42. Senior Market Advisor Falls for ITER Bait-and-Switch

Aug 082020
 
Ariel Cohen, Forbes.com Contributor

Ariel Cohen, Forbes.com Contributor

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By Steven B. Krivit
August 8, 2020

Ariel Cohen, a contributor to Forbes.com, fell yesterday for the longstanding bait-and-switch trick that has been used to fund and support the ITER fusion reactor project.

“ITER is supposed to become the world’s first reactor capable of self-burning plasma and would ideally generate up to 10 times the amount of heat that it consumes,” Cohen wrote. “If successful, the reactor will draw 50 megawatts (MW) of electricity to ignite the fusion process and produce stable plasma. This plasma would then put out some 500MW of power (in short bursts), thereby generating a whopping 10x energy return.”

In reality, the reactor will momentarily draw 400 megawatts of electrical power to ignite the fusion process and then draw 300 megawatts of electrical power throughout the 500-second fusion experiment.

If all goes according to plan, the reactor will have created a fusion plasma that has 10 times the power injected into the plasma and 3.3 times the electrical power used to heat the plasma. That will be a major breakthrough because, in the best fusion experiment so far, a reactor has produced only 0.65 times the power injected into the plasma and about 0.2 times the electrical power used to heat the plasma.

If ITER succeeds in its plasma amplification goal, it will become the first fusion reactor to make the same amount of power that it consumes. This too will be a breakthrough because, in the best fusion experiment so far, the reactor lost almost 700 million Watts of electricity just to make 16 million Watts of hot neutrons for about 1 second.

Cohen is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and the founding principal of International Market Analysis, a Washington, D.C.-based global risk advisory firm. He also consults in the public and private sectors.

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