7. EUROfusion’s Role in the ITER Power Deception
NOTE: On Nov. 23, in response to a Nov. 21 letter from this writer, EUROfusion made all necessary corrections to its three Web pages that contained false and misleading statements about ITER.
Nov. 7, 2017 – By Steven B. Krivit
Return to ITER Power Facts Main Page
The EUROfusion organization has been a key participant in the ITER power deception. Three pages from the EUROfusion organization’s Web site illuminate the organization’s false and misleading claims.
Generally, misleading or deceptive claims in science are not tolerated. In this case, however, members of the worldwide fusion community — with Japan a notable exception — have participated in or allowed the deception about nuclear fusion progress to run for decades.
The Japanese ITER team is the only participating group to clearly and transparently state the power capability of ITER:
“Will ITER make more energy than it consumes? … ITER is about equivalent to a zero (net) power reactor, when the plasma is burning.” (Archive copy)
The principles of transparency and integrity, along with excellence, compose the three core values of the Directorate-General for Energy of the European Commission. The three annotated pages, as shown below, reveal EUROfusion’s failure to achieve its own core values and show its complicity with the ITER power deception.
The motive for the unscientific behavior is easily explained. In the 1970s, fusion proponents told the public that, in the 1990s, fusion reactors would provide virtually limitless pollution-free energy. However, not one Watt of net thermal power, let alone one Watt of electricity, has ever been produced by controlled nuclear fusion on the Earth. Fusion advocates have subsequently struggled to keep the public funding flowing for large-scale fusion projects like ITER.
The European fusion advocates are not alone. American fusion proponents participated in the deception, as well, as shown in the New Energy Times report “The Selling of ITER.” A public fact sheet on the U.S. ITER organization Web site includes a deceptive statement that suggests that the 5,000 Watts of real electrical power used by a typical U.S. home can be compared with the 10 MW of thermal power produced by the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory TFTR reactor on Nov. 2, 1994. (Archive copy)
This is false and misleading because the TFTR reactor produced not a single Watt of net thermal power. The fact sheet also suggests that the 5,000 Watts of real electrical power can be compared with the 500 MW of thermal power that will be produced by ITER. This, too, is false and misleading because, if thermal output of ITER is converted to electricity with 40% efficiency, the real, usable output is less than zero.
Here are the links to the EUROfusion Web pages depicted in the images below:
