very hot launching a burn wave into the dense deuterium-tritium layer: A microscopic star is born.
This is in theory, exactly what happens. The 192 lasers induce densities and temperatures sufficient for nuclear fusion by not allowing the spherical fusion capsule to explode asymmetrically (technically this is called internal confinement fusion). The rate of fusion is proportional to density squared times the temperature to the fourth power, so the more rapidly the capsule can be made to implode the better. In reality the lasers impending on the capsule will create an imploding shock which will cause instabilities to grow under high acceleration of the shell during the convergence and allow energy to escape ruining the efficiency of fusion. Compression is maximized by keeping the fuel cool hydrodynamically with several laser pulses stepped in time such that the spherical deuterium and tritium fuel capsule is qausi-isentropically compressed. When the deutrieum and tritum nuclei get close enough for the strong force to kick in fusion results in 14 MeV neutrons and 3.5 MeV alpha particles being emitted. The 3 MeV alpha paricles have a short mean free path in the dense enviroment which causes local heating and facilitates sustained fusion.
However, no one has ever measured the dynamic compression and shock breakout pressures present in the shell and the nonlinear nature of the process means is must be determined experimentally. There is no equation anyone has to say how this is going to work because the system is so complex. An example of one specific issue the physicists at the NIF face is the so called Rayleigh-Taylor instability that originates from the interface between the solid shell and the deuterium and tritiutm fuel within it. It is this instability which causes the fusion reaction to proceed asymmetrically such that the necessary temperatures and pressures are not reached because instead the capsule explodes before the implosion is complete. Overcoming physics challenges like this will lead to efficient fusion.
Politics at the NIF
The politics of the NIF are as complicated as the fusion itself. The project is wildly expensive so that alone makes it controversial and beyond fusion the NIF has a second major task that doesn't fit in their public relations campaign so well. The NIF will provide needed data on the nuclear weapons status, capability and performance in this era of nuclear weapon testing abstinence. The United States has a stockpile stewardship and management program run by the DOE which tests nuclear weapons, but it can't go around nuking like it used to as a result of the comprehensive test ban treaty established in 1996 (edit: the United States has signed but not ratified this treaty, regardless live nuke testing is frowned upon in the modern age) . The NIF should be able to experimentally simulate on small scales the conditions of pressure, temperature, and energy density close to those that occur during a nuclear explosion. I have never read anything that describes how the NIF is meeting these goals in technical terms information is tight. As for our would be spy, Mascheroni, the evidence regarding his case was placed under a limited protective order by a judge last Tuesday. Documents containing sensitive nuclear weapons information will be crucial in his case, but, like so much else at the NIF, confidential.
Hope for the NIF
The NIF has everything: science, intrigue, spies, money, and hope. The hope is that it leads the path forward to sustainable fusion. The issue currently is that there is a physics and engineering problem at the NIF and based on what is known today it seems unlikely that NIF will produce any practical amount of fusion energy because it wasn't designed to. It is a scientific experiment which will give us answers about fusion. It will light a path forward, literally, with the power of the stars.
Questions and Answers on the NIF
I leave you with some questions and answers with Dr. Glenzer.
1) What are the design challenges of the NIF?
The NIF laser is finished and operational. At this point, we can deliver more than 1.2 MJ energy and 400 TW (yes, 400 TW) on target and we have calculations that indicate a good chance at ignition at these energies if everything else works as expected.
One of our goals is to increase the laser energy and power further to 1.8 MJ and 500 TW to increase ignition margin. This requires careful placement of beam smoothing optics and proper planning of optics maintenance. We are in the process of implementing this capability while we are doing experiments in the facility every day. A very challenging task.
2) What does focusing lasers at a hohlraum with a deuterium-tritium target at the center do? And what is a hohlraum?
A hohlraum is a radiation enclosure. The laser irradiates the inside of the hohlraum wall and is converted to soft x-rays. The soft x-rays homogeneously ablate the outer layer (the ablator) of a 2.2 mm spherical fusion capsule in the center of the hohlraum. Due to Newton's third law, the dense fuel on the inside the ablator layer is accelerated towards the center producing a hot plasma surrounded by dense deuterium and tritium (1000 times solid density). The center will get very hot launching a burn wave into the dense deuterium- tritium layer: A microscopic star is born.
3) This machine creates a star on Earth?
Yes, a microscopic star will exists for a billionth of a second burning deuterium and tritium into helium nuclei.
4) In an experiment in early November of 2010 a 1.3 megajoule laser shot run produced a world record neutron yield for laser-driven fusion in internal confinement target, thus fusion is being achieved at NIF, yet this is not considered ignition. What does ignition mean and what advancements are necessary to achieve it?
Ignition means producing a burning plasma where fusion processes occur on a much higher rate than observed so far. This is about the case when the energy produced by fusion processes is of the order of 1 MJ, i.e. of the same order as the laser energy used to heat the target.
This is of fundamental interest for laboratory astrophysics and dense plasma physics. To make this process useful for energy production using fusion we are further developing targets that produce about a factor of 100 more energy than initially used by the laser.
5) This machine is designed to do vastly more than just fusion. What other fundamental physics is explored?
The rough split is 40% fusion, 40% defense, and 20% basic science. There are calls for proposals on the NIF website, and Universities around the world have responded to the first call submitting more than 40 proposals. Eight experiments were selected to be scheduled on NIF in the next few years. The proposals include the study of supernovae plasmas or states of matter of ultra-high pressures and densities never produced the laboratory before.
6) The NIF has been accused of black ops, cost overruns, political pork-barreling, and misleading the public on the reality of fusion. Does this situation put additional pressure on the scientists on the project?
I do not believe that there is additional pressure when people are asking critical questions. Fact is that there are fewer world-leading science machines left in the US than before- see LHC in CERN or the upcoming XFEL at DESY. I believe that NIF will make a big difference in science and it will be worth the investment.
7) When will we have sustainable energy producing fusion on Earth?
Good question - I believe that I will live to see it happen (I was born in 1966).
References
Glenzer, S., MacGowan, B., Michel, P., Meezan, N., Suter, L., Dixit, S., Kline, J., Kyrala, G., Bradley, D., Callahan, D., Dewald, E., Divol, L., Dzenitis, E., Edwards, M., Hamza, A., Haynam, C., Hinkel, D., Kalantar, D., Kilkenny, J., Landen, O., Lindl, J., LePape, S., Moody, J., Nikroo, A., Parham, T., Schneider, M., Town, R., Wegner, P., Widmann, K., Whitman, P., Young, B., Van Wonterghem, B., Atherton, L., & Moses, E. (2010). Symmetric Inertial Confinement Fusion Implosions at Ultra-High Laser Energies Science, 327 (5970), 1228-1231 DOI: 10.1126/science.1185634
It's the planetary neighborhood I am talking about here. The stars may beckon but it's an interplanetary, rather than interstellar culture that we will likely inhabit for hundreds if not thousands of years in the future. Baring the miracle of a "warp drive," the stars are simply too far away in space and time (via the theory of relativity) for a true interstellar culture to develop. The solar system with its 8 planets, 166 moons and countless asteroids and comets is likely to be our home -- our only home -- for a long, long time.
We should consider the implications of these limitations on coherent human cultures in space because today the president unveils his new plans for NASA.
The Obama administration made headlines recently when it reversed direction on NASA's Bush-era push to return to the Moon. The new plan turns to hungry young private space ventures to give us access to Near Earth Orbit. Stepping back on any present space mission the plan calls for development of the next generation of space technologies for the next generation of space exploration. But critics fault the Obama plan for its lack of any clear goals for these new technologies. Without a bold choice of destination -- Mars is the obvious choice) -- critics say the human space program will simply drift.
You may be aware that Google recently threatened to cease operations in China. They publicly spun the decision as a response to censorship laws, but the cold hard truth is that Google's new approach to China resulted from “a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property". I have seen a spat of computer security related articles recently and I have been thinking about technology and security. This topic is a little bit off my regular focus, but I found that as I looked deeper there were disturbing trends and tons of information available.
Corporate cyber espionage is rampant and current security systems are woefully unprepared to deal with involved studied attacks. Governments around the world are setting up cyber defenses and military attacks are rumored to exist, but if they are most are classified. Finally, most attacks whether military, corporate or personal begin with social engineering and are targeted such that common defenses (firewalls, anti-virus, anti-malware, etc.) do practically nothing resulting in a state of misplaced paranoia.
China Attacks Google & Others
There is a lot of speculation about the details of the attacks. The only thing that is known for certain is that in December anonymous attackers targeted the source-code repositories of at least 30 American companies (though some investigations report that over 100 companies may have been targeted) and critically compromised at least some of their targets. Another high profile company that was a victim of the attacks was Intel though they have not revealed how much or what was stolen. To get an idea of the gravity of the situation last week when the CEO of Intel Paul Otellini was interviewed by Charlie Rose when asked by Rose, "What is the next big idea you think in technology in terms of the internet and in terms of processing information?", Otellini replied, "I think recent events have given us all a wake up call on security. I think we need to do a much better job of protecting people's privacy corporate assets, government assets... this is everything from credit card fraud, to phishing, to state sponsored cyber attacks... all of that suggests we need to do a hardening of our systems... ". Now, keep in mind they were not talking about security when Rose asked this. Otellini recommends that breaking passwords should become so hard that it needs a massive amount of computing power to be done. The interview is an excellent review of the current situation of technology. I highly recommend the Charlie Rose Paul Otellini interview.
The National Security Agency and others have been working to determine the origin of the attacks which are now being called the Aurora attacks. You know if the NSA is on the case this is serious. I suspect that the recent media spotlight on international hacker warfare is only scratching at the surface of an ongoing cold cyber war, a cold war 2.0 of sorts. Various sources have found links to two Chinese schools with close ties to the Chinese military to the Aurora attacks. However, because the Chinese government encourages volunteer “patriotic hackers” to run espionage it is possible that the source of the attacks was not officially sanctioned, but rather zealous computer nerds. There is also the possibility that the attacks came from China, but not from Chinese citizens; no matter how well you trace digital fingerprints unless you have the web cam on the other end turned on it is impossible to tell who is actually at the terminal. At best you can trace the route back to a location. A United States military contractor that faced the same attacks as Google has pointed to a specific computer science class at the Lanxiang Vocational School. The other school fingered by investigations is the Shanghai Jiaotong University. The Chinese approach to online espionage is distributed which will make definite proof of the origin of an attack almost impossible.
Short Circuit on Demand
Consumers often joke that manufactures build products only long enough to last until when next generation of the product is available. What if manufactures could simply turn off your electronics from a distance at their command? They already can. Windows will stop working eventually if you don't register your version of the software and your car's engine can be stopped by OnStar. These situations are benevolent. The real threat is malicious Trojan horses hidden in computer chips that control our nations financial systems, communications networks, power grids, and military defenses. The scenario postulated is that a foreign nation supplying the microchips to another nation may include an undetectable back-door in those microchips. This New York Times article, Old Trick Threatens the Newest Weapons, indicates that this kind of digital warfare has already occurred
A Trojan horse kill switch may already have been used. A 2007 Israeli Air Force attack on a suspected partly constructed Syrian nuclear reactor led to speculation about why the Syrian air defense system did not respond to the Israeli aircraft. Accounts of the event initially indicated that sophisticated jamming technology was used to blind the radars. Last December, however, a report in an American technical publication, IEEE Spectrum, cited a European industry source in raising the possibility that the Israelis might have used a built-in kill switch to shut down the radars.
Separately, an American semiconductor industry executive said in an interview that he had direct knowledge of the operation and that the technology for disabling the radars was supplied by Americans to the Israeli electronic intelligence agency, Unit 8200.
The disabling technology was given informally but with the knowledge of the American government, said the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. His claim could not be independently verified, and American military, intelligence and contractors with classified clearance declined to discuss the attack.
The United States has used a variety of Trojan horses, according to various sources.
In 2004, Thomas C. Reed, an Air Force secretary in the Reagan administration, wrote that the United States had successfully inserted a software Trojan horse into computing equipment that the Soviet Union had bought from Canadian suppliers. Used to control a Trans-Siberian gas pipeline, the doctored software failed, leading to a spectacular explosion in 1982.
These past events show that any sophisticated computer system that is not built entirely on home soil can never be completely trusted. This problem is essentially one of globalization. In the case of military defenses a country must remain self-sufficient; that is it must be an autarky. However, autarky is not viable in most realms, but can be pursed with great economic cost to those countries which have sufficient resources to develop their own arms from scratch. In the case of the United States the Pentagon now securely manufactures about 2 percent of the integrated circuits which the military buys annually (Intel also does a lot of manufacturing work in the United States, see the Otellini interview). The push to have a completely organic source of microprocessor seems to be economically prohibitive. Some say that the computer security industry plays up the fears of catastrophe and deliberate sabotage, rather, the larger threat is design and programming errors in hardware or software. The severity of this problem is open for debate and I am not enough of an expert on it to weigh in too heavily. I wont don't delve into science fiction paranoia about it, but I do think it is a risk. You can read more on this topic at IEEE Spectrum in the report The Hunt for the Kill Switch.
Testing the Electric Fences
In Jurassic park the seasoned park ranger demands that the velociraptors be killed as they're far too intelligent. They are testing the electric fence for weaknesses, but never the same spot twice, because as he says, "They remember". They escape as soon as the power is cut and claw their way out; they have been waiting. Finally, despite that the ranger knows the danger, as he's stalking one velociraptor, another ambushes him from the side. His famous last words:
Analysts have found that the Aurora attacks were actually an entire campaign of observation and intrusion. The ISEC Partners report details the infiltration program of the Aurora malware suite and the pattern it followed:
Despite the diversity of victims in these attacks, we have seen a common pattern in the attacks, which generally proceed like this:
1. The attacker socially engineers a victim, often in an overseas office, to visit a malicious website.
2. This website uses a browser vulnerability to load custom malware on the initial victim’s machine.
3. The malware calls out to a control server, likely identified by a dynamic DNS address.
4. The attacker escalates his privilege on the corporate Windows network, using cached or local administrator credentials.
5. The attacker attempts to access an Active Directory server to obtain the password database, which can be cracked onsite or offsite.
6. The attacker uses cracked credentials to obtain VPN access, or creates a fake user in the VPN access server.
7. At this point, the attack varies based upon the victim. The attacker may steal administrator credentials to access production systems, obtain source code from a source repository, access data hosted at the victim, or explore Intranet sites for valuable intellectual property.
In the report they outline recommendations for all organizations or companies even if they have not been contacted or found evidence of an Aurora infection. The ISEC team lists off steps that companies need to take to defend themselves, but troublesomely states:
The most interesting aspect of this incident is that a number of small to medium sized companies now join the ranks of major defense contractors, utilities and major software vendors as potential victims of extremely advanced attackers. This is concerning for many reasons, not the least of which is that even most Fortune-500 companies will not be able to assemble security teams with the diversity of skills necessary to respond to this type of incident.
Mike McConnell, the former Director of National Intelligence, said to the US Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee yesterday that if the US got involved in a cyber war at this moment, they would surely lose. "We're the most vulnerable. We're the most connected. We have the most to lose," he stated.
It is not at if we aren't trying to prepare, in fact the United States is much better prepared than most countries, but we are also a primary target. Given the rumble of talk about cyberwar and such programs as the United States Cyber Command the only thing that is clear is that the United States is keeping its cards close.
We all know the threat is there, but are we watching the flank? Every computer network is guarded with a password, albeit probably a poor password, in order to keep out those who shouldn't access to specific systems. Is it velociraptorparanoia to password everything? No, in fact I would argue more secure steps should be taken even for average users like restriction of remote logins, biometric scans (I already use one for my laptop), and security key fobs (even video games, like World of Warcraft now have authenticators!) that must be present for login. There is a rumble of talk about dark nets, foreign cyber attacks, corporate espionage, and an entire business sector for malware which lead me to believe there is an incredibly serious danger at hand. Perhaps there is a cold cyber war going on right now. In a globalized world I don't see how much of a benefit it would be to destroy another nation that you trade with or that is in debt to you (if you could hack into the banking system, would you destroy the banks, steal all the money at once, or just take enough?). Like the cold war, a cyber war would have the threat of mutually assured destruction. Yet, this will not abate the fears that all our electronics have Trojan back-doors (the ultimate outflanking maneuver) yielding all resistance (and passwords) futile.
The McCarthyism of McAfee
There is one catch to all this fear mongering which I would call the McCarthyism of McAfee. You see many anti-virus programs are detected as viruses by other anti-virus programs. These programs take up system resources and don't protect users from their own worst enemy (themselves). On my old desktop I did some monitoring and determined that my anti-virus software is actually about the 15th greatest system resource hog in terms of CPU and RAM utilization on average and I don't even have it turned on to actively scan. The is not much of a threat on your home computer if your a tech savvy user. The threat is from social engineering and on the business network you log into.
I am wondering for each press release how many undetected probing attacks are made? Or for each missile the air force launches how many digital attacks does it make? You can bet it is a lot, but I wouldn't lose sleep over it because history shows us that doomsday is less likely than government control schemes.
This is not a documentary about the politics, fraud, or current events in Iran. This is a documentary about people in Iran. I watched this several years ago I want to share it because I believe understanding the people of Iran is better than interfering with the people of Iran.
The key to releasing the energy of the Sun is forcing the nuclei of atoms close enough together for them to overcome their electrical repulsion and allow the strong force which binds nuclei to merge the nuclei together. Such favorable conditions for atoms to smash into each other can only occur under extreme temperatures and pressures, like say at the center of a star, but it is almost impossible to hold a star on earth. Anything which is hot enough to undergo fusion is also hot enough to burn through any container, thus we must contain something without quite touching it. Enter the magnetic doughnut known as the tokamak. A tokamak is a toroidal or doughnut shaped container that uses magnetic fields to confine plasma. Plasma is a state of matter where all the atoms are ionized (the electrons that normally orbit the protons in the nucleus have escaped)—and at these temperatures the atoms contained in the tokamak are definitely ionized. Magnetic fields apply a force on the charged particles of plasma such that the plasma can be corralled and kept away from the walls of the container. In an actual tokamak huge magnets encircle the enclosure as shown in the figure here where the magnetic coils and the ITER plasma surface is shown. The colors and contour lines indicate the magnetic field strength which is not quite perfect, the lines are wavy, due to deviations from perfect symmetry in the structure because the tordioal magnetic field is made of a finite number of magnetic coils. The ITER tokamak will be huge. Check out the tiny little person (bottom left) in the image below.
