#85 Former Head of U.K. Fusion Said Tokamak Energy Ltd. Made Baseless Fusion Promises
Return to ITER Power Facts Main Page
By Steven B. Krivit
Oct. 18, 2021
“When you tell your investors that you can do fusion by 2018, you cannot tell them that the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority agrees with you, because we do not.” — Steven Cowley, July 21, 2015
Six years ago, in testimony before the United Kingdom House of Lords Science and Technology Select committee, Steven Cowley, the highest-ranking UK fusion expert at the time, told legislators that Tokamak Energy Ltd., a UK fusion startup company, was making baseless claims to its investors.
House of Lords
At the time, Cowley was the head of the UK Atomic Energy Authority. Sitting next to Cowley at the witness table was David Kingham, the chief executive of Tokamak Energy Ltd. Cowley objected to statements Kingham made.
David Kingham: I think we are probably in the process of repairing relationships; it was difficult for a while. Partly, that is because Tokamak Energy popped out of nowhere, in a sense, and had some very bold ideas initially. It is only this year that we have been able to produce the level of evidence both on the physics of these compact spherical tokamak devices and on the engineering feasibility, so that we have been able to speak more publicly about our plans and put a stronger case to scientists and engineers around the world.
Steven Cowley: I can see where this is going. In presentations to investors, Tokamak Energy claimed that it could get fusion by 2018. We had several people working with Tokamak Energy. That is not just incredible; it boggles the mind—you cannot get fusion by 2018, not with any of these things. Nuclear licensing would take you 10, 15 years at best; a fusion device is a highly nuclear machine, and so on. So claims to investors of being able to get to fusion by 2018 drove us to say, “We need to have you at arm’s length.” We are very much dependent on our credibility. Back in 1958, Sir John Cockcroft revealed the ZETA results and claimed fusion for the UK, and it did great damage to the credibility of nuclear research in this country. When you tell your investors that you can do fusion by 2018, you cannot tell them that the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority agrees with you, because we do not. We do not think that you can get electricity in 10 years and that that is a credible claim. We have to defend our credibility.
Pot Calling the Kettle Black?
Nevertheless, Cowley’s own pie-in-the-sky claims did not escape the attention of Member of the House of Lords Baron Maurice Harry Peston:
Lord Peston: As background, I must say that I am totally confused by the evidence that you have given us. I hope you will bear that in mind. Professor Cowley, you said in your opening remarks, “I am confident that a commercially sustainable outcome will occur.” How could you possibly say that? What is your evidence? Also as background, let me point out that it is not even obvious that fission stations are commercially viable. You are talking about things that have never been built and are not within a million miles of being built. How can you express any degree of confidence that this is not a total waste of money? Those were your words: “will occur,” not “might occur,” and you repeated it a bit later.
Steven Cowley: Yes, I gave you a timescale, which I think is useful.
Lord Peston: “Will” could be between now and plus infinity, but you could not possibly have meant that.
Steven Cowley: No. I think we need fusion later in this century. What we have now are transitional decarbonizing technologies, which are fission and carbon capture and storage. At some point, we will have to move on from current technology because we cannot do infinite amounts of carbon capture and storage or fission. By the end of the century, we need some technologies to replace them. We have done some fusion at Culham: 16 megawatts of fusion power on JET. We can make the conditions for fusion. We have to make a step to the scientific demonstration of fusion, but that still is not commercial demonstration of fusion. Whether we can do that in the 2040s or whether it will wait until 2080 is the question.
MIT Helps Pave the Way
A Sept. 21, 2015, document that, as of today, is still on the Tokamak Energy Web site includes several gross exaggerations and false claims. (Archive copy)
The company said that, with collaboration and funding, it could turn nuclear fusion into a practical source of energy within a decade. The company dangled the bait for investors: “If successful, this could be one of the most lucrative opportunities yet.”
The company then provided multiple statements that implied that planned near-term fusion reactors would be producing net energy. To be clear: each of the claims implied that the tokamak reactors — the full systems — would produce more energy than they would consume.
But the Tokamak Energy fusion scientists responsible for the deceptive message knew full well that the near-term reactor plans (including their own) for net energy apply only to the physics reactions, rather than to the overall reactors.
Dennis Whyte, the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology fusion center, helped establish the false foundation in the company’s article.
“This puts net energy gain from fusion on a decade timescale,” Whyte said.
If Whyte had really intended to convey that he was only talking about net energy gain of the physics reactions, rather than the reactor, he had six years to request a correction. But Whyte had a track record of using the bait-and-switch language.
In 2017, Whyte told a writer from the MIT News Office that MIT’s planned reactor, SPARC, “will carry out the world’s first demonstration of net energy from a fusion experiment — making SPARC the first fusion device to make more power than it consumes.”
Whyte implied that the SPARC reactor — not reaction — is designed for net energy. After I asked Whyte for reactor specifications that would support his claim, MIT removed the entire article.
An MIT science writer Whyte spoke with in September 2021 wrote “the successful operation of SPARC will demonstrate that a full-scale commercial fusion power plant is practical.” But SPARC is not designed, as a reactor system, to produce net energy. The SPARC design, like that of ITER, if it accomplishes its scientific objective, will demonstrate a correlated overall reactor net power output of zero. That’s not very practical.
Maria Zuber, the vice president for research at MIT — and the person responsible for oversight of research integrity — made a misleading claim about the SPARC reactor design.
“I now am genuinely optimistic that SPARC can achieve net positive energy,” Zuber said.
The Road to Fusion Fraud
After the fusion pump by Whyte, the Tokamak Energy article then repeated the long-running lies about JET and ITER:
Scientists have yet to produce a net energy gain in fusion. The world’s current largest tokamak — the Joint European Torus (JET) — located at the Culham Center for fusion energy in the UK — produced a record 16 megawatts of energy in 1997 from 24 megawatts of input energy.
ITER’s goal is to produce 500 megawatts of output power — ten times the amount of energy put in. ITER is an internationally-united endeavor to realize net fusion energy gain. … ITER’s goal is to produce 500 megawatts of output power — ten times the amount of energy put in.
The JET reactor, as readers of New Energy Times know, produced 16 megawatts of power (not energy) in 1997 from 700 megawatts of input power. The ITER design, if it works correctly, will produce not a tenfold power gain but a zero-power gain, or less.
On these false foundations, Tokamak Energy then told the public — and its investors — that the company “aims to achieve net energy gain in fusion in five years and generation of electricity in ten.”
Fusion critic and author L.J. Reinders, a retired high-energy physicist, once asked a plasma physicist who works at Tokamak Energy, “What do you mean by connected to the grid?” His colleague replied, with an embarrassed smile, “Well, it depends what you mean by grid.”
