Assim Khan watched Mitchell’s convoy depart from the dock, noted the registration plate of Mitchell’s vehicle, and then flicked away the cigarette he was smoking into the nearby black water as he strode to a motorcycle and climbed aboard.
XXV
‘Wow.’
Lopez’s voice sounded small as they climbed out of the car they had leased for cash, in Euros, from a small dealership in Roquemaure alongside the Le Rhone river that wound its way through the picturesque valleys of southern France.
The flight out of Abu Dhabi that Ethan had booked had resulted in them abandoning Agent Willis in the city, an act for which Ethan felt some degree of shame. However, Stanley and Amber were his priorities and he felt certain that Majestic Twelve would have located them before Huron had gotten far from the docks. Jarvis had texted him and warned of a possible breach, confirming Ethan’s suspicions and urging him to make alternative plans. A commercial flight out of the city using the cash and fake documents Jones had provided a better option, and they had landed in France tired but beyond the reach of the Saudi authorities, for now at least.
‘It’s a temporary victory,’ Lopez had warned him. ‘The Saudis have strong ties with our own administration. They could easily demand our arrest and extradition to face charges.’
‘One thing at a time,’ Ethan had replied with more confidence than he had felt. ‘Let’s just get back to America first — we’ll be better able to operate on home ground.’
A vast facility was arrayed before them containing many huge buildings, many of which were still under construction. Ethan could see heavy trucks moving to and fro, cranes operating and countless workmen labouring beneath the warm sunshine.
Stanley Meyer looked up at the vast construction site with his hands on his hips and a scowl on his features.
‘Biggest waste of the world’s money I’ve ever seen,’ he muttered.
‘What is this place?’ Lopez asked.
‘ITER is Latin for ‘the way’,’ Amber explained, apparently well enough versed in her father’s work to know about the site. ‘It’s an international research and engineering project to build the world’s first nuclear fusion reactor.’
‘The project is funded and run by seven member entities,’ Stanley said as they began walking toward the massive site. ‘The European Union, India, Japan, People’s Republic of China, Russia, South Korea and the United States. All of them have agreed to waste enormous sums of money building what is really just a giant plasma accelerator using a tokamak chamber.’
‘A torus to contain the plasma in magnetic fields,’ Ethan recalled from a previous investigation for the DIA, deep beneath the waves of the Florida coast.
‘Indeed,’ Stanley said, raising a surprised eyebrow at Ethan. ‘The reactor uses deuterium fuel, which is easily extracted from seawater, and tritium which is generated once the fusion reactions begin, thus creating a runaway reaction which is effectively self — sustaining. It’s being designed to produce five hundred megawatts of output power while only needing fifty megawatts of ingoing power to operate.’
‘Free energy,’ Lopez remarked. ‘How come that’s possible?’
‘It’s the same process going on inside our sun,’ Stanley explained as he glanced up at the bright orb in the hard blue sky. ‘The sun’s gravity is so immense that it attempts to crush itself under its own weight. This compresses the nuclei of hydrogen that mostly make up the sun so much that they fuse together, a process known as nuclear fusion. Immense volumes of energy are emitted during this process, in line with E=mc2, and are emitted from the sun as the heat and the light that we feel on our faces right now.’
‘Isn’t that what all nuclear power stations do?’ Lopez asked.
‘No,’ Stanley said. ‘They use nuclear fission, the opposite process: once again, mankind chooses to use the opposite method to nature for producing energy. They split the atom, releasing vast amounts of energy but also radiation with it. A fission reactor can melt down in a runaway chain reaction should it overheat, as witnessed at Chernobyl in 1986. A fusion reactor, however, will simply cease to operate if the temperatures or pressures fall below the required level. Fusion also produces very little waste product — it’s the perfect energy supply for mankind if it can be harnessed.’
‘Then why are you so against it?’ Ethan pressed.
‘I’m not against it, I’m against the methods employed to achieve it,’ Stanley insisted. ‘All of this, some sixteen billion dollars of investment, all to produce what is in effect nothing more than a proof of concept. This reactor won’t be able to power the world even if it works perfectly and confounds the critics who say it’s a waste of time. Our National Ignition Facility in California has already proved the concept on a smaller scale and initiated nuclear fusion reactions, and the aerospace giant Lockheed Martin has announced plans for a fusion reactor small enough to fit on the back of a truck that may be commercialized within a decade, long before this monstrosity even gets fully completed.’
Stanley huffed and puffed his way to a low ridge of dirt alongside the edge of the compound where the reactor was to be built and surveyed it through the high fences that surrounded the enormous site.
‘I have witnessed energetic reactions emitting excess heat phenomena in an apparatus made from things you could buy in a local hardware store,’ he said gloomily. ‘It’s all about efficiency, not a free lunch. Our governments are building this not because they need it, but because they want to show the people how much they need their governments and leaders to achieve such things. If only the people knew that they don’t, that if they simply made an effort to research these things themselves they could take their own futures into their own hands and shake off these ridiculous gestures of power.’
The reply to Stanley Meyer’s oratory came from one side of where they stood.
‘The cynic as ever, Stanley.’
Ethan turned to see an elderly man watching them from the foot of the ridge, his hands in the pockets of his jacket and a kindly smile on his face.
‘Hans!’
Stanley hurried down the ridge with remarkable agility for one so old and the two men embraced briefly.
‘This is Hans Furgen,’ Stanley introduced his friend, ‘the best electrochemist I ever knew and somebody who knows more about nuclear reactions than everybody else in the world combined.’
Furgen appeared to almost blush as he shook Ethan’s hand.
‘That’s something of an exaggeration,’ he murmured in reply.
‘Blah blah,’ Stanley said, more animated than Ethan had ever seen him. ‘You’re the top dog, Hans, it’s why these damned fools picked you to run this project.’
‘You’re ITER’s project leader?’ Lopez asked.
‘I’m in charge of developing the tokamak chamber,’ Hans replied. ‘It’s a crucial part of the assembly and one so large has not been built before. Stanley’s right that excess heat phenomena have already been achieved at the NIF in California, but only on a very short time scale and at lower energies than we plan to achieve. This facility is to prove that it can be done at a commercial scale, and thus will hopefully pave the way to a future devoid of fossil fuels and the dangers of fission meltdowns and radioactive waste.’
‘That’s a big responsibility,’ Ethan noted with considerable admiration for Han’s role. ‘And if somebody else were to come along and do the same thing on a desktop with some beakers and electrodes they bought at Walmart, how would that go down at ITER?’
Hans sighed and his shoulders slumped as he glanced at Stanley.