38. Founders of Renaissance Fusion Perpetuate ITER Deception

Return to ITER Power Facts Main Page

By Steven B. Krivit
June 18, 2020

Another news magazine has repeated the false claim that ITER is designed to produce net power.

Founders of Renaissance Fusion, a stellarator start-up based in France and in the U.S., published their article in Power Engineering International magazine today.

The authors and founders, Martin Kupp and Francesco Volpe, wrote that “the reactor will produce net energy” and that it will “produce net power by 2035.”

In the next sentence, the authors tried to support their claim by stating what the reactor is actually designed to do: produce a fusion plasma that emits particles and thermal power 10 times greater than the injected thermal power.

But readers who are not experts in fusion won’t realize that this is a bait-and-switch trick. This type of deception has been used by the fusion community for decades. If ITER works as planned, the net power of the reactor will be about zero net Watts.