47. European ITER Domestic Agency Removes False Fusion Claims

 

Return to ITER Power Facts Main Page

By Steven B. Krivit
Sept. 12, 2020

Last week, in response to letters from New Energy Times, the European ITER domestic agency removed its three primary — and false — claims about the promised results for ITER from its Web site.

The agency, known by the trade name Fusion for Energy, under the leadership of Director Johannes Schwemmer, had published the false claims about the forthcoming ITER reactor earlier this year. Schwemmer’s agency made the false claims despite the fact that he knew the accurate and honest way to describe the ITER design objective, and he knew about his agency’s earlier false and misleading claims. Schwemmer has been one of the primary participants in the ITER reactor fraud, a bait-and-switch trick to gain support and money by grossly exaggerating and falsifying the project’s design objectives and promised outcome.

The ITER project is managed by the central ITER organization headquarters. Secondarily, activities in Europe, China, India, South Korea, the Russian Federation, and the United States are managed by their respective domestic agencies.

Schwemmer removed the following false claims:

• ITER will be the first fusion device to generate more energy than it consumes.
• ITER is designed to produce excess heat at a rate that would be sufficient to satisfy the electricity needs of a medium-size town.
• ITER will generate 10 times more power than it uses.

New Energy Times began writing to Schwemmer and his staff in June 2018, pointing out an earlier set of false and misleading claims on the agency’s Web site, only one of which Schwemmer corrected – and that only partially. Schwemmer complained to us on Dec. 18, 2018, that he felt unfairly judged. He expressed indignation that our letters suggested that his organization was deliberately making fraudulent claims. He said he would not discuss the issue further with us.

On July 20, 2020, after we discovered the new set of false claims, we wrote to Beatrix Vierkorn-Rudolph, the chair of the governing board of Fusion for Energy. We also provided suggestions for accurate corrections. We received no response from Vierkorn-Rudolph. Three days later, we publicly reported Schwemmer’s new false, fraudulent claims.

If the new claims were the result of a clerical error, Vierkorn-Rudolph did not tell us. If Vierkorn-Rudolph asked Schwemmer to make any corrections, we don’t know what happened to her request.

A month later, on Aug. 27, 2020, we wrote to Kadri Simson, the European Commissioner responsible for the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Energy. One week later, Schwemmer made the necessary corrections. (Change log) Two days later, a staff member wrote to New Energy Times on behalf of Simson. (See below)

Schwemmer and his agency have now published accurate, honest, and transparent claims. The text in the corrected claims is similar to that which we suggested to Vierkorn-Rudolph. One major difference is that the new claims are even more conservative than we suggested. Rather than using the phrase “thermal power,” which could contribute to further misunderstandings that the ITER reactor is intended to produce “power,” the text says that ITER will “generate heat.”

The claims now focus on the legitimate design goal of ITER, a tenfold amplification in the rate of heat produced by the fusion reactions compared with the rate of heat injected into the reaction chamber. The overall reactor itself will produce no net power and will not demonstrate that producing commercial energy from fusion is possible.

---

April 23, 2021 Update: After reviewing the Benfatto paper, and the 500 MW of electrical power required to start the fusion reaction, we have determined that two of the “corrected” claims noted above are also inaccurate. The “corrected” language still creates a false association between the physics reactions and the overall device power balance. The language “it will be the first fusion device to generate more heat than used to start the fusion reaction” is technically accurate, but misleading because it omits the majority of electrical power needed to start the fusion reaction. The overall reactor, accounting for the full rate of power required to start the fusion reactions, will generate no more power than is produced by the fusion reactions.

Schwemmer knows the accurate way to represent the primary objective and goal of ITER; 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.”