#64 ITER Is a Suicidal Plan That Would Discredit Nuclear Fusion, Scientist Says, Again

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By Steven B. Krivit
Dec. 5, 2020 

A retired plasma physicist has given New Energy Times permission to republish critical letters he wrote about the ITER fusion reactor project many years ago. He has done this despite risks associated with publicly criticizing the international project.

Ernesto Mazzucato spent his entire career — from 1965 to 2014 — working at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory. Mazzucato continues to work on his own fusion concepts.

He told us about pressure from some of his peers from 1996 to 2006 when he openly criticized the ITER project, but he asked us to withhold those details for fear that it would interfere with his present access to resources and the ability to publish in peer-reviewed journals.

Mazzucato is the second retired fusion physicist from the Princeton laboratory with whom New Energy Times has spoken who is critical of ITER. The first was Mazzucato’s colleague, Daniel Jassby, who has been publishing critical articles about ITER on the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Web site.

Jassby was the first scientist to provide New Energy Times with clear values for the ITER reactor power requirements, following our attempts to obtain this information directly from the ITER organization.

Mazzucato told New Energy Times that he “suffered dearly” shortly after Science magazine published his first critical comments in 1996.

“I knew that speaking out was risky, but I had to say what was on my mind,” Mazzucato said. “I thought that ITER would ruin fusion, and I had spent all my life working on fusion. ITER was the wrong track.”

Mazzucato told New Energy Times that, decades earlier, at the beginning of the discussions about the ITER concept, the conversation was purely about physics. The conversation soon shifted to the bait-and-switch scheme, as Nobel laureate Masatoshi Koshiba called it.

“The scientists were not talking about power production,” Mazzucato said, “but then slowly, the bureaucrats were put in charge of this project, and they started talking about a power gain, that ITER would produce 10 times more power than it would use.

“But none of the scientists said anything. We all knew that the power values only applied to the particles, not the overall reactor.”

These are the three letters Mazzucato provided.

1996 Mazzucato Letter to Science

In his first letter, Mazzucato responded to an article published in Science magazine by Andrew Lawler about the ITER project.

For the United States to concentrate its efforts on the construction of ITER, which by my estimates would require at least twice the $8 billion cited by Lawler, [Andrew Lawler, “U.S. Power Outage Won’t Dim ITER,” Science, Jan. 19, 1996, p. 282] would halt significant progress in domestic thermonuclear research.

It is tantamount to a suicidal plan that would discredit nuclear fusion as an economically viable form of energy production.

The current ITER design is based on the most optimistic extrapolation of experimental results for plasma confinement, plasma beta (the ratio of plasma to magnetic pressure), and plasma purity. To guarantee a minimum of performance, the design has been pushed to such a grandiose scale that its major and most sophisticated components would have to be manufactured in situ, as no road is large enough for their transportation. In spite of this, ITER would not ignite if any one of the aforementioned parameters falls below its assumed value by as little as 10 to 20%. Moreover, a single plasma disruption and consequent abrupt termination of tokamak discharge, a phenomenon that happens daily in tokamak reactors, could destroy the inner core of ITER. This raises the strong possibility that ITER may never achieve its goals.

The designing of ITER has served to indicate the major problems in physics and engineering that must be addressed before the construction of a tokamak fusion reactor is attempted: The former include an improved plasma confinement at large values of beta, which would lead to a more compact and cheaper reactor, as well as an improved plasma stability, which could lessen the danger of plasma disruptions; the latter include the development of low activation materials, and a better divertor design. These problems are being tackled in experiments and are the focus of proposed near-term facilities.

The construction of ITER, by absorbing all the available funds, would inevitably prevent development in these critical areas. From Lawler’s article, it appears that ITER finds its strongest support in a “wealthy and influential association of major corporations…..” This sounds like an ominous repetition of history, as our problems today with nuclear fission power plants originated when the nuclear industry decided to bring to prominence the first fission reactor concept that appeared to work. Similarly, the adoption of this probably faulty device would have catastrophic consequences for the development of nuclear fusion energy.

2004 Mazzucato Letter to The Economist, As Submitted

In his second letter, Mazzucato responded to an article published in The Economist by Andrew Lawler. It was titled “Bouillabaisse Sushi,” a clever reference to the two factions, one that wanted to build the reactor in France, the other that wanted to build it in Japan. His published letter was significantly edited so we are providing his original letter for the record.

Being The Economist is a business oriented publication, it is not surprising that the major concern in your article on ITER (“Bouillabaisse Sushi,” February 7, 2004, is the large price tag, which in your opinion is sufficient to disqualify nuclear fusion as an economical way of generating electricity. This is based on your assumption that ITER is an apparatus for the production of energy. Indeed, this is not true. ITER was conceived as an experimental device for studying the physics of thermonuclear plasmas, and therefore its construction and operating costs are not necessarily those of the fusion reactor that it is supposed to investigate. Besides, ITER is not the only scheme of fusion reactor.

The real problem with ITER is more serious. It stems from our present knowledge of plasma physics which does not guarantee that it will be capable of reaching the required plasma conditions. ITER is based on a very optimistic extrapolation of existing data, where a small deterioration in plasma confinement would be sufficient to degrade substantially the achieved plasma conditions. This, together with our incomplete knowledge of what to expect in the thermonuclear regime, makes ITER a risky project, whose failure could cause irreparable harm to the credibility of nuclear fusion.

As Masatoshi Koshiba, who shared the 2002 Nobel prize in physics, recently said “…this project is not in the hands of scientists any more, but in the hands of politicians and businessmen…” (www.eubusiness.com/afp/040130132633.8evw80e7). Of course, the high cost of ITER, which in my opinion is larger than the $10 billion you quote in your article, is exactly what has attracted the political and business interest. Still, I find it amazing and very depressing that a small but vocal minority of the fusion research community, to which I belong, was able to convince the governments of many nations to support – to use your technical term – a boondoggle.

2006 Mazzucato Letter (Publication information unknown)

Mazzucato didn’t remember where he originally published his third letter, but by its formatting, he had written it in response to an article in The Economist titled “A White-Hot Elephant.”

The Problem of Nuclear Fusion Energy

ITER is a large international project aimed at demonstrating the feasibility of fusion energy. Partners in this effort are the European Union, Japan, China, India, South Korea, Russia and the U.S. A recent article in The Economist (“A White-Hot Elephant,” Nov 23, 2006), makes a startling connection between the war in Iraq and ITER. Referring to the process of selecting a site for the fusion project, it states that “the subsequent wrangling looked like a proxy for rows over the war in Iraq.” Indeed, the similarity between the two projects runs much deeper, since, like the war in Iraq, the political support of ITER stems from misleading propaganda. By now the case of the war in Iraq is of public domain, that of ITER is not.

ITER is an acronym for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. To boost its importance, we are reminded (www.iter.org) that ITER means the way in Latin. It sounds as if the Intelligent Designer, after telling Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply, added: “do it as much as you like, all problems will be taken care of by ITER.” Well, we did it recklessly and now we are in serious trouble, but is ITER really the way to the solution of our problems? Here are some facts to consider.

First – The official construction cost of ITER is $6 billion. The EU will contribute 45%, while the other six partners will equally share the remaining 55% ($3.3 billion). The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) estimates that this will cost $1.122 billion to taxpayers instead of $550 million (one sixth of $3.3 billion). Since DOE is not a philanthropic institution, we must assume that a similar discrepancy is in the budgets of the other six partners as well. Presently, seven more countries are considering joining ITER: Brazil, Mexico, Canada, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Slovakia and Kazakhstan (no word from Borat, yet). All will have to pay an entrance ticket, adding new cash to the coffer.

Conclusion: either the real construction cost of ITER is much larger than the official figure or somebody is getting rich on fusion.

Second – ITER will produce 500 megawatts (MW) of fusion power, equivalent – we are told – to a tenfold gain (defined as the ratio between the total fusion power and the external power needed for heating the fuel). Unfortunately, 20% of these 500 MW (it used to be 410 before miraculously growing to 500) will be trapped in the reactor chamber. ITER doesn’t plan to transform the remaining 400 MW into usable energy, i.e., electricity. However, even if it did, it could generate – to be generous – no more than 160 MW, less than the electric power needed for its operation.

Conclusion: the real gain of ITER, i.e., the ratio between output and input electric powers, is smaller than one.

Third – ITER will be able to operate at full power only for a maximum of 400 seconds. After that, it will need to be shut down, to restart later for another pulse. The supporters of ITER are quick to stress that their main objective is to test the physics and engineering of fusion reactors, not to generate continuous power. However, they do not mention that all physics objectives of ITER could be achieved with smaller and much less expensive devices, and that most engineering problems of fusion reactors will not be solved by ITER, including how to make their operation steady state.

Fourth – From all of the above, we must conclude that the cost of electricity from an ITER-like reactor will be enormous. Again, we are told that this is not a problem since it can be fixed by increasing the reactor’s size. Indeed, assuming that the latter will operate at the same fuel temperature of ITER, our present understanding indicates that the total fusion power will increase only linearly with the reactor’s linear dimension, while costs will rise at least squarely.

Conclusion: The economy of scale does not work in this case – a bigger reactor will be even less economical than ITER.

Quoting The Economist, it is clear that “Like the International Space Station, ITER had its roots in superpower politics. As with the Space Station, the scientific benefits may not justify the price.” The result is that, rather than [advancing] the commercialization of fusion, ITER will risk destroying its credibility.  It took three years to understand the fallacy of the war in Iraq and to get rid of some of its sponsors. Unfortunately, we will not be so lucky with ITER. The recent signing of the International Fusion Energy Agreement by the seven partners in Paris (Nov. 21, 2006) will secure thirty years of life to ITER. At the end, none of its present sponsors will be fired – they will all be retired or dead.

Turning a Blind Eye

Mazzucato is the first fusion scientist I know who a) noticed the discrepancy between ITER’s planned power values and the publicized power values and b) openly objected to the false claims its promoters were making about the promised power gain of the reactor. Nobel Prize winner Masatoshi Koshiba had also sounded the alarm sometime between 2001 and 2004, calling the ITER project a bait-and-switch trick.

Mazzucato told me that all of his colleagues knew that the bureaucrats in charge of the project were tricking the public. Assuming he’s right, then there are thousands of fusion experts who saw what was going on and did and said nothing about it. It’s not the first time in history that something terrible was happening in a community and was known as an open secret within that community. But it is the first time in modern history that something like this, on this scale, has happened in science.

By 2003, the deception was firmly established, as evident by Robert Stern’s statement in the New York Times on Jan. 31, 2003: “ITER would provide a record 500 megawatts of fusion power for at least 500 seconds, a little more than eight minutes, during each experiment. That would meet the power needs of about 140,000 homes.”

In reality, a fusion reactor designed with the parameters of ITER, if configured to convert its thermal output to electricity, wouldn’t be able to power a single light bulb.

Public statements like Stern’s, published without the authors’ knowledge that they were false, were the norm for more than two decades. Either no fusion scientists except Mazzucato and Koshiba read news accounts about ITER and realized what was happening, or the majority of fusion scientists saw that the “mistakes” significantly favored their field, and they turned — and continue to turn — a blind eye to what has now developed into the largest science fraud in modern history.