3. The Selling of ITER

Jan. 12, 2017  – By Steven B. Krivit

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Billions of dollars of public funds have been spent on thermonuclear fusion research. Should the technical problems be solved, fusion would be an excellent replacement for fossil-fuel-based power plants because it does not produce greenhouse gases. However, the largest experimental fusion research project in the world may have been sold to the public and elected officials using misleading information, according to this New Energy Times investigation.

Program administrators for the ITER fusion reactor, under construction in Cadarache, France, have led the public to believe that, when completed at a cost of $23 billion, ITER will produce 500 million Watts of power. This claim is not accurate, although ambiguous terminology allows ITER representatives to claim that the reactor will produce 500 million Watts of “fusion power.”

Public confidence in the integrity of scientific research is predicated on trust. Scientists earn such trust by performing research carefully, reporting results honestly, and, most important, in their communications with the public, transparently. The public expects, among other things, that scientists will explain crucial technical objectives of research programs using unambiguous, accurate terms that will be correctly and easily understood by their target audiences. The public also expects that, in communication from scientists, there are no misleading calculations and no unstated assumptions.

For decades, representatives of the U.S. Department of Energy and the fusion research community have told international partners, members of the U.S. Congress, and the public that their record-setting laboratory experiments have produced megawatts (millions of Watts) of “fusion power.” A 1997 experiment at the Joint European Torus (JET) reactor in the U.K. did not produce 16 million Watts of net power, as fusion spokesmen led Congress to believe, not even for a brief second. Instead, after accounting for the thermal output power, JET consumed 684 million Watts of electrical power.

After the construction of more than 100 experimental fusion reactors in 50 years, many fusion scientists have pinned their hopes for the future of fusion on ITER. The ITER Web site says that the future reactor is “designed to produce 500 MW of fusion power for 50 MW of input power (a power amplification of 10), [and] it will take its place in history as the first fusion device to create net energy.”

The two images above, from the home page of the ITER Web site, display the subtle but significant use of terms that has misled the public and elected officials. The phrase “fusion power” appears in the text of each of the images. However, “fusion power,” in the phrase “500 MW of fusion power,” refers to a special technical meaning that a member of the public likely would not know. (See below) Although the special meaning is used regularly among fusion scientists, clear public explanation of this meaning has been rare.

“Fusion power,” in the phrase “tomorrow’s fusion power plants,” is used in the nonspecific, general sense that is familiar to many members of the public. The problem is that the “500 MW” value shown on the ITER Web site doesn’t mean what a member of the public would assume it means: 500 million Watts of potentially useful power. This would imply that commercial fusion power plants are not far away. However, the real meaning of “fusion power” has nothing to do with the engineering efficiency or the commercial viability of a reactor that produces net power.

Magnetic Confinement Fusion Machines
To fully understand the special meaning of “fusion power,” we must understand some basic aspects of experimental fusion machines like ITER. Extreme temperatures — more than 100 million degrees Celsius — are necessary to create an environment in which atomic nuclei are forced closely enough together so they can bind and undergo nuclear fusion. Hydrogen isotopes (deuterium and tritium) are used as fuel in many fusion reactors. The reactor design concept comes from Russia, from an invention called a tokamak device. Inside the tokamak, heat is applied to the hydrogen isotopes and, when hot enough, the hydrogen forms a plasma. A plasma is like a gas but is in fact a fourth state of matter. An everyday example of a (normal temperature) plasma creates the glowing discharge in neon signs. In experimental tokamak reactors, heating is accomplished in a variety of ways that convert electricity from the grid into thermal power applied to the plasma.

In addition to heating, the plasma must be kept from touching the metal walls of the machine. No material on Earth can directly contain the hot plasma inside the reactor. If the plasma touched a reactor’s wall, it would instantly damage the reactor by vaporizing wall materials and terminate the reaction. The technological marvel of containing the super-hot plasma is accomplished by suspending the plasma in the center of the reactor by using a magnetic field. Older tokamak devices use conventional electromagnets. ITER’s design uses more efficient superconducting magnets that require less input power. In any case, the magnets surrounding the reactor are one of the largest power-consuming subsystems in tokamak reactors. Accounting for the input power for the various subsystems is crucial to understanding the dual meanings of the ambiguous phrase “fusion power.”

Special Meaning
Among fusion scientists, the special meaning for the phrase “fusion power” means the numerical ratio of the plasma heating power output to the plasma heating power input. In other words, it encompasses only the output/input power balance for the plasma heating subsystem. Fusion scientists have additional terms and symbols for this and similar ratios, but they are unnecessary for the scope of this article.

Standard practice for analysis of devices or experiments that purport to transform fuel into power is to provide a complete accounting of all power that goes into the system and all power that comes out of the system. Ordinarily, for claims of power gains, peak and average power outputs are compared to peak and average power inputs.

In fusion reactors, input power used to heat the plasma and input power used to magnetically suspend the plasma are among the greatest power-consuming subsystems of a tokamak reactor. Using the special meaning of “fusion power,” fusion scientists account only for the power used to heat the plasma. They do not include the power for the magnetic subsystem or any of the other critical subsystems that compose the rest of a fusion reactor.

Readers familiar with the fusion term “breakeven” will recognize that the specific meaning of “fusion power” is directly related to “scientific breakeven.” Fusion research involves three other types of breakeven: engineering, commercial and extrapolated. They are useful and technically precise terms; however, when fusion spokesmen have communicated to the public or Congress, they have rarely explained the difference between the two most common terms: scientific breakeven and engineering breakeven. Instead, spokesmen have generally used only the term “fusion power.”

In Their Defense
Fusion scientists responding to a recent New Energy Times survey explained that they use the special meaning because they are trying to demonstrate only the physics of a fusion plasma rather than the actual power gain or loss of the entire reactor as a complete system.

One of the scientists who responded to the survey was Ahmed Hassanein, a professor of nuclear engineering at Purdue University who has expertise in plasma fusion physics. Hassanein wrote:

The electrical power needed to run ITER is not an important issue now. ITER is not intended to be a practical, commercially viable reactor; it is only intended to be an experimental reactor. In a real working fusion device, the gain factor is infinity, and the electrical power needed for radio frequency plasma heating, ohmic heating, beam injection, magnet operation, etc. are basically trivial compared to the amount of output power. The main thing that one needs to explain to the public and lay readers is the amount of output power from the ignited plasma compared to the input heat needed to start the reactor. This is the main feature of a successful fusion concept. There is no need to be concerned about how much electrical energy is needed for plasma generation, heating, magnets operation, etc. since, once we achieve fusion successfully, all these values are basically very minute compared to the gain. So one should highlight to the lay reader the gain factor between the input heat and the output power.

Fusion researchers like Hassanein believe that they will inevitably ignite a self-sustaining plasma, which will create enough net output power for sufficiently long duration to be practical. They believe they will be able to capture energetic output neutrons from the deuterium-tritium fusion reaction and efficiently convert their energy into electricity to keep the magnets and other subsystems working.

Therefore, how much total power the reactor consumes is not of interest to fusion scientists right now. However, this is not how fusion has been sold to the public and to elected officials. Financial support for expensive mega-science projects like ITER has been sold based on the appearance of getting more net power out of the entire reactor system than goes into the entire reactor system.

JET’s Two Sets of Numbers
The following numerical comparison illustrates the impact of the two meanings of “fusion power.” The first set of numbers reflects the 1997 JET experiment data using the special technical meaning of “fusion power,” which does not account for full total input power to the reactor but only shows the plasma heating power (24 million Watts):

Duration of experiment: 100 milliseconds
Power input: 24 million Watts
Power output: 16 million Watts
Net power: Loss of 8 million Watts
Ratio of output to input: 65%

I obtained the actual power consumption of JET after I sent an e-mail to Nick Holloway, the media manager for the Culham Centre, in 2014. (PDF Archive) As shown on the Internet Archive Web site, which preserves past versions of Web sites, the numbers appeared on the EUROfusion Web site sometime in 2015. Here are the results of the same experiment based on a full accounting for total input power to the reactor (700 million Watts):

Duration of experiment: 100 milliseconds
Power input: 700 million Watts
Power output: 16 million Watts
Net power: Loss of 684 million Watts
Ratio of output to input: 2%

In 2014, I was unable to locate any Web site, book, or news story revealing that, instead of consuming a total of 24 MW of power, JET consumed a total of 700 MW of power. The records of two congressional hearings that I examined show that Congress was informed about the 24 MW number but not the 700 MW number.

Congress, in making its fusion funding decisions, relied on the false and misleading impression that the JET reactor produced 65% of the total power it consumed, when instead it produced a mere 2%.

Congressional records show that the practice of exploiting vagueness in the meaning of the phrase “fusion power” has been occurring for decades. The following slide gives an example of how this ambiguity has been used. The supplemental article gives many examples of how the term was used in congressional hearings.

The Details About JET
In December 2014, I sent e-mails to each of the 20 members of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee. I asked them one question: “What is the best total net power output from any kind of fusion experiment thus far?” Six of them responded. None of them initially interpreted my question as I intended it. I learned that fusion researchers (who are almost all physicists) simply do not think about the total power that goes into the entire reactor. Instead, they think only about the power that is used to heat the plasma.

Mark Koepke, professor of physics at West Virginia University, then the chair of the Department of Energy’s Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee, and the immediate past chair of the Plasma Physics Division of the American Physical Society, was one of the respondents. He wrote that power requirements in JET beyond those used for plasma heating were “extraneous quantities.” He also did not know how much power JET actually consumed.

Koepke — an expert and highly qualified source — didn’t know that JET required 700 megawatts for the total system input, as he told me. “I don’t know what JET’s engineering or commercial ratio values were in 1997,” Koepke wrote. Without knowing the facts, he had suggested to me that the bulk of the 700 Watts of electrical input power for JET, 98% of it, was extraneous. Not one of the FESAC respondents knew the total power consumption of JET. The public and members of Congress also likely (mistakenly) believed that the full power requirement for the record-setting fusion experiment was “extraneous.” (Full response)

The ITER Ambiguity
The home page of the ITER Web site ambiguously uses both meanings of the phrase “fusion power” without giving any indication to the public that it is using two meanings. The ITER Web site prominently advertises that the reactor will “produce 500 MW of fusion power” from “50 MW of input power.” As with JET, that “50 MW” thermal input is only a fraction of the actual total electrical input power requirement to get 500 MW. For clarification, ITER is not designed to produce any electrical power. It is intended for specific experimental research. Once the research program is complete, the reactor will be decommissioned.

I contacted Don Rej, a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratories and the acting chairman of the U.S. Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee, a federal advisory body that provides advice to the Department of Energy. He responded to my e-mail on Dec. 22, directing me to https://www.iter.org/factsfigures.

“That page is specifically written for the public, not fusion experts,” Rej wrote, “as are many other pages that can be accessed from https://www.iter.org.”

Even though the ITER Web site targets the general public, it does not inform the public that it is using the special meaning of “fusion power” and does not provide a definition of “fusion power.” Thus, ITER management has continued the tradition of taking advantage of the ambiguity in meaning, allowing members of the public to think that 500 million Watts means one thing when ITER management knows it means something completely different.

Determining the full power input required to get the 500 million Watts is difficult because the ITER Web site does not clearly provide that information. On Dec. 19, I began asking Laban Coblentz, the communication head of ITER, for this information. When I asked Coblentz for a simple, straightforward answer about the full power requirements for the reactor, he couldn’t provide one.

He gave a long answer but said that he didn’t know and had to do more research. Eventually, he got back to me. Despite the fact that the ITER Web site gives a simple value for the heating input power, he could not give me a commensurately simple, straightforward number for the total reactor input power. Therefore, this article makes no attempt to analyze the actual total input power for the whole reactor or the actual net gain or loss for the entire reactor. Perhaps, because of the complexity of the system, Coblentz could not give a simple number for the full input power requirements of the reactor. However, this is a secondary matter. It does not change the fact that the ITER Web site misleads the public with its ambiguous use of the phrase “fusion power.”

Also, any discussion about duration of pulses, duration of power, pre-heating power, and steady-state power versus burst power is irrelevant because the values given on the ITER Web site are not energy values. They are specific values for power — 50 MW and 500 MW.

Coblentz redirected our conversation and said that ITER was never designed to convert thermal output to electricity, but this fact has been well-known. He also denied that the total amount of power produced by the reactor — accounting for all power input — was important. He wrote that it was “completely irrelevant to the success of ITER.” Instead, he explained, ITER is intended to be a large-scale scientific experiment that demonstrates net power gain only in a fusion plasma rather than net power gain in the entire reactor system, even for a moment. But that is not how ITER has been sold to Congress and the public. As the ITER Web site says as of Jan. 9, 2017: “The main goal of ITER and future fusion reactor-based power plants is to develop a new, sustainable and virtually unlimited energy source.”

On the basis of the undisclosed special meaning of “fusion power” on the ITER Web site, the organization claims that “ITER is designed to produce a 10-fold return on energy.” (In my conversations with Coblentz, I pointed out to him that the ITER Web site regularly misuses the word “energy” when the context clearly indicates it should instead use the word “power.” When I brought this phrase (“10-fold return”) to the attention of Coblentz, he clarified in an e-mail that the statement really means “approximately 10 times more power coming out of the plasma than goes into the plasma.” That is honest and straightforward. But that’s not what the ITER Web site says.

The Power of Omission
The regular use by fusion spokesmen in their communications with the general public of the ambiguous meaning for the phrase “fusion power,” combined with their failure to inform the public about its true meaning, has caused the public to be unaware of two very different meanings of “fusion power.” In turn, this has caused significant and widespread public and government misunderstanding about the true level of progress in fusion research for decades. It has also helped to bolster legislative support for continued funding of ITER, the world’s most expensive science experiment.

4. Supplement to The Selling of ITER (PDF)
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Jan. 16, 2017 Addendum:

Factually inaccurate statement on Culham Centre for Fusion Energy Web site: (PDF Archive)

The input power for the reactor in the best experiment at JET thus far, in 1997, was about 700 MW. According to Chris Warrick, Communications Manager for Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, “the vast majority of this goes into feeding the copper magnetic coils and the rest into subsystems and energising the heating systems.” ( PDF Archive) The power to heat the plasma was 24 MW. The “fusion power” produced was 16 MW. The answer provided on the Culham Centre Web site omits the vast majority of power input to the fusion reactor.

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Steven B. Krivit began his science journalism career focusing on low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR) in 2000. He initially reported on the work of credentialed scientists who claimed that they had experimental evidence of “cold fusion.” He took those scientists at their word. However, by 2008, Krivit had identified eight experimental facts that disproved their erroneous “cold fusion” hypothesis. Since then, Krivit has published extensively, in encyclopedias and peer-reviewed journals, about the distinction between the erroneous idea of “cold fusion” and the valid science of LENRs. His distinction was adopted by the Library of Congress in 2016 for its authoritative subject heading index. Krivit’s latest article on LENR was published by Scientific American on Dec. 7, 2016.

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Jan. 16: 2017 Update: I sent Coblentz the link to the article on Jan. 12. He has not responded.