#95 Cleantechnica Covers Fusion, Minus the Hype
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By Steven B. Krivit
Dec. 4, 2021
Michael Barnard, writing for Cleantechnica.com, has injected a healthy dose of reality into the latest media craze about nuclear fusion. Cleantechnica is a web site that focuses on news and commentary about clean technology.
The satirical title of Barnard’s Nov. 9, 2021, article, “Breaking News: Fusion Recedes Into Far Future for the 57th Time,” is more accurate than most titles of fusion news stories.
With all the money flowing into private fusion ventures lately, significant new scientific results must be fueling the fusion frenzy. However, I haven’t seen any new experimental results of power production — the only results with practical relevance — since 1997.
That’s when the Joint European Torus (JET) reactor consumed electrical power at a rate of 700 megawatts and produced fusion reactions with 16 megawatts of power for about one-tenth of a second. Technically, the output wasn’t even thermal power. Instead, the 16 MW was the measurement of the kinetic energy of the emitted neutrons. JET lost about 99 percent of the power it consumed.
So now we need a fusion system to be only 100 times more efficient to finally see a reactor that produces net power.
Barnard did an excellent job summarizing the long-running propaganda for the ITER machine, focusing on the power discrepancy associated with the project.
“I had assumed, as most press and indeed pretty much everyone involved with it asserted, that it would be generating more energy than it consumed, when it finally lit up,” Barnard wrote.
He had located the research I published on the New Energy Times web site, specifically my ITER power research and analysis page and learned a lot from it. But Barnard was confused about one point. He wrote that my “numbers didn’t add up” and said that I should have used values expressed in MW instead of MWh. He thought that the values shown on the Japanese JT-60SA used “the right units.” But, as I told him, that site also used values in MW.
For anybody who works in an industry that produces or distributes electricity, the relevant unit is kilowatt-hour, a unit of energy, rather than a unit of power. In my phone call with Barnard, I explained to him that, in magnetic confinement fusion research, values are and have always been provided in units of power, not energy.
Barnard made another point that’s worth mentioning:
I expected more from ITER. Not much more. I mean, it is a million-component fission reactor expected to light up in 2040 and not generate any electricity at that point. But I had assumed, based on all the press, that it would generate more electricity than it used to operate if you bolted a boiler and some turbines to it, even if it were grossly expensive. Apparently not. Just grossly expensive, no net new electricity.
Barnard had every reason to believe that the reactor was designed to generate more electricity than it used, if it was configured for thermal to electric conversion. The ITER organization suggests exactly this on its web site:
