#67 President Biden Does NOT Get Hoodwinked by Fusion Advocates

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Saturday, June 12, 2021
By Steven B. Krivit

On Friday, E&E News, under the headline “Biden Draws Fire for DOE Fusion Plans,” reported that President Joe Biden said “no” to recent pressure from the U.S. fusion lobby.

E&E News reported that “fusion energy advocates in Congress and private industry are protesting the Energy Department’s lack of support for a pilot reactor this decade.”

Biden’s Department of Energy fiscal 2022 budget request, E&E News reported, “has no funds to start work on a pilot reactor project proposed by two committees of leading U.S. scientists and fusion entrepreneurs as an essential step to keeping the U.S. in competition with European and Chinese projects, said supporters of the efforts.”

Times have sure changed. Decades ago, leading U.S. fusion scientists told Congress that the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) was the way, the only way. My documentary film, “ITER, The Grand Illusion: A Forensic Investigation of Power Claims,” has all the gory details.

Now, four-and-a-half years after I first revealed that leading U.S. fusion scientists hoodwinked Congress to spend the public’s money on ITER, the leading U.S. fusion scientists insist that ITER is not the way — for them.

E&E News spoke with Andrew Holland, the chief executive officer of the Fusion Industry Association, a three-year-old public relations organization that represents the numerous private companies seeking to score profits with fusion. Holland complained that the federal government was not committing enough public money to the domestic public-private fusion pilot plant idea.

“There’s just not enough money there to do the work that needs to be done to get a fusion pilot plant,” Holland said.

The insistence of the U.S. fusion lobby that ITER is no longer the way represents more than just hypocrisy.

The lead paragraph of a news story in Physics Today summarized the proposal from the leading U.S. fusion scientists: “If fusion is to contribute to decarbonizing electricity generation by mid-century, the U.S. must begin to construct a grid-scale pilot fusion-power plant well before a self-sustaining fusion reaction is first achieved.”

Perhaps a more relevant response to the proposal was this succinct comment from someone identified as D.M. Bell, who wrote, “By this reasoning, the U.S. also should construct a public-private pigs-will-fly project well before flying pigs have been achieved.”

Bell’s point was not only witty but also spot-on. When Robert Goldston, the sixth director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laborator, pleaded for public support in an article he published on the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Web site, I asked him how he expected anybody to take the pilot plant proposal seriously. Toward the end of our public conversation, Goldston wrote, “This new idea is to put some electricity on the grid and get some learning-by-doing experience earlier.”

I responded to Goldston:

You have no experimental evidence that a fusion reactor can produce power from fusion at a greater rate than the injected heating power (scientific breakeven/scientific feasibility).

You have no experimental evidence that a fusion reactor can produce power from fusion at the same rate as it consumes electrical power (engineering breakeven).

The most well-documented and most credible fusion reactor design, ITER, if it works correctly, will achieve engineering breakeven sometime around 2045. That still won’t produce enough thermal power from fusion to provide one net Watt of electricity.

Yet you imagine that, now, after 70 years of trial and error, you can skip over the intermediate steps and go right to designing a reactor that would produce net electricity to put on the grid. And you imagine that you can do this by more Edisonian trial-and-error “learning-by-doing.”