12. Evidence of the ITER Power Deception

Dec. 11, 2017 – By Steven B. Krivit

Return to ITER Power Facts Main Page

Recently, some organizations involved in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) program have corrected false and misleading information published on their Web sites, after reading articles published by New Energy Times.

This report summarizes the way that some ITER proponents have misled non-experts about the potential power output of the ITER experimental nuclear fusion reactor, once it becomes operational. The misrepresentation is not exclusive to ITER; it has been a systemic problem in the fusion community for decades. ITER is simply the largest and most recent fusion project.

Specifically, the proponents conflated the power gain ratio of the plasma (technically known as the fusion Q) with the power gain ratio of the device (technically known as the engineering Q). They took the value for Q-fusion and convinced non-experts that it was the value for Q-engineering. They did this not only by switching the Q-values but also by hiding the actual input power required for the reactor. This report also identifies people and organizations who have published false statements about the ITER design and function based on the information they were given by the ITER organization.

A decade ago, Neil Calder, a former ITER spokesman, taught attendees at his international communicators’ workshop how to promote ITER to the world:

As described in previous reports in this series, the ITER reactor will produce at best 1.6 times the input power, given the fusion reactor’s design. According to the Japanese ITER group, ITER will not produce any net energy. (Archive copy) The Calder claim was false.

The ITER organization published similar misleading information on its Web site. Instead of using the word “energy,” as Calder did with his trainees, the organization used the term “fusion power.” The term “fusion power,” as explained in “The ITER Power Amplification Myth,” can mean two different things, depending on the context. ITER managers created the impression that the ITER reactor will produce 10 times more power than it will use, although they knew that this was impossible.

In fact, only the plasma would produce 10 times more power than it would consume. The managers said that ITER would require only 50 MW to run; however, the complete fusion device will require the support of multiple component sub-systems that collectively consume at least 300 MW. The organization did not openly publish the 300 MW value. The deceptive communication effectively flipped the values for Q-fusion and Q-engineering.

The switch is similar to claiming that a new high-tech automobile will be capable of speeds of 200 miles per hour although that is only the engine’s capability when connected to a dynamometer rather than installed in a car and connected to a chassis, transmission, and wheels. After all loads, transmission losses, and air resistance are accounted for, the high-tech car can go only 80 miles per hour.

This diagram explains how the ITER Q-switch worked:

The Q-switch has been used in the promotion of other experimental nuclear fusion reactors, as well. Ian Chapman, the chief executive officer of the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority, employed the switch as recently as Nov. 12, 2017, when he was interviewed in the U.K. Sunday Times about JET, the Joint European Torus fusion reactor in the U.K. Chapman told the Sunday Times that JET produced 16 MW of electricity. He also told the newspaper that JET produced as much electricity as four windmills. After I contacted Chapman and the editors of the Sunday Times, Chapman directed them to change his claim of the production of 16 MW of electricity to 16 MW of “fusion power.”

That didn’t substantially clarify the problem. Because he didn’t explain the hidden meaning of “fusion power” and because he maintained his analogy to wind turbines, which produce real power, he still misled readers. The published correction notice was no better; it said that JET had produced “16 MW of power.” Neither the article nor the correction notice gave readers any indication that the 16 MW required a total input power of 700 MW of input electricity, a net loss of 684 MW of real power.

But Chapman’s behavior is nothing new in the fusion field. Fusion proponents have conflated the values for plasma power gain (Q-fusion) and reactor power gain (Q-engineering) for years, if not decades. In the U.S., records of two congressional hearings show that fusion representatives informed Congress about the 24 MW value for JET but not the 700 MW value. Meanwhile, the fusion representatives made statements to members of Congress claiming that JET “generated a few million watts of fusion power, enough to power thousands of homes” and that “ITER will produce 500 million watts for 10 minutes.” A page on the ITER Web site still says, “JET produced 16 MW of fusion power from a total input power of 24 MW.” That, too, is false.

I have sent e-mails directly to Bernard Bigot, the director-general of ITER, Won Namkung, the outgoing ITER Council chair, and Arun Srivastava, the incoming ITER Council chair, advising them of the misleading statements on the ITER Web site. They have made only partial corrections. ITER’s “Facts and Figures” Web page, for members of the news media, is now accurate and unambiguous, as are two other pages on the ITER Web site. But false and misleading statements remain on two other pages on the site. As it stands today, the ITER Web site is internally inconsistent from this page to this page and the home page. (See this report for details.)

The home page and the “In a Few Lines” pages still employ the Q-switch. They give non-experts the misleading impression that the reactor will produce 10 times the power it consumes. Second, ITER, as misleadingly shown on the ITER Web site (see image below), is not designed to be “the first fusion device to create net energy.”

The values shown above supposedly to support the claim of “net energy” are not the numbers used to calculate the reactor’s power gain, that is, the Q-engineering value. Q-engineering is defined, for example, in Jeffrey P. Friedberg’s textbook Plasma Physics and Fusion Energy: “Qe = (total electric power out – electric power in)/electric power in.” The values displayed by the ITER organization, 500 MW and 50 MW, are the numbers used to calculate the gain of only the plasma, that is, the Q-fusion value. The plasma power requirements are a fraction of the entire reactor’s power requirements.

If the ITER organization wanted to be accurate and transparent, the sentence would read “ITER will be the first fusion device to create a plasma with net energy.” Their sentence is carefully conceived and uses the same logic that has been used for decades to switch values of plasma power gain (Q-fusion) for reactor power gain (Q-engineering). The organization has allowed the misleading statement to stand for eight years, including a year since New Energy Times informed Laban Coblentz, the communication head of ITER the organization.

A year ago, when I began asking Coblentz for the value of the full power requirement for the reactor, he didn’t provide one, even after three requests. Instead, he wrote that power gain of the reactor (Q-engineering) was “completely irrelevant to the success of ITER.” He explained that ITER is intended to demonstrate net power gain only in a fusion plasma (Q-fusion) rather than net power gain in the entire reactor system. While entirely true and accurate, this is not what the organization said on its home page a year ago, and it is not what it says right now.

In fact, for years the EUROfusion organization had the same “net energy” claim about ITER on its Web site. But two days after I sent an e-mail to the organization on Nov. 21, 2017, it removed that claim from the ITER page and accurately added the “net energy” claim to another page that included the description for the next fusion reactor, called DEMO.

Despite the fact that the ITER Web site home page and the “In a Few Lines” page are still employing the Q-switch, Coblentz, in a Nov. 20, 2017, news article on another Web site, began accurately describing what ITER is designed to do: “ITER will have a Q of 10 or greater: 50 megawatts of thermal power heating the plasma to produce, via fusion, a thermal output power of 500 megawatts or more.”

Evidence of the Q-Switch Deception

The evidence for the deception is (or was) widespread, consistent, and long-standing. Below are examples of prominent English-language Web sites and news media outlets that have re-published the false and misleading claims made by the ITER organization.

I have communicated directly with Petra Nieckchen, the head of the EUROfusion communications office, and Agneta Rising, the director-general of the World Nuclear Association. They have issued corrections on their respective Web sites. I corrected the ITER entry in the English-language version of Wikipedia two weeks ago.

Nieckchen told me that she knew of nobody who felt deceived by the ITER representatives. Rather than debate the perceptions of other people, I asked her whether she published the false statements on her Web site knowingly or unknowingly. The discussion ended there; she didn’t respond.

The list below is based on an English-language search of Web sites and news articles that mention ITER power claims. The first version of each statement is the way it was published. The second versions are what the statements would look like if published correctly. False words and values are shown in red. Correct words and values are shown in green.

• Wikipedia (Corrected on Nov. 26, 2017): “The ITER fusion reactor has been designed to produce 500 megawatts of output power for around twenty minutes while needing 50 megawatts to operate.” (Archive copy)
  FACTUAL STATEMENT: “The ITER fusion reactor has been designed to produce 500 megawatts of output power for around twenty minutes while needing 300 megawatts to operate.”

• EUROfusion Web site, JET page (Corrected on Nov. 23, 2017): “ITER, which is designed to deliver ten times more power than it consumes.” (Archive copy)
  FACTUAL STATEMENT: “ITER, which is designed to deliver 1.6 times more power than it consumes.”

• EUROfusion Web site, ITER page (Corrected on Nov. 23, 2017): “[ITER will] generate 500 MW fusion power, which is equivalent to the capacity of a medium-size power plant.” (Archive copy)
  FACTUAL STATEMENT: “[ITER will] generate 500 MW thermal power, which is equivalent to one-third the thermal capacity of a medium-size power plant.”

• EUROfusion Web site, FAQ page (Corrected on Nov. 23, 2017): “Since ITER is expected to produce 10 times the power consumed …” (Archive copy)
  FACTUAL STATEMENT: “Since ITER is expected to produce 1.6 times the power consumed …”

• World Nuclear Association Web site (Corrected on Nov. 29, 2017): “ITER is to operate at 500 MW (for at least 400 seconds continuously) with less than 50 MW of input power, a tenfold energy gain.” (Archive copy)
  FACTUAL STATEMENT: “ITER is to operate at 500 MW (for at least 400 seconds continuously) with 300 MW of input power, a 1.6-times power gain.”

• European Parliament (November 2017 study): “ITER is designed to produce 500 MW of fusion power from 50 MW of input power, i.e. a ten-fold return on energy.” (Archive copy)
  FACTUAL STATEMENT: “ITER is designed to produce a plasma that has a thermal output of 500 MW using 50 MW to heat the plasma, a tenfold gain in plasma power.”

• U.S. Department of Energy, Sept. 26, 2017, press release: “ITER can produce 10 times more power than it consumes.” (Archive copy)
  FACTUAL STATEMENT: “ITER will be able to produce 1.6 times more power than it consumes.”

• U.S. ITER organization Fact Sheet: “The typical U.S. home presently uses about 5,000 watts of electricity on a continuous basis. [ITER] is expected to produce 500 million watts.” (Archive copy)
  FACTUAL STATEMENT: “The typical U.S. home uses about 5,000 watts of electricity on a continuous basis. [ITER] is expected to produce about zero usable watts.” 

• Princeton University, Oct. 5, 2017, news article: “[ITER is] a massive project that will provide 120 megawatts of power — enough to light up a small city.” (Archive copy)
  FACTUAL STATEMENT: “[ITER is] a massive project that will provide the equivalent of zero megawatts of electrical power — not enough to light up a small bulb.” 

• Geoff Brumfiel, Scientific American, June 2012: “It will generate around 500 megawatts of power, 10 times the energy needed to run it.” (Archive copy)
  FACTUAL STATEMENT: “The plasma will generate around 500 megawatts of thermal power, 10 times the energy needed to heat it.“

• Raffi Khatchadourian, New Yorker, March 3, 2014: “[ITER will] produce ten times the energy fired into the plasma, at half a gigawatt.” (Archive copy)
  COMPLETE AND TRANSPARENT STATEMENT: “[ITER will] produce plasma heating ten times the power injected into the plasma, at half a gigawatt, when provided with 300 megawatts of electricity.”

• Ethan Siegel, Forbes, Aug. 27, 2015: “The breakeven energy point in nuclear fusion [is] where we get out as much energy as we put in. … The reality is we’ve moved ever closer to the breakeven point.” (Archive copy)
  FACTUAL STATEMENT: “The breakeven energy point in nuclear fusion [is] where we get out as much energy as we put in. … The reality is that the closest we’ve gotten is 1% of engineering breakeven, although we have gotten within 65% of scientific breakeven.”

• Daniel Clery, Science, Nov. 19, 2015: “The ITER project aims to show that nuclear fusion — the power source of the sun and stars — is technically feasible as a source of energy. Despite more than 60 years of work, researchers have failed to achieve a fusion reaction that produces more energy than it consumes. ITER … is the biggest attempt so far and is predicted to produce at least 500 megawatts of power from a 50 megawatt input.” (Archive copy)
  COMPLETE AND TRANSPARENT STATEMENT: “The ITER project aims to show that a plasma can generate more thermal power than it consumes. ITER … is the biggest attempt so far and is predicted to produce at least 500 megawatts of thermal power from a 50 megawatt thermal input and, in total, a 300 MW electric input.”

• Nathaniel Scharping, Discover, March 23, 2016: “ITER is projected to produce 500 MW of power with an input of 50 MW … enough energy to power roughly 50,000 households.” (Archive copy)
  FACTUAL STATEMENT: “ITER is projected to produce 500 MW of thermal power with an input of 300 MW of electrical power. If the output heat is converted to electricity (not part of the ITER design), this gives the electric equivalent of 200 MW — a net loss of 100 MW — which is not enough power for a single light bulb.”

• Davide Castelvecchi and Jeff Tollefson, Nature, May 26, 2016: “[ITER] is predicted to produce about 500 megawatts of electricity.” (Archive copy)
  FACTUAL STATEMENT: “[ITER] is predicted to produce about 300 megawatts of net thermal power. If this were converted to electricity (not part of the ITER design), it would result in a 100 MW net loss of power.”

• Dave Loschiavo, Ars Technica, July 3, 2016: “[ITER] is projected to produce 500 MW of fusion energy while consuming 50MW to heat the hydrogen.” (Archive copy)
  COMPLETE AND TRANSPARENT STATEMENT: “[ITER] is projected to produce 500 MW of thermal fusion power while consuming 50MW of thermal power to heat the hydrogen.”

• Damian Carrington, The Guardian, Oct. 17, 2016: “ITER should be completed in 15-20 years and aims to deliver 500MW of power, about the same as today’s large fission reactors.” (Archive copy)
  FACTUAL STATEMENT: “ITER should be completed in 15-20 years and aims to deliver 500MW of power, but unlike today’s large fission reactors, it won’t produce enough heat to be converted into any net electrical power.”

• Damian Carrington, The Guardian, Dec. 2, 2016: “‘We are convinced we can deliver hundreds of megawatts through ITER,’ up to 10 times more energy than is put in, says David Campbell.”
  FACTUAL STATEMENT: “‘We are convinced we can deliver hundreds of megawatts of plasma heating through ITER,’ up to 10 times more thermal power than the heat that is injected, says David Campbell.”

• Henry Fountain, New York Times, March 27, 2017: “ITER will benefit from its larger size and will produce about 10 times more power than it consumes.” (Archive copy)
  FACTUAL STATEMENT: “ITER will benefit from its larger size and will produce about 1.6 times more power than it consumes.”

• Fraser Cain, Universe Today Web site, May 28, 2017: “If all goes well, ITER will have a ratio of 10. In other words, for every 10 MW of energy pumped in, it’ll generate 100 MW of usable power.” (Archive copy)
  FACTUAL STATEMENT: “If all goes well, the fusion plasma in ITER will have a ratio of 10. In other words, for every 10 MW of thermal power pumped into the plasma, it’ll generate 100 MW of thermal power, though no usable power.”

• Jing Cao, Bloomberg, June 29, 2017: “[ITER’s] developers say it’ll produce 500 megawatts of power using 50 megawatts to get the reaction going.” (Archive copy)
  FACTUAL STATEMENT: “[ITER’s] developers say it’ll produce 500 megawatts of thermal power using 50 megawatts of heat to get the reaction going. In fact, it will need 400 MW of electricity to get the reaction going and 300 MW of electricity to keep it going during peak fusion output.”

• Edwin Cartlidge, Nature, July 6, 2017: “ITER [will] generate electricity only in bursts of a few minutes.” (Archive copy)
  FACTUAL STATEMENT: “ITER [will] generate heat only in bursts of a few minutes.”

• Edwin Cartlidge, BBC News, July 11, 2017: “[ITER] is designed to generate 10 times the power that it consumes.” (Archive copy)
  FACTUAL STATEMENT: “[ITER] is designed to generate 1.6 times the power that it consumes.”

• Jason Socrates Bardi, Inside Science, July 17, 2017: “The goal of ITER is to prove it’s possible to produce a net gain of energy. That means it will produce more power than it takes to make it. It will produce 500 megawatts of output power but only use 50 megawatts of input power.” (Archive copy)
  FACTUAL STATEMENT: The goal of ITER is to prove it’s possible to produce a net gain in fusion plasma power. That means it will produce fusion particles with more thermal power than is required to heat the plasma. It will produce 500 megawatts of thermal output power but use only 300 megawatts of input power during peak plasma production.”

This list reveals the widespread link between the misleading information published by fusion representatives and the false information given to the public. In fact, in English-language searches, news stories that clearly and correctly report the expected power gain of ITER are difficult to find.

Members of the fusion community who deny intent to mislead must answer these two questions: 1) The English Wikipedia page for ITER changed sometime between March 2, 2010, and March 1, 2011, from clearly stating the power gain as a Q-fusion value to representing the power gain as a Q-engineering value. Why? 2. That error remained on the page until I corrected it on Nov. 26, 2017. Why did no fusion expert in seven years see that error and correct it?

There is a direct relationship between the changes on Wikipedia between March 2, 2010, and March 1, 2011, and the ITER Web site. According to the archive.org Web site, ITER began publishing its “Facts and Figures” Web page during that period. The first version of that page on record at archive.org is from Aug. 1, 2010. It contains the Q-switch.

The ITER Q-switch deception cannot be broadly attributed to all fusion researchers. Consider Hartmut Zohm, the head of the Tokamak Scenario Development Division at the Max-Planck-Institute of Plasma Physics, who has not been involved in the misleading claims. When I asked him several months ago for the ITER reactor power values necessary to calculate the engineering Q, Zohm immediately and clearly gave me the correct numbers. Zohm was honest with me but seemed unaware of the extent of false public statements about the ITER power claims.

Consider Chapman, who compared the net power output of JET (negative 684 MW) to the power output of wind turbines (positive 16 MW). After I brought this to his attention, after he agreed with me about the errors, he made limited changes to his quotes in the Sunday Times and allowed the fundamental misleading aspect, the conflation of the Q-values, to remain.

There is little room for doubt about his intentions. He did, however, get a commitment from the U.K. government, announced on Dec. 7, for another $115 million. When a person knowingly misrepresents facts, then takes other people’s money based on the misrepresentation, that’s fraud, and that’s what Chapman did.

The Q-switch with JET and ITER go hand-in-hand, as evidenced, for example, by this news report in the U.K. Register:

JET is a European project involving 40 laboratories and 350 scientists. In 1997, it set a record, producing 16MW of fusion power from a total input power of 24MW.

ITER, however, is a scaled-up version of JET currently under construction in the south of France and planned to open in 2025 – a fusion reactor that aims to use 50 MW to generate 500 MW for 500 seconds.

The U.S. fusion advocates have also employed the Q-switch. Although many careful and accurate statements on the U.S. ITER Web site discuss Q-values and clearly associate such values with thermal gain of the plasma, a statement on the U.S. ITER Web site conflates 5,000 Watts of real electrical power (a Q-engineering value) with 10 megawatts of “fusion energy” (a Q-fusion value). (Archive copy) The 5,000 Watt value is real, usable net power. The 10 MW value, obtained in the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory on Nov. 2, 1994, was created at a cost of 500 MW of electricity. TFTR did not produce 10 MW, it lost 490 MW. But non-experts would not realize this by reading the paragraph below.

Given the preponderance of misrepresentations of the ITER power values on prominent Web sites, in news outlets such as the New York Times, Bloomberg, and the BBC, in science publications such as Nature, in major worldwide Web references such as Wikipedia, EUROfusion, and World Nuclear Association, and in a publication of the European Parliament, logical conclusions are that: 1) The fusion representatives who created the misrepresentations had to have known of the effects of their public relations efforts; 2) A significant number of fusion scientists who were not directly responsible for the creation of the misrepresentations must have read about their project in the news media and known of the falsehoods — yet for at least five years before October 2017, they corrected none of the falsehoods.

Even the director-general of ITER, Bernard Bigot, had to have seen the falsehood in this Nature article, which says that ITER “is predicted to produce about 500 megawatts of electricity.” He added a comment to the article after it published.

Was the public broadly misled? The list above shows that, yes, it was. Was the Q-switch intentional on the part of the scientists? In most cases, this is difficult to prove. Was the Q-switch intentional on the part of the people — like Neil Calder and Laban Coblentz — whose job it was to create, manage and track the worldwide public communications of their respective organizations? Clearly, they were in control of the public messaging about ITER and fully aware of the results.

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Dec. 15, 2017 Update: ITER India Domestic Agency

Subject: False and Misleading Statement on India ITER Web site
Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2017 00:44:38 -0800
From: Steven B. Krivit

To: Shishir P. Deshpande, ITER India Project Director
cc: Bernard Bigot, ITER Director-General
cc: Arun Srivastava, Incoming ITER Council Chair

Dear Dr. Deshpande,

On the home page of the ITER India Web site, https://www.iter-india.org, you have a major factual error. It says:

“ITER will produce at least ten times more energy than the energy required to operate it.”

The amazing thing is that this error has been on your Web site at least since March 6, 2009, and for almost nine years, nobody has noticed it, nobody has corrected it.

There are three ways you can correct it:
1. ITER will produce at least 1.6 times more thermal power than the electrical power required to operate it.
2. ITER will produce 0.6 times the thermal power, if converted to electrical power with 40% efficiency, than the electrical power required to operate it.
3. ITER’s plasma will produce at least ten times more power than the power injected into it.

Most kind regards,

Steven

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Dec. 16, 2017 Update: Effect of ITER Press Release

Sometime before Dec. 6, 2017, ITER director general Bernard Bigot and his PR chief Laban Coblentz issued a press release, embargoed for Dec. 6, that contained more falsehoods. They wrote that ITER is “a project to prove that fusion power can be produced on a commercial scale and is sustainable.” They also wrote “How much power will [ITER] provide? The ITER tokamak will produce 500 megawatts of thermal power.”

As before, we can depend on the Japanese ITER team for the truth. Here’s the truth about ITER’s projected net power (Source): “Will ITER make more energy than it consumes? … ITER is about equivalent to a zero (net) power reactor, when the plasma is burning.”

Here’s the truth about the goal of ITER (Source): “The goal of ITER is to achieve plasma of temperature, density, etc. at the same level as that of the nuclear fusion reactor.”

The ITER team press release triggered several news stories, some of them, as before, successfully deceiving more journalists:

• Charles Q. Choi, Live Science, Dec. 7, 2017: “Its goal? To fuse hydrogen atoms and generate 10 times more power than goes into it by the 2030s … “The ITER tokamak should generate 500 megawatts of power …”
• Charlie Wood, Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 11, 2017: “If successful, the colossal International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) will produce 10 times as much energy as it takes to run.”
• Alan Boyle, Geekwire, Dec. 6, 2017: “ITER’s ambition to demonstrate a sustained fusion reaction that produces a net gain in energy.”
• Anmar Frangoul, Yahoo, Dec. 7, 2017: “[ITER is] a  vast project to prove that fusion power is sustainable and can be generated on a commercial scale.”
• Sputnik News, Dec. 12, 2017: “ITER project scientists calculate that their working experimental generator will generate about 500 megawatts of energy, five times the amount it consumes through its operation.”
• Frank Jordans, Associated Press, Dec. 6, 2017: “”[ITER is] a vast international experiment designed to demonstrate that nuclear fusion can be a viable source of energy … scientists hope it will demonstrate that such a fusion reactor can produce more energy than it consumes.”
• World Nuclear News, Dec. 11, 2017: “[ITER] is a major international project to build a 500MW tokamak fusion device (requiring an input of 50MW) designed to prove the feasibility of fusion as a large-scale and carbon-free source of energy.”
• S.A. Mathieson, The Register, Sept. 25, 2017: “[JET] set a record, producing 16MW of fusion power from a total input power of 24MW. ITER, however, is a scaled-up version of JET currently under construction in the south of France planned to open in 2025 – a fusion reactor that aims to use 50MW to generate 500MW”
• Hannah Osborne, Newsweek, Dec. 6, 2017: “[ITER] would prove that fusion energy on a commercial scale is a possibility.”
• Peter Teffer, EU Observer, Nov. 15, 2017: “The current challenge is to prove that a fusion reactor can be built which produces more power than it consumes.”
• Lea Udov, Stakrog, Dec. 13, 2017: “The purpose of [ITER] is to build the largest experimental fusion reactor in which, by means of fusion, they would generate ten times as much energy as the reactor [uses].
• Agencia EFE, Dec. 6, 2017: “Iter, the giant experimental machine that wants to demonstrate the viability of fusion energy as an alternative to fossil [fuels].”
• Mark Lapedus, Semiconductor Engineering, Dec. 5, 2017: “The world record for fusion power is held by JET, a European effort. In 1997, JET produced 16 MW of fusion power from a total input power of 24 MW, according to ITER. In comparison, ITER is designed to produce 500 MW of fusion power from 50 MW of input power.”
• Natasha Romanzoti, Hypescience, Dec. 11, 2017, “So far, no one has built a fusion reactor that could supply a small town, a state or country. ITER is the hope to change that.”
• Veronique Le Billon, Les Echos, Dec. 12, 2017: “The goal of the “big machine”: to produce 500 megawatts with 50 megawatts of initial power.”
• RIA, Dec. 13, 2017: “It is assumed that in the operating mode the installation will give 500 megawatts of energy. This is five times more than it consumes.”
• Patrick J. Kiger, How Stuff Works, Dec. 19, 2017: “But so far, [experimental tokamaks have] required more energy to operate than the fusion generates. But ITER hopes to overcome that …  ITER will use 50 megawatts of power input to generate 500 megawatts of fusion energy, in the form of heat.”
• Christa Marshall, E&E News, Dec. 21, 2017: “The international demonstration is aiming to generate about 10 times its input power.”
• Christa Marshall, Science, Dec. 21, 2017: “The international demonstration is aiming to generate about 10 times its input power.”