#57. Open Letter to ITER Director-General About ITER Power Claims

Return to ITER Power Facts Main Page

November 3, 2020

Dr. Bernard Bigot
Director-General, ITER Organization 

Dear Dr. Bigot,

When one or two journalists fail to understand the facts about a science story, the failure is usually theirs. When nearly every journalist fails to understand the facts provided by scientists on a story, the failure likely falls on the shoulders of the scientists. When the communication failure is about the ITER project, that responsibility is yours.

That’s why I wrote to you on May 1, 2017. I encouraged you to direct your staff to revise statements on your organization’s Web site that were directly and significantly contributing to misunderstandings about the primary measurable design objective of the ITER project. For example:

Since that time, I have identified more than two hundred examples of the misunderstandings caused by the ambiguous, misleading, and at times false claims you and your peers have made about the ITER project. In that letter, I showed you these three examples:

• 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.”
• Geoff Brumfiel, Scientific American, June 2012, “It will generate around 500 megawatts of power, 10 times the energy needed to run it.”
• Nathaniel Scharping, Discover magazine, March 23, 2016, “ITER is projected to produce 500 MW of power with an input of 50 MW.”

But, after my May 2017 letter, you did not make any corrections to prevent these kinds of misunderstandings. Nor did you reply to my letter or dispute my criticism.

In particular, I would like to draw your attention to the false statement written by Davide Castelvecchi and Jeff Tollefson in Nature on May 26, 2016: “[ITER] is predicted to produce about 500 megawatts of electricity.” The reason this particular false statement is important is that you read the article, wrote to the authors, and asked them to add an extra statement from you about your confidence in achieving the first plasma deadline.

The fact that the authors said that ITER was designed to produce electricity didn’t concern you. The fact that the authors said that ITER was designed for a reactor (rather than a plasma) output of 500 MW didn’t concern you. You chose to allow the most prominent general science magazine in the world to publish an exaggerated claim about your project.

Soon after I wrote my first letter to you, I obtained information from three credible sources that the ITER reactor will require an electrical input rate of at least 300 MW to produce 500 MW of thermal power from fusion.

Four months after I wrote to you, your organization had done nothing to correct any of the false and misleading statements on its Web site. Among other claims, you and your team were still saying that the overall ITER reactor was going to consume power at a rate of only 50 MW.

I published the 300 MW value in October, and a month later you and your team corrected only the most egregiously false claims on the ITER Web site. But you chose to continue publishing an array of misleading claims about the primary measurable design objective of the reactor.

On March 28, 2018, I published a news report of your March 6, 2018, testimony before the U.S. Congress. Within 24 hours, you and your staff corrected more of the false power claims on your Web site. But several misleading claims remained. So on June 17, 2018, I wrote to you again and encouraged you to correct them so that ITER power claims are described accurately and transparently for your public audience. You are still publishing those misleading claims.

Separately, on Feb. 8, 2018, members of the European Parliament — Michèle Rivasi (Verts/ALE), Bart Staes (Verts/ALE), Rebecca Harms (Verts/ALE), and José Bové (Verts/ALE) — formally asked European Commissioner Miguel Arias-Cañete about the accuracy of the claims made by your organization.

On April 25, 2018, Commissioner Arias-Cañete, on behalf of the commission, reassured the members of Parliament that all the problems had been fixed and that the ITER organization was then accurately and transparently communicating its primary goal to the public. Here’s what Arias-Cañete wrote:

The IO Web site now states unambivalently that the performance of ITER will be assessed by the so-called fusion Q, i.e. by comparing the thermal power output of the plasma with the thermal power input into the plasma.

But the person who gave that information to the commissioner was mistaken. An array of misleading claims was then, and is now, on your organization’s Web site.

I have exchanged many letters with Massimo Garribba, director of Nuclear Energy, Safety & ITER in the European Commission’s Directorate General for Energy. I understand from him that the European Commission has formally requested the same things I have requested of you: accurate and transparent claims about ITER for a public audience that does not have expertise in nuclear fusion.

Your actions so far imply that accurately and transparently communicating the primary measurable design objective of the ITER project for a public audience is not a priority for you. Because you are the head of the world’s largest and most expensive science project on Earth, a lack of scientific integrity in your stewardship would be extremely concerning.

You have been entrusted to manage a public science project serving more than half the world’s population. It is your responsibility to ensure that what you promise to the public, in exchange for the tens of billions of dollars you have received from the public, is what you intend to deliver to the public.

You do not intend to deliver a fusion reactor that produces 10 times its input; you intend to deliver a fusion reactor that produces a fusion plasma that has 10 times the power injected into the plasma. I realize that the false and misleading claims on your organization’s Web site were there before you were appointed director-general. But it’s your responsibility now. And the fact that you inherited this problem from previous directors gives you a wonderful opportunity, if you choose to take it, to show your courage and fix this long-standing problem. I ask you one more time to communicate the primary measurable design objective of ITER with scientific integrity.

I am not going to analyze every claim on your organization’s Web site again. Instead, I’m going to summarize the conceptual requirements for you to ensure accurate and transparent claims about the primary measurable design objective of ITER for a public audience.

1. You must not create any impression that the reactor is designed to produce thermal power at a rate significantly greater than the power it is expected to consume. You must not claim that the reactor is designed to produce net power. Instead, you must ensure that any claims of power output or power gain explicitly refer to the relationship between the thermal power output of the plasma and the thermal power input to the plasma. As an aside, members of the public who understand the difference between the terms power and energy would certainly appreciate your organization’s improved and precise use of those terms, as well.

2. If you choose to continue publicizing the 500 MW value, you must ensure that your statements clearly associate that value with the produced plasma rather than the overall reactor.

3. If you choose to continue publicizing the 50 MW value, you must ensure that your statements associate that value with the injected thermal power used to heat the plasma. Because of the widespread confusion among input power to the reactor, input power to the reactor’s heating systems, and input power injected into the plasma, you would serve the public well by being explicit when mentioning the 50 MW value.

4. Claiming that the design is intended to produce a 500 MW plasma from 50 MW of injected thermal power would be appropriate. It would not be appropriate to create the impression that the ITER design is intended to produce a 500 MW plasma from only a 50 MW input because, based on the design, a 300 MW electrical input will be necessary to produce a 500 MW plasma.

5. The public, in general, does not know the scientific meaning of “fusion power.” It knows only the practical meaning. Unless you publish the definition of the scientific meaning of “fusion power” in your glossary, and you ensure that any future use of the scientific meaning of this phrase can be clearly distinguished by the public from the practical meaning of this phrase, your claims that ITER will produce “500 MW of fusion power” will mislead the public.

It is irrelevant that the “fusion power” phrase has been used for more than half a century by members of the fusion community to describe the thermal power output associated with fusion-produced nuclear particles. It was a bad idea when the practice of using the same two-word phrase for these two very different meanings started decades ago, and it’s still a bad idea today.

I realize that you may believe that the way you have been making claims about ITER is acceptable because this is how the fusion community has been doing it for decades. That doesn’t mean it was the right thing to do. As you know, because I have cc’d you on many of the e-mails, I’ve already been in direct contact with many of your colleagues and their respective public information officers.

Some of them, like Shishir P. Deshpande, at the time the ITER India project director, made a complete and appropriate correction to the ITER claims on his organization’s Web site without any argument or discussion. On the other end of the spectrum is Johannes Schwemmer, the director of the ITER European domestic agency. Three years and a dozen e-mails were insufficient to convince Schwemmer of the wisdom of making honest claims to the public. A request to his governing board was insufficient. He made the necessary corrections only after I contacted high-level officials in the European Commission. This left little doubt about his intentions. Now it’s time to find out your intentions.

Because you have not responded to either of my previous letters, I’m going to publish this as an open letter and send it to interested parties to ensure that you know about this letter.

I realize that your staff might need some time to go through the English and French versions of your organization’s Web site to perform the necessary corrections — if that is your intention. However, if you intend to ensure that your organization’s Web site communicates the primary measurable design objective of the ITER reactor in a manner that is accurate and transparent for public audience, please let me know by November 12.

Sincerely,
Steven B. Krivit
Publisher and Senior Editor, New Energy Times

DISTRIBUTION
European Commission
Ursula von der Leyen, President
Kadri Simson, Commissioner, Directorate-General for Energy
Ditte Juul Jørgensen, Director-General, Directorate-General for Energy
Massimo Garribba, Director, Nuclear Energy, Safety & ITER, DG for Energy
Klaus-Dieter Borchardt, Deputy Director-General, DG for Energy
Renatas Mazeika, Directorate D4: ITER, DG for Energy
Mariya Gabriel, Commissioner, DG for Research and Innovation
Jean-Eric Paquet, Director-General, DG for Research and Innovation

European Union/Parliament
Jeppe Tranholm-Mikkelsen, Secretary-General, Council of the European Union
Klaus Welle, Secretary-General, European Parliament
Riccardo Ribera D’alcala, DG, Internal Policies of the Union, European Parliament
Marian-Jean Marinescu, Member of the European Parliament, (Horizon Europe)
Michèle Rivasi, Member, European Parliament
Étienne Bassot, Director, Members’ Research Service, European Parliament
Jerzy Buzek, President, European Parliament (Former Chair, ITRE)
Cristian-Silviu Bu?oi, Chair, ITRE
Patrizia Toia, Vice-Chair, ITRE
Christian Ehler, Member, ITRE
Angelika Niebler, Member, ITRE

ITER
Luo Delong, ITER Council Chairman, Director of ITER Domestic Agency, China
Johannes Schwemmer, Director of ITER Domestic Agency, EU
Kathy McCarthy, Director of ITER Domestic Agency, US
Ujjwal Baruah, Director of ITER Domestic Agency, India
Shishir Deshpande, Former Director of ITER Domestic Agency, India
Kijung Jung, Director of ITER Domestic Agency, Korea
Makoto Sugimoto, Director of ITER Domestic Agency, Japan
Anatoly V. Krasilnikov, Director of ITER Domestic Agency, Russian Federation