Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–189
powered by solar. There are niches—fill them. Back when I was a kid—and before then, too—a
farmer out in the middle of nowhere, where there was no electricity, could buy a windmill kit.
Came in a box. You put it up, and you had a little bit of power and you pumped water into your
stock tank. That’s a niche. Sears and Montgomery Ward filled it with these windmill kits. I’m a
great believer that—and this is an evolutionary biology model—evolution occurs when, usually
in some small environment, there’s a niche to be filled, and something evolves into the niche and
exploits it. Find the niches, encourage people to try to fill them with biofuels, with wind, water,
tide. And for big power, nuclear reactors of one kind or another. It’s a compact power source.
The density of power for solar cells—folding in a lot of factors—is, let’s say, 100 watts per
square meter. You know, I’m folding in winter, clouds, day and night, and stuff like that. But,
you know, that’s not very dense power. To get up to 1,000 megawatts electrical at 100 watts a
time requires a big piece of real estate. So I’m not against it. I’m just saying there are niches,
and some will be filled by dense, large power, big power. Some will be filled by a single
windmill or a windmill farm. Some will be filled by solar-cell farms or thermal solar. I’m a
great believer—[laughter] go back to Mao and say, “Let a thousand flowers bloom.”
ASPATURIAN: Speaking of Mao, are your committees—both in terms of energy, climate change,
and weapons—international? Are you working with your counterparts in other countries on any
of these areas?
TOMBRELLO: On the nuclear reactor accident thing, we worked with a lot of different people.
Not with the Chinese, because, remember, it was twenty-five years ago. We knew what was
going on in the Soviet Union, and just about the time we wrote the report, Chernobyl happened;
so we clearly were plugged into a lot. Often there are Brits. There’s always a special
relationship there. Occasionally, and on the laser stuff, I suspect we’ll have some people from
France that we talk to, because they’re building a big laser system that’s very like this big NIF
[National Ignition Facility] laser at Livermore. In fact, they’re using materials for the laser that
were developed and caused to be manufactured by Livermore. So there is an international
component.
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