TOM BEARDEN: To begin with, why are you interested in nanotubes and why are they so special?

RICHARD SMALLEY: Well nanotubes and particularly what I like to call bucky tube turn out to have just incredible properties. And bucky tube is an extension of a bucky ball. So imagine you have a ball and you extend it out here and all along the sides there are hexagons as part of the graphing sheet of graphite, like chicken wire, just a single layer of it turned around and seamlessly put together so you have a perfect tube. That object has incredible properties. If you held it in your hands and you pulled on it, you'd find it has the highest stiffness of any object you can make out of anything. And if you pull it until it breaks, we expect it would be the strongest of anything you will ever ever make.

But in addition, the electrons that are holding this thing together, some of them are free to move along the length of it, and if you do the bucky tube just right, it is a metallic wire. It is effectively a light pipe for electrons. It's small enough the electron is confined in its quantum little way. There's really only one way it can move down the tube. But it does that extremely efficiently. So here in one object you've got the strongest, stiffest thing we will probably ever make in the universe, made just out of carbon, but it also conducts electricity and oh, by the way thermal conduction along this is, is higher than diamond. The best you can ever be. So it's just carbon. In a way it's a new polymer of carbon, I like to think of it.

So following from nylon and Teflon, here's a new polymer and I'm convinced we will find a way to make it in, in vast amounts at low cost. Well it has very little environmental problem, it doesn't react with oxygen until you heat it up to about 4-or-500 degrees centigrade at least. I suspect we will be able to rewire the world with these bucky tubes amongst many other things.

TOM BEARDEN: Replacing existing conductors?

RICHARD SMALLEY: Yeah in, in high voltage DC and AC transmission lines that are draped around the country and around the planet and move power from here to there. They're made of aluminum, not copper - copper's a better conductor, but copper's so heavy, that if you drape them between the towers it really gets down too deep. And while these bucky tubes, if we made a bucky cable, of just the right kind of tubes, so that there are quantum wires, we expect it very well may have the electrical conductivity of copper, could be better. But even if it's a little bit worse, it would still be of stunning importance, because it's only 1/6th the weight of copper, about half the weight of aluminum. So the cable that's draped between the towers can be bigger in diameter and more powerful.

So there'd be ... more power down existing power corridors. In fact, it may be good enough and it's strong enough, that you only could have the central cable draped there - most of these cables are just bare cables in full, nearly a million volts voltage - you could put an insulator around them and then a grounded sheath around them and ... you would have no radiation, and so you get much more power down existing corridors and it wouldn't be so unpleasant to live by the power corridors. So that's one of the things that bucky tubes may be able to do, just one.

These things are about the diameter of a DNA molecule. They're really tiny. Only a billionth of a meter across. ... And since they conduct electricity, but they're a new carbon polymer, pretty much anywhere you know that electricity is involved, these bucky tubes may find themselves there. For example, fuel cells, batteries, nanoelectrics, detectors. Gadget sensors that detect things on a nanometer scale, individual molecules but then communicate that information back to the macroscopic world. The future applications of these may be as vast as electricity.

TOM BEARDEN: How about using them to store hydrogen for transportation purposes?

RICHARD SMALLEY: One of the beauties of bucky tubes is that every carbon atom there is on the surface. In fact, if you can get to the inside of the tube, there's a surface there too. So, so if we could adjust the diameter of the bucky tubes, tweak them so that hydrogen would be absorbed at near liquid densities on the surface, there's a lot of surface there, and it's only carbon, so it's fairly light. And so we have a periodic table. It starts at hydrogen and goes well past uranium.

These are the atoms we have to build things with in the universe. Well, as we go down the periodic table they get heavier and heavier and heavier, so you'd like to have an answer for this material X that we'll put in our gasoline tanks that absorbs hydrogen that comes from the early part of the period table, where things are light. Well carbon is number 6, so it's a good place to go looking and we have plenty of carbon. We have natural gas, we have oil, we have coal, and here in Houston, Texas, we've got a huge chemical enterprise that manipulates carbon and puts them in perfect molecules and sells them.

Well I've got a new perfect molecule for them to make. Bucky tubes. If we can make them I'm, I'm confident we will in time find a way of making them very low cost, with great perfection. Nice clean process. That sounds like something you might be able to stick into a gas tank. So if in fact it is permitted by the laws of physics, chemistry that this universe is built with, if it's permitted that you could manipulate carbon into a structure that would absorb hydrogen, so hydrogen could be like our gasoline, we'll find it, and probably it will be these tubes.

TOM BEARDEN: How big a challenge is it going to be to find out if the laws of physics and nature allow that to happen?

RICHARD SMALLEY: Well, it's a big challenge. But it's not like going to the moon. It's actually incredible how much has been learned in the past century by physicists and chemists about what makes atoms stick together and what you get when they do stick together. In fact, in the case of carbon, with hydrogen around, our current calculation tools ought to be able to handle it pretty well. So I suspect within three to five years, we'll know the answer. If the whole notion is to cast a net broadly over all possibilities for this material X that goes in the gas tanks, so we're going to cast it over a region where we're looking at carbon structures, we'll cast it over a region where we're looking at metals, we'll cast it over other things. Maybe we'll forget a couple regions and we'll cast the net later. Cast the net. Look at everything that's possible.

And then every one of those possibilities calculate it, make examples, measure it, see whether or not you can get to this incredible goal that we all want which is a great hydrogen storage thing that will fit in our gas tanks. In many of these cases, it'll turn out, it's good, it just doesn't make it, and there's no way we can change physics and chemistry to make it happen so alright, that's gone and that's gone. Maybe out of this net there is one or two, maybe three reasonable practical schemes.

And then you have to make a prototype and then of course you've got to learn how to make this stuff cheaply. You can't afford to spend more than a couple hundred dollars for what goes in that gas tank. You just can't. It might turn out there's nothing in the nets. Well we can't change that. That's just the way the universe is, but the push now is let's go cast the nets. Let's go see because we really would like to have that answer. The good news is that we actually have a couple answers that aren't that bad. One is you just pressurize it in a tank. Pressurized gas tank and they have done very well these days. That wouldn't be that bad. It would probably mean our cars wouldn't quite look the same as they do now. But it would work. And liquefying the hydrogen's not bad either. We already have two answers, we don't really like them that much, we'd like to have another one. So we're going to cast the net broadly and see.

TOM BEARDEN: As we were discussing yesterday though, some of this seems to depend on the idea that the government can spend a lot of money and order up a breakthrough. Is that possible?

RICHARD SMALLEY: Sure, you can spend a lot of money and you can order up a breakthrough. And if it's possible given the laws of the universe, that breakthrough just might happen. It often happens that to have a breakthrough, you have to make a advance that's really in many ways unpredictable. There's an essential surprise aspect to scientific research, particularly if it's a really hard thing that nobody's ever done before. Chances are the idea you initially cook up to get it done, it's not going to work. So you get in a lab and you start playing around and you hit this brick wall, like you're really slowing down. You're just say, well if I try harder, maybe it will happen. Usually it doesn't work that way. Something off to the sides says, ah, and you find this other angle. But you wouldn't realize that thing to the side unless you were pushing, unless you put the effort in it. And in all scientific research, and for that matter, engineering, if you just keep on pushing on that one path that you originally had, almost certainly you will fail. In all enterprises, you try to keep yourself open. And keep from putting all of your resources into one path, even when it's long since been clear that it's not going to make it.

But here we have a hydrogen storage issue, in the energy issue in general and so many other technical issues we have clear drivers. We want a result in this area, needs almost miraculous breakthroughs. And you have to learn how to nurture this enterprise, I call it the garden of science and engineering so that the miracles that we need will pop out of the garden.

TOM BEARDEN: So you think the approach that the government is taking now is a good one?

RICHARD SMALLEY: Yeah, I think it's quite reasonable. And we should look at it, year by year, and see how it's going. We would so love to have an answer for hydrogen storage that allows us to keep driving the kind of cars we drive and have the same experience when we go to a gas station. Three to five minutes later we drive away. We're all happy. We have a cup of coffee in our hand and 300 to 400 of miles energy in the back and I don't know where the gas tank is. I'm not even sure what gas is. I don't want to know about it. I just plug it in, I pay my money. We'll we're so used to that wonderful thing of gasoline, and now that we try to understand how we would use hydrogen, we begin to appreciate with what poetry mother nature gave us gasoline. I mean it's got hydrogen stuck in there, you know, it's two or three hydrogens on every carbon atom.

There's enough of them hooked together so that it's a liquid. It will flow and fill the tank. It's not so volatile it'll bubble away, but it's volatile enough to vaporize in the engine of the car. A tremendous energy density. Very convenient and here, about 150 years ago, we found it flowing in out of the ground. Tremendous boom, that's oil. And that's the world we're used to living in. That's what powers, not only American society, but the entire worldwide economy. We're looking for another answer. And probably hydrogen absorbed on something is not going to be as good as gasoline. I mean how you can beat it? It's all there in the little molecules snaking around. When you burn it you get water and CO2. I mean how bad could that be?

But we're looking for another answer. And we know we can pressurize hydrogen in a tank. It won't be that bad. It's not going to be like gasoline. We can make it liquid hydrogen in a tank. It would be pretty good. Particularly for trucks and airplanes. Probably would be great. But for, in our motorbikes, in our little compact cars, we don't really have enough room to put liquid hydrogen in there unless we really get snazzy, maybe we all get snazzy. We'd love to have a little tank, put a pipe in it and it fills up and it's just like a gasoline. We may never get something that's like gasoline. So we're going to try. See if it can be done. But if it turns out the answer is no, we'll cry and we'll moan and so forth, but then we'll go on and we'll change the way cars look and we'll find some other answer. The real world, we have to live with the reality of physics and chemistry.

TOM BEARDEN: In your view, is the storage issue the most important challenge? The most difficult challenge or is there something else that's also a challenge?

RICHARD SMALLEY: No, I don't think it's the most important challenge since I know we already have two answers to storage, which actually aren't as bad as most people think they are. Pressurized hydrogen in a tank. And liquid hydrogen. No, I believe the most important problem, having to do with hydrogen and beyond the hydrogen issue is primary energy. Where are you going to get the hydrogen from? Hydrogen is not a primary energy source. It's an atom. Well the energy you get from hydrogen is when you burn it from the oxygen in the air and you make water. It's the heat of combustion that does that; where is that energy going to come from? The primary energy supply?

Over the last century, the primary energy supply that's fueled the world, made us what we are today, this vast enterprise of humanity, is fossil fuel - primarily oil. It was coal before that. Fascinating to read the history of going from coal to oil. The whole story of oil. It's the discovery really of modern economy. That's what got us rich. ... We're incredibly rich compared to any previous century. Well in this century that we're in now, if oil and gas and coal remain the basis of energy prosperity, the basis of prosperity in general, it's not going to be a very prosperous century. Because right now, we have 6-and-a-half billion people on the planet of which about only 1 billion are really consuming energy at a significant rate. Those other 5-and-a-half billion people are going to, there's no way to stop it. We don't want to stop it, consume energy. By the middle of the century, at least a factor of two more energy will be produced every day. Right now it's about 200 million barrels of oil every day are burnt up one way or another. Either as oil or as gas or as coal or other energy sources.

By mid-century we're going to need at least 400. Where's that going to come from? Well if it has to come from oil, and the way that we're used to getting it, the low cost we're usually getting it, it's not by any means certain there will be that oil there. In fact, we may peak within the next couple of years or the next 10 years. By mid-century we will have peaked, so where are the billions of people on the planet going to have their primary energy coming from? Where? Since that determines the cost of everything, where is the economic prosperity of this planet going to come from in the middle of the century. If it's just fossil energy, I don't like that answer. I don't think it's going to be enough. We're not going to be rich enough.

So I'm a chemist and a physicist and the people like me, we're responsible for coming up with an answer. Nuclear is a great answer. I wish we had another one. The fact is that this planet is bathed in energy. Every moment hitting the earth is 165,000 terawatts of power from the sun. If we went off planet, there's all the energy that you could ever imagine. If we found a way of harvesting that efficiently, found a way of transporting over thousands of miles from western deserts to our big cities, found a way of storing it -- because the sun goes down, what are [we] going to do at nighttime?

I think the best answer is locally. We could solve this problem. We could have plenty of energy for every man, woman and child on the planet, not just the ones that are here now, but 10, 12 billion if, if we needed that. We could be rich again. But we can't do that without essentially miraculous developments in the physical sciences and engineering. Good news is that miracles do happen. I've been around enough, for about 30 years in the physical science, I've seen many of these miracles happen. Lasers, microelectronics. Moore's Law just keeps on trucking. They're going to go for another 10, 20 years on this. If you'd asked them back in 1970, are you confident you could have gotten even to 1990? No, they would have told you three or four things, they haven't got a clue of they would have done. But every couple of years, they keep on finding an answer. That's a miracle. I was around when DNA was discovered. It was figured out how to clone. I was around when light emitting diodes. If you go driving down a street now and you look at the stoplight, it doesn't look like the stoplights used to look. These are light emitting diodes, incredible efficiency, strained super labs that are doing these things. These miracles do happen and they come out of what I call the garden of physical sciences and engineering. For the last 30 years I've looked at these things.

The rate of miracles happening is not going to be fast enough to get us to where we need to be, to transform the world's energy in the way that our, that I think we need to do. So I believe we have to, to look at that garden of physical science and engineering. To decide how big it really ought to be proportionate to what we're asking it to come up with. And then very much, like in the current hydrogen program, are you going to tell this garden, I want an answer to the energy problem. I want it to be cheap, I want it to be clean, I want it to be able to go around the planet and keep on working for hundreds of years. Give it to me. People like me in the garden say, you know, don't bother me I'm, I'm not interested in doing this. I'd say, yeah, but if you were just working this area, we'd really appreciate it. And so people come up with ideas to do it, so you'll fund it and it won't work and so forth. You get to keep on working. What sort of things do you plant in that garden? How do you? How do you fertilize it? How do you water it? How do you prune it? Do you have a monoculture in it? So it's a good metaphor. Somehow out of that garden the answer has to come and we've got 6-and-a-half billion people that need an answer. It'll probably be about 10 billion by the middle of the century, so I think we ought to build that garden a little bit bigger and really cultivate it and aim not all it, but a good fraction of it, at solving this energy problem. I believe it is the single most important problem facing humanity today. Energy. How are we going to across this when oil and gas and coal are no longer enough?

TOM BEARDEN: Talk about what you're doing in the garden.

RICHARD SMALLEY: Well, my life is very simple. There's only one thing I care about, it's bucky tubes. Back 15, 16 years ago, far enough I don't even know exactly how far back it was, in my laboratory at Rice, we were lucky enough to be around when we discovered that mother nature can self-assemble perfect soccer balls of carbon. Bucky balls. And it turned out that not only was she assembling perfect bucky balls, perfect soccer balls, 60 atoms in the little sphere, but a whole new class of molecules that have that same architectural motif of the geodesic dome. That's why we called it bucky balls, after Richard Buckminster Fuller, the American architect and visionary. Well, it turns out it's not just a soccer ball you can make, you can make bigger balls. You can make oblong balls, the Y-shaped things. You can make, in fact, an infinite class of new materials made entirely of carbon, made of a carbon network that's folded around on itself with pentagons and heptagons. We'll love that whole new universe of materials that we were lucky enough to discover for the first time. The most interesting single one is the tube capped at the end because that tube, if you held it in your hands, stiffest darn thing you'll ever make in the universe. You can pull it, break it at the highest breaking force of anything but what is so special is that it is the best way of conducting electricity down a single molecule that we have ever seen and this is hundreds of years into the evolution of chemistry and physics. We understand why atoms stick to each other. And so we got, we know what the periodic table is.

We can think of all possible ways of sticking atoms together and we can say, well could you conduct electricity? How about you? How about you? Well there's always going to be one thing that's best. I'm convinced this is it. And it's made out of carbon which means we ought to be able to make it cheaply. The polymer industry, polypropylene. I used to work in the polypropylene business. It sold these days for what 25 cents a pound of something like that. And every atom in that polypropylene is in that polymer ... it's got molecular perfection. And the reason it's so cheap, is you find a catalyst. You develop a process that just makes it. You make it right the first time, you don't have to make it again. You don't have to correct your mistakes.

TOM BEARDEN: And this is the special material that could lead to many, many things.

RICHARD SMALLEY: Yeah, this structure is the one that conducts electricity in a truly metallic way, but it's small enough and has sufficient crystalline perfection that the electron as it moves, moves as a coherent quantum wave down the tube. And there's really only one way it can move down the tube. So it's heading on down this tube. You can't kick it to the side because this is it.

TOM BEARDEN: No room.

RICHARD SMALLEY: That's right. Now, if I had another tube right next to it, it could disappear from this and just wake up and the other tube going the same direction. Quantum tunnel in-between the thing. Remember an electron is a quantum particle. In fact, all particles are quantum particles, whichever we're just used to seeing lots of them together where these coherent weird quantum effects all average out, you don't see them manifest. But in this bucky tube that little quantum electron particle can only be there in this coherent wave packet. And that's its special talent, being a life pipe for electrons. But still made out of carbon. Another way of thinking of this, this is polymer carbon. Just like in fact, this physical stuff is a polymer carbon. This structure is a polymer pure carbon and we will learn how to make it cheaply in vast amounts.

TOM BEARDEN: How do you grow this?

RICHARD SMALLEY: Well if, if this tube were closed on both ends, it would be very difficult. So what we do is we start from a piece of the tube, where the ends are opened and we attach a catalyst at that end which is really just a blob of metal, and we heat it up to about 500, 600 degrees centigrade where that metal is just a molten blob and if the metal is iron or nickel or something like that, actually that liquid metal is a solvent for carbon. And so just like you grow a crystal of sugar by dissolving sugar in water, making it saturated and put a little seed and it grows, the sugar from the water goes to that sea crystal and grows, so here the equivalent of water is the metal blob on the end that's a molten blob and the sugar is in fact, the carbon. You bring the carbon to it in the form of carbon monoxide or methane or alcohol or something and it comes up to it, breaks apart on the metal, the carbon dissolves into the metal, wanders around looking for the best place to bind. If you've got this tube attached to it, this will be the best place to bind it and off it goes. Even though it's true that carbon would most like to form either diamond or graphite, if it had the chance to get itself really hooked together over vast macroscopic scales, on a nanometer scale, this is the best thing it can do. So you trick it into thinking the world's only a nanometer in size. You give it the example of what to do, and it just goes off and makes that and don't let it know about the macroscopic world for awhile.

TOM BEARDEN: And this may be the key to growing this on an industrial scale?

RICHARD SMALLEY: Yes, yes. In fact, all bucky tubes, now being made are made with something like this. There's a metal blob at the end and the tube is growing off of that as the feedstock migrates around, gets to find that tube. What we need to do to make it really efficient, to make this stuff at less than a dollar a pound, is to get an extremely efficient catalyst so that in moderate conditions, this stuff spins right out, um, and I'm confident we can do that.

TOM BEARDEN: How does it grow?

RICHARD SMALLEY: It grows straight out. In fact this object, it's a pretty floppy looking thing, but the real bucky tubes is the stiffest of all possible rods of this size. And that comes from the fact that this network of carbons, if you just straighten it out, that is the sheet that is stacked one on top of another to make graphite. Called the graphing sheet. Picked off one of those sheets in my hand and held it like this and pulled on it, you'd find it as the stiffest of all sheets that you can make out of anything in the universe. But of course, it ultimately has its edges in three dimensions. What we found here is a way of getting rid of those edges. They're wrapped around seamlessly connected here.

So now that this is effectively a soda straw on a nanometer scale, made of the stiffest fabric in the universe, so when you go to bend a soda straw, you know it's kind of stiff to begin with and it buckles -- the reason it's stiff to begin with is you have to kind of stretch that material of soda straw initially to bend it. Well, imagine soda straws made of this stuff, made of the stiffest of all fabrics. So as you go to bend this tube, you find it as the stiffest of all possible things that you can make ... so from that comes incredible mechanical properties and also, it is that stiffness that enables this quantum coherent transport of the electron, to actually work at room temperature in the real world and not have the molecule flopping around and find a way where the electron can localize at a bend. So the stiffness is a critical part of the whole story.

TOM BEARDEN: So what's that?

RICHARD SMALLEY: Well this is a model of a bucky ball. There are 60 of these vertices around here and the real bucky ball, each one of those vertices is a carbon atom. And the carbon atoms are hooked to each other in the bucky ball exactly as this pattern. You might recognize this pattern as the pattern of seams on a soccer ball. Well the bucky ball is about a billion times smaller than this but it really exists. It's perfect, molecularly perfect. It's made these days, hundreds of pounds a day, each one of those balls spins around randomly a billion times a second and has a true vacuum system on the inside. This is the most symmetrical molecule you can make in the universe.

But in many ways these days we're much more intrigued in this sort of elongated bucky ball which we lovingly call the bucky tube because it's the same sort of structure as this, except it's now extended in one direction. Now this is only fairly short, a little capsule. But in reality, we're now making these hundreds of thousands of times longer in this direction than their width. So that allows it to couple to the macroscopic world. For reasons of strength and for conducting electricity, thermal energy, along the length, to use them as detectors and so forth, so it, in a sense, brings nano to the real world. So this particular bucky tube, is in fact an exact extension of that bucky ball. So there's a pentagon right on the end. There's five other pentagons on the end, that gives you six on the end caps. See this is the 5-5 tube. It is an armchair tube.

And if I had to guess for the electrical transmission cable 50 years from now, what it's made of, it wouldn't be just any bucky tube. It would be this one. Exactly this one. Because you want to have as many of these conducting channels in every square inch. By that time we'll be in the metric system, it'll be square centimeter of the conduction cable. Each one of these tubes only gets to move one electron at a time. So you want as many as possible. So it wants to be as small as possible. If it gets much smaller than this, the strain of curvature of this sheet becomes a problem.

But right here the diameter of a bucky ball, C60 which is what this diameter is, it's okay and we have made these in large amounts already. We know that mother nature's okay with that. We haven't made them all purely just this tube so far. We must do that. And of course, we have to find a practical industrial scale way of doing it, not in pounds but in you know thousands and millions of tons at a cost of we would hope no more than a couple of dollars a pound. We'd like it to be like the cost of aluminum or cheaper. But I think that that's in the cards, that that will be achieved. Because after all, when you're dealing with carbon, with a catalytic process to produce this material from actually cheap feed stocks, methane, or carbon monoxide, both of which can be made if necessary from coal, we've got plenty of carbon. We will have for centuries to do things like this with them. Maybe we'll just take the carbon out of the air and CO2 and put it back into these things again, but that will take some energy. These tubes, which are being made now in labs all over the world are grown using a catalyst, and the catalyst doesn't attach to the tube that you've seen here. It attached to the open tube.

So imagine that this end isn't here so you just had the open end of the tube which you can see these dangling bonds. Instead of being attached to these other carbs, suppose it's attached to a blob of iron or nickel, not much bigger than the tube which is only about 100 atoms. And you heat it up to about 5-600 degrees centigrade, even though that's well below the melting point of bulk iron or nickel, for such a small little cluster, it's already molten. So it's a little molten droplet at the end. It turns out that molten iron and nickel and a few other transition metals are actually solvents for carbon. Carbon actually dissolves in them just like sugar dissolves in water. So you have a little blob of a molten liquid here in which carbon dissolves. So carbon comes from methane, carbon monoxide, methanol, it hits the surface, it's a catalyst that rips apart those molecules. The hydrogens will go off as C, the oxygen will go off as water and leave the carbon back here. Poor old carbon can't make a gas phase molecule anymore. It's stuck, but it's in this molten blob so it migrates around. Of course, it has no idea what we have in mind for it to do. But accidentally, it wanders up and it finds one of these carbons, part of this network and makes a new hexagon and man, is it happy. In fact, it's as happy as it can possibly be in this restricted nanometer space and that's the trick. You can find a circumstance in the physics and chemistry in the reactor, where the atoms, for their own selfish things, want to do what you want them to do, that's what chemistry's always been about, and in fact, industrial processing. You look for schemes in big pots and so forth where you put in your raw feedstock, put in energy if you need to. In this case, you get energy out, and you get just the products you want. Nothing else. Of course, in these days of green chemistry, you want to do that without any solvents.

BEARDEN & SMALLEY IN THE LAB
RICHARD SMALLEY: This apparatus makes nanotubes, we call it the hipco apparatus. The reactor's really behind us way back over there. And the product comes whistling along these tubes here where we're taking the heat out of the gas. It's a heat exchanger, where the incoming gas heats up as the outgoing gas is cooling down. The product has blown through these tubes and finally comes down along this tube and turns around and goes through one of these collectors where there is a filter on the inside. And very luckily for us, for this process, they filter out very cleanly and also very luckily, they do not plug in the tubes. Even though we run these tubes for months and months and months, we have never cleaned them up. They kind of wad up and then they blow themselves out so they're self-cleaning. Anyway, they collect in here, and so we'll run until one of these is pretty well full and we've got a five pounds or so pressure dropper across it and then we'll switch the other collector and then at some later time, we take a collector off line, we open it up and we carefully harvest the material. The material, when we get it out, is a black fluffy sort of stuff. It's inside this, this jar.

TOM BEARDEN: Kind of looks like charcoal.

RICHARD SMALLEY: Yeah, and all, it's the property of nanothings. I mean you just can't see them. You can't really see the nano beauty of these tubes. In fact, if we went to the best optical microscope, when we looked at them and had them all focused in and I said, come look at this. Still looks like junk to me. You have to get to scanning electro microscope or transmission electro microscope, or you're not really seeing what you see on the screen with your eyes, is a computer generated image. The image is generated by electrons going through the material and making an image using the diffraction properties of electrons. So it's a trick to allow you to think you're looking at it, at least the direct examination. But then you will say, oh yeah, now I see them. These beautiful ropes. So all this material, when you really look at it, is one gigantic tangle of ropes of nanotubes. They look all the same diameter. You never seen an end. They're just all wadded together kind of like brillo in a Brillo pad or whatever those wires are in brillo, except in these case, the wires are only about 10 to 50 nanometers in width and go forever, even there you're not seeing the individual tubes. Every one of those brillo pad wires uh, contains hundreds of nanotubes.

TOM BEARDEN: So is it even possible to actually ever see a nanotube?

RICHARD SMALLEY: If you mean by see that the light that hits the nanotubes goes into your eye and you generate an image on your retina that you say oh yeah, I see the tube, I see the side, I see the ends. No. You will never ever see it because the wavelength of life that you can see with your eye, the smallest is, is blue or violet which is 400 nanometers in wavelength. These things are 1/400th of that.

TOM BEARDEN: So light is too gross a tool to be able to see a nanotube.

RICHARD SMALLEY: Right. In fact, that's true of the whole molecular and atomic world. It's part of the great fascination of this that at the beginning of the 1900s, only then were chemists who actually worked with this stuff, were they really believing that there really were atoms? It was a convenient sort of fiction to think about. But right around 1900 with J.J. Thompson discovering the electron and the whole business about discovering atoms and the structure, the belief in atoms went from being something that people talked about just as a way of making sense of the world, to something that believed that really exists. Then about 30 years ago, we found ways of directly imaging them with, not with eyes, but like a blind person, images. Oh, I think there's something there, this is atomic force or scanning tunneling microsity where there's a little tip and you can image beautifully individual atoms and tubes and so forth. So it since long stopped being a debating issue whether they're atoms. We know the world is made of atoms. We know exactly the kind of atoms that are available in our universe to build with. Nanotechnology is the thought that okay, let's head off and build things of really tremendous societal and economic, practical significance, where we put the atoms just where we want. And these bucky tubes are a great example of what you could achieve if you could really do that.

TOM BEARDEN: That's terrific.

RICHARD SMALLEY: The consistency you get depends on how the reactor is operating and how tightly packed this material has been. You'll see if you look in here, there's kind of some stringy parts. There are times that we get extremely stringy material where there's little threads that are actually bigger than cotton threads that will go from centimeters. We're very interested in just what's going on here. Are there tubes that actually go the whole length? Did they get formed back in the reactor and the gas? Are they formed on the sides of the reactor, this stuff that sticks and it's not a gaseous product. The tubes that are not metallic are direct band gap semiconductors. And the band gap is in the near infrared. And what happens when the light absorbs and the semiconductors produce an electron. So if you can configure it since the electron will go one place, and the hole there's another place, you've just harvested solar energy.

And so in the solar energy game, when you're looking for terawatts of power from the desert, it's got to separate electronics from holes. Suppose you spun a continuous fiber which was made up of bucky tubes all hitting in the same direction, but they're packed together as close as possible, kind of like pipes in a hardware store. And let's suppose that no one bucky tube is any longer than say a 10th of a millimeter in length, a little bit like this. So it's huge for a bucky tube that's hundreds of thousands of times longer than its diameter, but it's hardly the distance from here to Dallas. But they're right beside each tube or our other tubes. And if we made them of exactly the same bucky tube, let's say the one that's the same as the size of a bucky ball, an electron as it heads it down one tube could just appear in the adjacent tube, and just keep on going up by a process that's called resonate quantum tunnel. Cause you see that particles in our universe don't do what you think they do. At this level, individual particulars are quantum. We may move from here to there, they do it in a very weird way. It's as though you were riding in this one train and right next to you is an adjacent train and you kind of blink and you wake up in the adjacent train and you're still going the same direction. That's the world of quantum.

So here we have in the bucky tube of quantum wire, electrons move along the quantum wire, extremely efficiently, very hard to slow down or stop, because the mechanisms to do that just don't exist. You just can't deflect it to the side there is no side. You can only bounce it back on itself and it's almost impossible to do that, not quite, but it's hard. But how do we get it from here to Dallas? We're going to have to take a lot of trains and the electron can quantum tunnel to the adjacent train and keep on doing that. Without any loss. So this is a wonderful story and those of us who learned quantum mechanics, we love this notion. That quantum mechanics is going to save the world and rewire the grid.

In fact, we don't have this cable yet. We have the tubes. We know that the quantum behavior of electrons going along, particularly the ones in these tubes is just what I said. We have never made a fiber where the electron hops from place to place. But we will make that. We're going to make it. We're going to hold it in our hands and we're going to attach little clips to it and we're going to measure the resistance. And when we measure the resistance, it won't just be theory, it will be God's reality. All the physical phenomena that we know, plus all the ones we have yet to discover. My guess is that the physical reality is that we'll have wonderful electrical connectivity. It may very well be as good as copper. If we can make it cheaply then we've got ourselves a new way of moving electricity from here to there and could be a tremendous importance.

And incidentally these little race tracks fro the electrons going along, they really only want to go along the wire in that direction. They don't want to go any other direction. When you generate electricity, you take a wire conductor and you move it through a magnetic field. And that causes the electrons to flow along the wires. That's what Faraday discovered and that's how our electric generators run. On an electric generator, you have a lot of wire and you spin it through a magnetic field. Well sometimes the wire is spinning through the magnetic field in a direction that induces a current that goes along the wire. Other times, the magnetic fields not the right direction and it's inducing currents that don't go the right direction. And these things are called eddy currents. And they're parasitic. And so you lose power in there.

In my bucky tube quantum wire, you won't have the eddy currents because the electron isn't going that way. Even when it hops to adjacent tubes. It's just blinking and waking up in the adjacent tube, still going the same direction. So that could be terrific in generators. So this one example of areas where these new nanotubes, particularly the bucky tubes, where we can make them with molecular perfection with high efficiency could have just a stunning impact. Electricity is very important. Not just in the electrical wires, but you know every little cell phone you hold, there's a lot of electricity that goes in there. It's also shielded so that it's electromagnetic influences don't talk to your neighbor's cell phone except the way you want to and that the electrical noise from around you doesn't perturb it. Right now though that, that shield is made of metal. One of these days it'll be made of bucky tubes. In general, over the last 50 years, we've been taking the metal out of stuff. We've made a tremendous progress along that line. We're not done. When we do get done, it'll be hard to find any metal in your automobile. Not because we just like plastics, and they're cheap. We do like plastics and they are cheap, but because you want a nanometer scale or engineering the strength of properties you want, and not just asking what mother nature gave you when you melted iron and got steel. So bucky tubes are going to be involved wherever electricity is involved and they're great strength at some point will have a big effect as well.

As I mentioned, the bucky tube, when you pull it, it's the stiffest of all things. And if you keep pulling it until it breaks, you'll find that you took more energy to do that. There's more force than any other object we know of. So suppose, instead of I had a bucky fiber where no tube is longer than a fraction of a millimeter, that I really made them long. And I held this thing in my hand and pulled back, 100 times stronger than steel is realistic. Suppose we wound a hydrogen pressure tank with this new super fiber carbon. This is the ultimate carbon fiber. At whatever pressure we're used to using it will be far safer. It will be less weight. And we ought to be able to go to higher pressures. I mean this thing is so strong. We may never do this, but if you could do it, make one long enough, you could build an elevator to space and hang it essentially constant diameter, a fishing line from space that hangs all the way down. For NASA's future in near earth satellites and further out, we need super strong materials that are very lightweight to make huge structures for solar energy collection, for large aperture antennas, for collection of solar energy, far out in space. We need bucky tubes there and we're confident that they will be there.

TOM BEARDEN: What are you doing in your lab to get to the point where you can spin that cable that you talk about?

RICHARD SMALLEY: Well the principle focus in my lab right now is to learn how to grow bucky tubes from a short little seed. A little piece of bucky tube that had been made someplace else but only maybe 10 times bigger than its diameter, open at the ends, put a catalyst at the end which really is not much more than a blob of iron or nickel, but just a little tiny blob and only, only a nanometer across. Heat it up. Expose it to methane or carbon monoxide, some cheap gas and grow. And the tube that grows is exactly, exactly the clone of that initial seed. It's the seeded growth. If we can do that, when we pick the right seed, we've determined what we've made.

Plus we've already nucleated it. We ought to be able to grow it under moderate conditions. And that's beginning to sound like a chemical process, resembles the sort of thing that's done in the polymer industry anyway. This would be called a living polymerization. And if you can determine exactly what that seed is, then you have total control. There's not one bucky tube, there's hundreds of them. As they range in size from a little fraction of one nanometer, diameter of a bucky ball, to about 3 or 4 times that diameter. And in there there's oh, hundreds of different ways of doing it and the way the hexagons go around. Some of them are these things that are called the armchair tubes that have this tremendous metallic conduction. Others are direct band gaps semiconductors. Others are semi-metals with a little gap down in the microwave region that would be very interesting for electromagnetic antennas and devices. To really make bucky tubes be all they can be, we've got to be able to control them. Precisely, where every atom is. That is the essence of the chemical industry. That's what they do. They put atoms just where they want and they find cheaper and cleaner ways to do it so that, so that they can make money and people can be prosperous.

The future of bucky tubes is to get control. So that is our principle focus here. We have other focuses and we're working on growing a continuous crystal nanotube so that they will be literally centimeters in length. One of these days, we, or somebody else is going to do this. I'm convinced it's, it's just a matter of time. And one of these days you're going to hold it in your hand. It won't have gold around it. But it'll be black probably a little shiny, it'll feel like wood or plastic to your hands. But if you touch the end, it will feel cold like metal. The reason the metal feels cold is because it's a great thermal conductor, and it conducts the heat away from your finger. So you feel the cold. Well this thermal conductor, from here to here, will be better than anything we've ever made. Better than diamond. So not only will it feel cold to me here, but I'll feel it, my other fingers on the other side. It'll be a new material of bucky tube single crystal. I'm sure that can be done. And in fact, we may find that you can actually grow it practically in large amounts. So these are really super materials of a new sort. It's fundamentally nano. In a way it's an extension of previous uh, research and polymers and organic chemistry but it's wild because of the electrical properties of the tubes, the thermal properties. These are things we normally associate, only with great metals and incredible mechanical strengths that we're almost certain will be unmatched forever.

TOM BEARDEN: If all this works out as you hope, it sounds like you have the magic bullet for the electrical challenges of the 21st century.

RICHARD SMALLEY: Well it if it works out as, as I have imagined, it would be magnificent. It isn't the answer to everything. It isn't an answer to the primary energy challenge. I mean it's just a way of getting energy from here to there or manipulating it and storing it perhaps. Where are you going to get the primary energy? The best answer is the sun. ... But to solve the world's energy problems, with sunlight alone, as the dawn of the energy source, we need miracles. There's plenty of light. Plenty. And you could solve the entire world's energy problem with just six solar energy plots smaller than a fraction of Arizona, and put them out in the western deserts and if you look around the planet, we've got a lot of deserts where there is nothing going on. Light's coming down there, it's just heating up the soil.

If we discovered cheap -- it has to be very cheap, like cheapest paint, photoable tag, or photo catalytic scheme -- we could cover square miles of this and lasts for decades and converts that sunlight with about 20 percent efficiency. You need pretty high efficiency into some useful stored energy, either directly electric current or hydrogen or methanol. Hey if you want the best gasoline, I would love to have gasoline, take CO2 out of the air, if you could do that, you could solve the world's energy problem. And the energy problem is not infinite. The population of the planet is still increasing, but the good news is the fertility rates are dropping pretty much around the world. If this drop of fertility rates continues, we may very well see world population peak before 2050. Maybe as low as 7 to 8 billion people. Or perhaps it'll go to 10 to 12.

Somewhere around here, we're going to peak out if what has happened in the past continues to happen, that is as companies, countries develop, their fertility rates drop more to replacement level. It's happened in most of the developed world already. Then we have about roughly 10 billion people on the planet. And the average person does not need infinite energy. Two kilowatts, 5, would be more than we need. Two kilowatts, 10 billion people, 20 terawatts of power. Give it to me. Give it to me cheap, we've solved the problem. Just solved it. We could do that easily with just six places and deserts around, around the planet. Except we can't do it with what we've got now. We can't do it with anything we can extrapolate from what we've got now. It's not extrapolating ever going to get to be ask cheap as oil.

But miracles do happen. And I believe we ought to get on with it. It might turn out that the way, that the universe was built, you can't ever beat oil. We've had our great century and then for centuries in the future, there's never any answer that's better. I don't think that's likely, but we're acting as though we can never beat oil. We've got oil, we're going to get more out of the ground, we'll settle with what we've got and if we need any extra energy, we'll get it from nuclear and where else, I don't know. We'll burn trees. Actually it's not bad to do it with trees. I'd like a new answer. I want to get rich again. We used to always used to say for decades after the Apollo, well if we can go to the moon, we can do this. Well this is another one. The boldness, the tactical boldness of going to the moon, that same technical boldness still lives in us and that could get us out to energy prosperity in the future if we really got serious about it.

TOM BEARDEN: What's the problem with storing sufficient amounts of hydrogen on a nanotube or nanostructure?

RICHARD SMALLEY: The hydrogen storage problem, uh, challenge is, is huge. We're looking for an experience in our cares that's like our current experience, so we can't have a huge volume. We can't take up for the whole back of the car just to store the hydrogen. We need to have the hydrogen molecules closer to each other. Well even if we made it liquid hydrogen, about as close as they can get, it's still going to be substantially larger volume than gasoline tank. But liquid hydrogen doesn't exist unless you're 20 degrees above absolute 0 and that, so you've got the tank that does that and all the infrastructure. And even that would be kind of bulky. So what we're looking for is something that they hydrogen molecules will love to sidle up against at near liquid densities, but something that we can go into the gas station, connect up and three minutes later we've gone, you know equivalent of 20 gallons of gas, or maybe they're more efficient vehicles and they're 10 gallons of gas, but something like that.

So now not only do I have to have the hydrogen molecules in this tank, I have to have something else. It's going to take up volume, it's going to take weight. So it better be that every atom of this new stuff is useful in getting the hydrogen close to it. Well our central problem is that we know how hydrogen absorbs on surfaces. It's weak called phsiabsorption And then if you break the hydrogen atoms, there's two hydrogen atoms stuck to each other in a hydrogen molecule. You break them apart and you independently stick them on the surface, and you get chemical bonds there. It's called chemisorptions. And that's pretty strong. Turns out that what we need for this material X in the gasoline tank is about halfway between what mother nature gives us in physiabsorption and what mother nature gives in chemisorptions. Chemisorption's too strong. Get it on, you can't get it off. That's what happens in gasoline. You get it on, but okay, we'll just burn the whole stuff and we'll burn the carbon.

Boy, we get a lot of energy when we burn the carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide's great, soda water, probably got too much of it in the atmosphere right now and we're going to have to worry about it in the future, but carbon dioxide's good for you, so gasoline is a case where the hydrogen is attached to the carbon. That's chemisorptions. Physiabsorption, just not good enough. You'd have to go to a very high pressures. You might as well just go to a pressurized hydrogen tank and forget about putting anything in there. There's nothing cheaper than nothing.

Okay, so the challenge of finding material X for the gasoline tank, to store hydrogen like we used to for gasoline, is to find a way of adapting that surface so that it binds the hydrogen, somewhere between physiabsorption and chemisorptions. Now the optimism is that in a bucky tube, the binding energy of hydrogen to the surface depends on the diameter of the tube. So if it's infinitely large in diameter, the sheet is flat, very hard to buy the carbon now. Plus the tube is an electrical conductor. We can charge it up. We can put other atoms in there. We can put borons, we can put metal atoms in there, maybe there's a way of tweaking it to make very strong physiabsorption or very weak chemisorptions. So that's the the best business case that we have at the moment for this. Whether or not in fact there is any real answer, which really works the way we need it, it's something we're only going to find once we get into it. If there is, we still have to make it and it has to be really cheap.

The target for DOE's 2010 goal, for this material is I believe $8 per kilogram of stored hydrogen, which means the material itself is going to have to be like a dollar a pound. The price of bucky tubes right now in the research market is hundreds of thousands of dollars a pound. When bucky tubes come into the commercial market, which I suspect they will within a year or two, it's not going to be much cheaper than a couple hundred dollars a pound. Hundreds of dollars a pound. I can't be the bucky tubes we have right now because we know they're not good enough. It has to be some special thing. We're going to have to learn how to make it like a bulk polymer like propylene. So the price has to come down by two as a magnitude, at least, more like 3 factor a thousand. There are miracles to be had down there. Still, what we're working on here, this growth from the seeds, I think it's quite conceivable we could do that. It's made out of carbon. Carbon is cheap. We've got coal, even if we run out of natural gas. We can make gasses from coal. We know how to do that and we could with a good catalyst, reasonable process, thinking boys and girls, make the stuff and make the stuff work, we can find a process to make this cheaper. But that's the challenge. That material X. There is no material X you can buy in the stores now that works. If it's going to be a couple dollars a pound, you've got a couple revolutions to get to the point to gather material in.

TOM BEARDEN: Do you think the DOE's goals are realistic?

RICHARD SMALLEY: I think they're the right goals, put the flag out there and get us moving. And to get there will be a surprise. But nonetheless we so need an answer. If we put that goal too far in the future and we don't set it high enough, it's not going to inspire the sort of level of thinking that I just told you about the challenge. Scientists and engineers, God love them, they get a particular idea in their mind and they want to solve it, and they want to, leave them alone, they want to play. So it's like herding cats. And to get a big thing like this down, out of the garden of physical science and engineering, you've got to set a goal and get serious people thinking about it and then there's a good chance we can do it. But otherwise I don't think anything, grand thing we ever tried to do in the history of this country, that's technical in nature needed a driver like that.