Errors and Omissions in the CNN Article on the ITER Reactor
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By Steven B. Krivit
June 1, 2022
CNN published a news article on the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) on May 30, 2022, which contained several errors and misleading omissions.
Title: Bottling the sun
Subtitle: The world has been trying to master this limitless clean energy source since the 1930s. We’re now closer than ever
Link: https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2022/05/world/iter-nuclear-fusion-climate-intl-cnnphotos/
Writer: Boštjan Videmšek
Photographer: Matjaž Krivic
Editor: Angela Dewan
Photo Editor: Will Lanzoni
Motion Designer: Agne Jurkenaite
Here are the inaccuracies in the article:
1. “Fusion promises a virtually limitless form of energy.”
Tritium, half of the required fuel combination for nuclear fusion, does not exist as a natural resource in nature. There is no proven way to synthesize tritium from lithium-6 in a fusion reactor faster than it would be consumed. There is no safe, legal way to extract and enrich lithium in the necessary isotope of lithium-6. (Scientific facts and references are here.)
2. “No matter when you ask, it’s always 30 years away. But for the first time in history, that may actually be true. In February, scientists in the English village of Culham, near Oxford, announced a major breakthrough: they generated and sustained a record 59 megajoules of fusion energy for five seconds in a giant donut-shaped machine called a tokamak. It was only enough to power one house for a day, and more energy went into the process than came out of it. Yet it was a truly historic moment. It proved that nuclear fusion was indeed possible to sustain on Earth.”
That reactor, JET, the Joint European Torus, did almost the same thing last year (not February) it did 24 years ago: consume 700 megawatts of electricity to produce 10 megawatts of thermal power. In the 2021 experiment, the reactor lost 98.3 percent of the energy it consumed. This is an improvement over the 1997 result, in which the reactor lost 99.4 percent of the energy it consumed.
Furthermore, the sentence “It was only enough to power one house for a day, and more energy went into the process than came out of it” is logically inconsistent. If more energy went into the process than came out of it (as it did), then it did not produce any usable power, not enough for one house, not enough for one light bulb.
If we look at the 2021 JET experiment using values of energy, it produced 59 megajoules of fusion energy from an input of 3,500 megajoules of electrical energy. (Scientific facts and references are here.)
3. “[ITER’s] main objective is to prove fusion can be utilized commercially.”
If the reactor achieves its planned scientific objective, a) The effective output of the overall reactor will be zero net power or less, b) the reactor will consume hundreds of megawatts of electricity, and c) the reactor will fail to show that producing commercial energy from fusion is possible. (Scientific facts and references are here.)
4. “The project aims to produce a 10-fold return on energy, generating 500 megawatts from an input of 50 megawatts.”
These numbers apply to only the plasma heating and plasma thermal output. The overall reactor will consume more energy than it produces. (Scientific facts and references are here.)
5. “Tritium is rare, but it can be synthetically produced.”
See #1 above.
6. “Workers have already put together the shell of the tokamak, but they are still awaiting some parts.”
The insertion of the first sector of the tokamak itself was scheduled to take place December 2021. The first four sectors are, or have parts that are, defective; as a result, the French nuclear regulator ordered the ITER organization to suspend assembly of the tokamak chamber six months ago, in January. The conflict had been brewing since the summer of 2021, when the ITER organization failed an inspection by the regulator. Although other construction activities at the site continue, the assembly of the tokamak chamber is part of the critical path. (See this news article and this one.)
7. “The blanket within the tokamak will be coated with lithium, and as escaped plasma neutrons reach it, they will react with the lithium to create more tritium fuel.”
The inside of the ITER tokamak will be covered with 440 blanket modules. Four ports in the blanket will allow for replaceable test modules with lithium that are intended to test various ideas of tritium breeding. The other 336 modules will not breed tritium from lithium. This means that, at most, one percent of the surface area inside the reaction chamber will be able to test tritium breeding. Thus, although a blanket will capture the thermal energy in the tokamak, ITER will not have a lithium blanket to breed tritium. ITER will not be able to test whether a fusion reactor can produce tritium fast enough. (Scientific facts and references are here.)
8. “All the other participant countries are contributing a little over 9% each.”
India stopped paying its cash contributions in 2018. (See this news article.)
9. “Right now, the total has more than tripled to around 20 billion euros.”
That number does not include the cost of most of the parts, which come from outside Europe. The better estimate, by the U.S. Department of Energy, is $65 billion (€60 billion.) (See this news article.)
10. “First plasma is now expected in 2025.”
On Sept. 17, 2021, Bernard Bigot, the former ITER organization director-general, had told journalists that “first plasma in 2025 is no longer technically achievable.” Before assembly of the reactor vessel was shut down, the most credible date estimate for first plasma was 2031. (See this news article and this one.)
12. “The first deuterium-tritium experiments are hoped to take place in 2035, though even those are now under review — delayed, in part, by the pandemic and persistent supply chain issues.”
The reactor assembly was halted in January 2022 because of defects in the first four reactor sectors. (See #6 above.)
