Open Letter to Pietro Barabaschi, Director-General of ITER

By Steven B. Krivit
April 15, 2023

Dear Dr. Barabaschi,

One of my readers brought to my attention a recent news article published by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation about ITER.

The news article contains several significant inaccuracies. I bring these to your attention because I know that you are committed to the integrity of the public scientific communications about ITER.

The article features a single source: Tom Wauters, a plasma physicist who works at ITER. However, I would not want to blame Wauters for the inaccuracies because I have repeatedly seen other high-level staff members of the ITER organization communicating significant inaccuracies to the news media.

For example, two years ago, Joëlle Elbez-Uzan, the former head of safety and the environment at ITER, told reporter Celia Izoard that the ITER reactor will be “the first net energy production in the entire history of fusion by creating an amplification of a factor of 10: i.e., 50 megawatts at the input and 500 megawatts at the output.”

Elbez-Uzan learned from the reporter that she had completely misunderstood the primary objective of the project.

Then there were the many incorrect power statements ITER Chief Scientist Tim Luce provided, like this one: “We plan to produce 500 megawatts with 50 megawatts of consumption.” Luce, too, didn’t know even a close value of the expected 500 MW electric power consumption that will be required of ITER to start the fusion reaction and the 440 MW of electricity required to sustain it.

Then there was the matter of the recurring incorrect power statements by Mark Henderson, a former ITER physicist. Henderson had worked on the ITER project for about a decade, leaving the organization a few weeks after speaking with investigative radio journalist Grant Hill, who was the first to point out Henderson’s inconsistencies.

Based on Wauter’s statements, I see there is still a residual problem of information quality in your organization: incorrect information that has been repeated for many years, even decades, information that is false or misleading about the goals and design of the ITER project.

Limitless Energy

ABC quoted Wauters directly: “The advantages of this technique — even though it’s very complicated to achieve — is that you can have almost limitless energy.”

As you know from our previous discussions, half of the required deuterium-tritium fuel combination does not exist as a natural resource on Earth, so we can no longer legitimately make the claim of “limitless energy.”

10-Fold Energy Gain

ABC wrote that “ITER’s goal is a 10-fold return on the energy that goes in.”

This requires a correction, unambiguously explaining that the performance of ITER will be assessed by comparing the thermal power output of the plasma with the thermal power input into the plasma.

Tritium Breeding

Here is the ABC section on tritium breeding:

But the team at ITER hopes to use the fusion reactor itself to create more tritium as a kind of by-product of the reaction. This is known as “tritium-breeding” and involves bombarding lithium on the inner wall of the tokamak with neutrons in the plasma to create more tritium.

“The idea is to have at least one tritium produced for one tritium consumed in the plasma to have a closed fuel cycle,” Dr. Wauters says. “It should be possible, but there is a difference between doing these things on paper and actually doing it.”

There’s a bit riding on this. If they can’t find out how to replace the tritium they use, then it’s likely game over for the dream of fusion power anytime soon.

“There is indeed a risk,” Dr. Wauters says. “I’m quite confident that at some point we will manage it and that it’ll be ITER that does it.”

But ITER is not designed to breed at least one tritium atom for each tritium atom it consumes. The ITER reactor will have 440 modules that cover its inner wall. Based on the ITER design, a maximum of four of these modules at any given time will contain replaceable tritium breeding test blanket modules. A reactor with a full tritium breeding blanket will require tritium breeding modules covering the entire inner wall. Thus, in ITER, only one percent of the surface area will be capable of breeding tritium.

Accordingly, ITER will not breed and consume tritium at a 1:1 ratio. At best, it will be a 1:100 ratio.

Will Laban Coblentz be informing the Australian Broadcasting Corporation of these facts?

Will you be informing your staff of these facts?

Thank you,
Steven