Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–188
like ITER [the French-based International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor] and for the
basically inertial systems, where you drive this thing together with an electron beam, a heavy-ion
beam, or a laser beam. You have to get the energy—the heat—out of the neutrons that come
from fusion; and that represents a blanket around it. And you have to use the neutrons to make
more tritium to go back into the fusion process. So blanket design has a lot to do with reactor
design. It’s got fuel. It’s got products. It’s got transport problems. So the two of them are
related. Our committee is supposed to look at that. And then there is the hybrid reactor, where
you basically use the neutrons from fusion to drive to criticality what looks like a nuclear reactor.
Those are very interesting, but only concept designs exist so far. Is it something you can
reasonably start attacking now? I think it can be attacked now—just add a billion dollars and do
some reasonable design work.
Then there’s the role of industry in all this. The reactor program was subsidized by the
government, but it was overseen by Westinghouse and General Electric and Babcock & Wilcox,
who make the commercial reactors, not to mention all the foreign versions of those. Which
industries will take this on? I made the modest proposal to the committee that maybe you need a
new paradigm, and I know this young industrial giant named Elon Musk, who has formed a
spacecraft company and probably done more things than many national rocket programs.
Granted, he’s getting funding from NASA, but his program was developed separate from NASA
and has a whole new business model. And he’s also developed the Tesla car company, It’s too
soon to tell how successful that will be, but I said it’s worth listening to a visionary who might
attack this problem in a completely different way from Westinghouse or GE. A modest
proposal. Since I know Elon and I know he’s a fan of fusion, but he hasn’t picked a winner yet, I
think it would be interesting to bring him in and hear what he has to say. It’s a long shot, but an
interesting one.
ASPATURIAN: Do you back nuclear—fission or fusion—over solar energy as a solution?
TOMBRELLO: I am a believer that there are many niches in the energy market. If I were building
a remote cabin in a place where I would have to run in a power line from five miles away, it
would clearly cost me a lot of money to tie in to the grid and buy commercial power. I would
think very, very seriously about making this house completely independent and probably
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