ITER, The Grand Illusion: A Forensic Investigation of Power Claims

Released: April 11, 2021
Watch now on Vimeo or YouTube.

Film Synopsis

Is nuclear fusion a likely solution to climate change? Is fusion a viable alternative to fossil fuels?

For 70 years, fusion scientists have proposed new design concepts, provided computer models, and proclaimed that fusion is the answer.

But where is the experimental evidence that the scientific method demands? And why has energy from nuclear fusion always been 20 years away?

In a 1993 hearing, nuclear fusion research representatives convinced the U.S. Congress to spend public money on ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. ITER, they said, was the way to fusion energy. Elected officials in Europe, Japan, and the Soviet Union also agreed to fund ITER. Later, China, India, and South Korea joined the partnership. The revised estimated cost, including parts, is now $65 billion.

For experimental evidence of progress, the representatives implied that, in 1997, the Joint European Torus (JET) fusion reactor produced thermal power from fusion at a rate of 66 percent of the total reactor input power. That foundation, as it turns out, was flawed. The power produced by JET was only 1 percent of the total reactor input power.

With this false foundation, they proposed the ITER reactor, which, they implied, would produce ten times the power it would consume. This promise was also flawed. If ITER works as planned, the overall reactor will produce power at the same rate as it consumes power. Although this result would accomplish its scientific objective — a tenfold gain of plasma heating power — the overall reactor output will be equivalent to a zero net-power reactor.

Fusion representatives told Congress, the public, and the news media that the ITER reactor would produce “500 megawatts of fusion power” and that it would prove that fusion on Earth is commercially viable. These false impressions took root decades ago and, by 2017, had been established as apparent fact as shown in records from the European Commission, European Parliament, U.S. Congress, fusion industry partners, educational organizations, and news organizations.

Was it all just a big misunderstanding? Did leaders of the fusion community fail to see the cause-and-effect relationship of their consistently poor public communications? Or did they have an unspoken agreement that false appearances of fusion progress were necessary to maintain public excitement and public funding for fusion?

ITER, The Grand Illusion: A Forensic Investigation of Power Claims, featuring members of Congress, prominent representatives of the fusion community, and the two former representatives of the ITER organization, reveals the details of this story.

Questions and Critique
(Spoiler Alert: Read This Section After You View the Film)

Your film appears to use the dishonest promotions of JET and ITER to discredit the entire field of nuclear fusion.
This is not the intent of the film, but it is certainly a consequence. Other lines of fusion research have been and are being pursued honestly. But the false claims about JET were used to sell the false hope about ITER and it has been these two reactors that have dominated the public discussion about fusion for the past two decades. For people who want real energy from fusion, the dispelled illusions about JET and ITER do not leave any experimental results to support evidence of fusion as a viable energy source.

Aren’t there other approaches to fusion besides tokamak experiments?
With the scientific method in mind, what are those experimental results? Rather than the imputed significance of the triple-product values, what are the physical power values of the reactors? It’s been 70 years. Billions of dollars of public money have been spent. Can any fusion approach make enough net power to light a single light bulb?

Fusion research has been really hard. It’s been more complex and difficult than researchers imagined.
Maybe nature is trying to tell them something.

But they’ve learned a lot in 70 years.
Good for them. When can I make a cup of tea from fusion energy?

Your film uses the term “energy” when the term “power” should be used.
When I use my own words, I hope that I have not made that mistake. However, when I am commenting on public statements made by fusion representatives or organizations, and they have used the incorrect terminology, as they often did, I have maintained their wording for historical accuracy. It’s worth noting that no fusion result, to my knowledge, has ever been reported in energy values. Instead, they have always been reported in power values.

Sometimes your film uses the term “power” but you do not specify whether it is in the form of heat or electricity.
In my own narrative, I have made my best attempt to be specific about the form of power. However, the fusion representatives were consistently ambiguous, particularly when discussing the planned “50 MW input” to ITER. For historical accuracy, and contextual accuracy, I have referred to their wording as they provided it.

Your film didn’t explain in detail where all of the 300 to 400 megawatts of input power would go.
I provided only a cursory list, as shown at 00:14:18. I chose not to make the film longer and more complex by providing this deeply technical information. For technically curious reviewers, Daniel Jassby has an answer here.

How credible are the sources for the 300 MW input power value?
Please judge for yourself, here. Note that Benfatto’s value of 440 MW is probably the most accurate and authoritative value.

If the ITER reactor is not designed to produce net power, what is its real scientific purpose?
There are several objectives but the primary one is to test whether scaling up plasma volume from JET to ITER can achieve a significantly higher thermal plasma power output rate than the injected plasma heating power input rate. Numerically, they would like to see this ratio increase an order of magnitude; from 67% to 1000%. Secondarily, they would like to see whether the newer design and technologies will permit an extended reaction duration. Whereas JET’s peak plasma output power rate lasted for milliseconds, they would like to see ITER’s peak plasma output power rate last for 500 seconds.

Your film shows examples of fusion representatives making false and misleading claims. But are these cherry-picked?
According to a Nov. 9, 2018, letter I received from Johannes Schwemmer, the director of the European ITER Domestic Agency, the accurate way to represent the primary objective and goal of ITER is to “ensure that there is no possible misunderstanding on the ITER energy gain of 10 – [that it is] linked only to the plasma and not to the energy balance of the overall ITER plant.” He was right, even though he didn’t follow his own advice.

According to European Commissioner Arias Cañete, in an April 25, 2018, response to questions posed to him by members of the European Parliament in response to my investigation, the accurate and transparent way to depict the performance of ITER is “comparing the thermal power output of the plasma with the thermal power input into the plasma.” Cañete, too, explained this accurately.

But if you can find more than a handful of such examples prior to 2017, when I exposed “The ITER Power Amplification Myth,” please tell me. Otherwise, look at all of these examples of false and misleading claims about JET and ITER.

Perhaps your film cherry-picked examples of the people who were misled?
I know of no journalist or organization, prior to 2017, that, when discussing the expected power values of the ITER reactor, clearly differentiated between the physics values (plasma power) and the overall reactor values. There are hundreds of examples of wrong or ambiguous statements about the expected power values of ITER.

I would have liked to hear more about the first wall. I’m a materials person, and I have always been convinced that the first-wall issue (the heavy neutron bombardment that the container will undergo, causing rapid embrittlement) is a major problem.
No doubt, the first-wall issue is a point of major concern, and something that the fusion scientists are keen on testing. First-wall issues, tritium issues, beryllium concerns, and many other such technical concerns are valid. This film attempts to focus on the manner, deceptive in fact, in which the project was sold. It also attempts to reach audiences that do not neccesarily have the technical understanding of fusion physics and engineering. Daniel Jassby’s article “Fusion Reactors: Not What They’re Cracked up to Be,” on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Web site is an excellent resource for such details.

After reviewing the film, I am left wondering whether there is there a minimum threshold for declaring the project a failure and stop it’s continuity, or in other words, is there a clear line where they will decide to drop it? (CERN is a parallel.)
First, please note that there are various fusion approaches. The tokamak approach, for example, was once championed by Robert Hirsch, but he now favors a different fusion research approach. But fusion seems to spark an eternal quest among a segment of the scientific community and it is unlikely that its quest will ever be abandoned. But fusion, like any valid science, should be pursued by those who are interested in it. However, there is the question of using other people’s money to pursue fusion. To fund ITER, no performance threshold from prior reactors was required by legislators. When TFTR and JET later provided results, those data were falsely conveyed to legislators to sustain the continued funding for ITER. To fund the EU DEMO-class reactor, there appears to be no performance threshold required for ITER. In fact, the false claims of the 50/500 input/output was on track to be used to to sustain the EU DEMO funding. Big fusion does not follow the scientific model or the funding model as we know it.