A Jan. 26, 2022, Associated Press article about fusion results achieved at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) provides an excellent example of why achieving scientific breakeven is irrelevant to practical laser fusion progress.
NIF is part of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a U.S. government facility operated by contractors including Bechtel National, Babcock and Wilcox, and Battelle.
The AP, based on information published by the lab, told readers that the NIF experiments “pushed energy output to 1.3 megajoules … but even that is shy of the 1.9 megajoules needed to breakeven.”
The AP did not explain to readers that four types of gain measurements are used in the laser fusion research field. Only fusion scientists likely would be aware of the first three.
Instead, the public is generally aware of only the fourth: when the energy going into a fusion device equals energy produced by a fusion device. This is the only gain measurement where breakeven has practical meaning.
To achieve breakeven in the way the public understands — and in fact, would expect — the NIF device would need a fusion energy yield of 400 megajoules, not 1.9 megajoules, as the AP reported.
Pitching the President
With a loss of 99.7 or 99.9 percent (depending on the calculation used) of energy consumed by NIF, laser fusion is far from becoming a practical source of energy.
But that didn’t stop Andrew Holland, the chief executive officer of the Fusion Industry Association, from telling President Biden’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology on Jan. 21, 2022, that NIF was among the fusion projects “on the cusp of a key milestone: net gain energy, more energy out than in.”
#102 Why Scientific Breakeven Is Not Relevant to Practical Laser Fusion Progress was last modified: December 12th, 2022 by sbkrivit
ITER, funded primarily by European taxpayers, is an experimental fusion reactor that will consume more power than it produces — if it works as designed.
Fusion scientists have always known that ITER will not demonstrate that fusion is a source of energy.
But that’s not what they told the European Commission 22 years ago.
A few months ago, New Energy Times learned how European fusion scientists convinced the European governing bodies to fund the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, ITER.
The scientists (we don’t know exactly who yet) provided false information to former European Commissioner for Research Phillipe Busquin. In turn, Busquin provided that information to the European Commission, the European Council of Ministers’ and European Parliament.
The European Union agreed to participate in the ITER project in 2000. In a Sept. 22, 2021, e-mail to New Energy Times, Busquin explained the history:
I submitted the project to the Commission in 2000 (the Directorate-General for Research), and they agreed to support ITER. ITER was presented as part of the fusion research supported by the EU. At that time, the budget was estimated at €5 billion, compatible with the budget of the EU’s framework programme for research.
Then, at the Council of Ministers on Nov. 16 2000, I put forward a technical proposal enabling the EU to take part in the ITER negotiations. I made it plain that the Commission was not conjecturing whether or not ITER should be built. However, the audience was silent. I realized that almost no one knew about ITER. Only the Swedish Minister followed suit and encouraged the EU to commit to ITER. After the meeting, during the informal lunch, I returned to discussing the fusion project, and almost everybody agreed with the proposal.
Afterward, I presented the project at a meeting of the Industry, Research and Energy committee of the European Parliament, and they were very supportive.
There was no public debate organized on this topic. This is normal because ITER was presented as a research activity within the existing framework programme.
Busquin told New Energy Times that he no longer had a copy of the proposal he presented. However, New Energy Times located a March 11, 2002, report written by Busquin’s spokeswoman, Andrea Dahmen, showing that Busquin told the ministers that the purpose of ITER was to build a fusion reactor “capable of producing energy at an industrial scale, 1,500 MW.”
This means that the fusion scientists advising Busquin did not explain several things to him.
First, they did not explain to him the input power rate, the power ITER was expected to consume. They didn’t explain to him that the ITER design specification (at the time) for a 1,500 MW thermal output, was a projected gross output power value. They didn’t tell him that the input power required to operate the reactor was about 500 MW. They didn’t explain to him that the gross thermal output, if the 1,500 MW would be converted to electricity, would be 600 MW. Had they done so, Busquin would have told his colleagues in the European governing bodies that the original ITER design specification was a fusion reactor “capable of producing energy at an industrial scale, 100 MW.”
The next thing the fusion scientists did not explain to Busquin was that, by March 2002, the 1,500 MW plan was already obsolete. The reactor design had, seven months earlier in August 2001, been scaled down in size and cost, from 1,500 MW to 500 MW gross thermal output. This reduction means that ITER is now designed as a reactor design that will be capable of CONSUMING power at an industrial scale, 100 MW. (These are simplified values. For full details, please see the New Energy Times ITER power value research.)
Of course, technically speaking, ITER, as a reactor system, was never intended to produce net power or produce energy at an industrial scale. It’s just a science experiment to study a fusion plasma. But that’s not how ITER was sold.
New Energy Times spoke with Busquin, 81, on Oct. 26, 2021, and explained the power information to him and asked for comment. The research was too far in his past, he said, and he could not remember the details.
In the years he was Commissioner for Research, he was the most enthusiastic political supporter of fusion in Europe. Busquin told us that he still has great hope for the dream of clean, limitless, abundant fusion energy on earth. That, however, was before we learned that the required fuel sources for nuclear fusion do not exist.
#101 How Fusion Scientists Misled the European Union About ITER was last modified: April 16th, 2022 by sbkrivit
European workers on the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) have complained through their unions that a culture of overwork, stress, and abusive management has led to illness among workers and an employee’s suicide, POLITICO.EU reported on Jan. 26.
The European contribution to the ITER fusion reactor project is managed by the ITER domestic agency known as Fusion for Energy. The agency operates under the leadership of Director Johannes Schwemmer.
The European Parliament’s Budgetary Control Committee held a preliminary hearing on the issues on Jan. 25 (link to video), and according to an administrator for the Parliament, the matter has been placed on the agenda for another meeting of the committee.
POLITICO.EU reported about the suicide:
The most fraught issue is the May 2021 suicide of plasma unit engineer Mario Gagliardi, who blamed stress at work for his decision to take his own life in a final note shared with POLITICO with his family’s permission.
“My final gesture is due to a breakdown at work, into which I have invested a lot … On a whirlwind of events I found myself to be the scapegoat of an unsustainable situation for years, despite my efforts and commitment to try and straighten things out from the bottom as much as possible, albeit unsuccessfully,” he wrote.
Chiara Merola, Gagliardi’s then-fiancée who also works at F4E, declined an interview but authorized POLITICO to share excerpts of her protest letter to management.
“I testified that his managers and HR were absolutely informed about his huge workload, about the episodes of harassment and bullying, about the attacks, about the risk of burnout, about the extremely stressful situation in which he was continually blamed for something that was not even his fault or responsibility and how all that was affecting his health,” Merola wrote.
On Jan. 17, 2022, the heads of the three labor unions representing the European ITER workers sent a letter to the European Commission about the critical situation in the Fusion for Energy agency. New Energy Times has obtained a copy of this letter. Among their greatest concerns was that the European Commission launched a preliminary assessment of the events that led to the death of Gagliardi — in collaboration with Fusion for Energy. The unions demand an independent investigation.
Schwemmer has a history of making false and exaggerated claims about the purpose and design objective of the ITER project. In September 2020, Schwemmer and his organization removed such false claims only after being forced by European Commissioner Kadri Simson, at my request, to do so.
#100 Fusion Workers in Europe Suffer From ITER Management Issues was last modified: April 16th, 2022 by sbkrivit
Some of the 192 lasers in the U.S. National Ignition Facility (Photo: S. Krivit)
Today, media organizations like Reuters reported “Researchers Achieve Milestone on Path Toward Nuclear Fusion Energy.”
That’s because the journal Nature published year-old results from laser fusion experiments performed at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in Livermore, California.
In the experiments reported in the paper, researchers reported a fusion energy yield of 0.17 megajoules.
Omar A. Hurricane, the chief scientist for the inertial confinement fusion program at the lab, explained to New Energy Times that these experiments took place between November 2020 and February 2021.
The fusion energy yield from those experiments was eight times lower than the yield achieved later, in August 2021. That’s when the lab announced, in a press release, that it had performed an experiment on Aug. 8, 2021, that achieved a yield of 1.3 megajoules.
As we reported last August, the NIF device consumed 400 megajoules of energy and produced 1.3 megajoules.
Overlooking the input energy consumed, Reuters implied that the experiments produced a useful but small amount of energy: “The energy produced was modest — about the equivalent of nine nine-volt batteries of the kind that power smoke detectors and other small devices.”
These experiments lost 99.7 percent of the energy that the overall system consumed. They lasted for only a billionth of second. Nevertheless, that didn’t keep most of the news media from reporting that this older, less-powerful result was a “record-breaking” “milestone,” a “breakthrough” and a “step toward practical nuclear fusion.”
#99 News Media Report Year-Old Fusion Breakthrough, Milestone, Step Forward, Etc., Etc. was last modified: April 16th, 2022 by sbkrivit
Although deuterium is abundant and available as a natural resource, tritium is not. Some fusion scientists say that they can produce all the tritium they need for fusion reactors by breeding tritium from lithium. This claim is not supported by the science. There is no known way to breed tritium fast enough from enriched lithium. There is also no known legal, non-toxic way to produce the necessary industrial quantities of enriched lithium. The scientists know this. Some of them have been transparent about communicating it. Others have not. Without a source for tritium, without a source for tons of enriched lithium, fusion will never be a source of energy.
Nothing could be further from the truth. These wonderful qualities apply to deuterium but not to tritium. Fusion reactors will need a 50/50 mixture of deuterium and tritium.
Tritium Sources
Tritium does not exist as a natural resource. Tritium is a government-controlled, radioactive material produced by an aging fleet of specialized nuclear fission reactors that will not be replaced. The cost for tritium ranges from $30,000 per gram to $100,000 per gram. All of these special fission reactors are scheduled to be decommissioned by 2060, with no known replacements planned. (References and Sources)
Lithium-6 Sources
Fusion scientists know this, of course, and for 50 years, they have had an alternate plan. They have hoped that fusion power plants could make their own tritium by breeding it from lithium-6. But lithium-6 cannot be mined directly from the earth or from brine pools. Processing plants must take natural lithium and enrich its percentage of lithium-6.
Minor problem: There appear to be only two industrial-scale lithium processing plants in the world: one in China and one in Russia.
Minor problem: The purpose of these processing plants is to separate lithium-6 for use in nuclear weapons.
Minor problem: These plants use a toxic mercury separation technique that was banned in the United States decades ago.
Minor problem: Although lithium-6 concentrations can be purchased in quantities of grams from chemical supply houses, fusion reactors would require tons of lithium-6.
Minor problem: Even if a new, environmentally friendly lithium processing method were developed, a plant large enough to produce industrial-scale quantities would take 20 years to build.
(References and Sources)
In January 2022, I discussed these issues with Tony Donné, the head of EUROfusion, and asked Donné about his planned source for the tons of enriched lithium needed for his EU DEMO reactor. He confirmed, buttressed with optimism, that the enrichment technology does not exist.
“We have enough time until the fusion reactors are rolled out to develop the technology and set up plants to enrich the lithium,” Donné wrote.
Lithium in Seawater
Can lithium for fusion fuel be obtained from seawater? Today, lithium is mined from the earth and extracted from brine pools. The world is already seeing supply-chain resource conflicts for the lithium needed for batteries.
Fusion scientists say that lithium can also be obtained from seawater. For perspective, some fusion scientists also say that helium-3, as an alternate fusion fuel source, can be mined from the moon. Both statements are true. Neither statement accounts for the cost to obtain the particular fuel.
No economical method exists to harvest natural lithium from the ocean. That is because the concentration of natural lithium in seawater is dilute: roughly 0.2 ppm. Until and unless an economical method of ocean harvesting is developed, fusion fuel will need to come from conventional sources, which will only add to the current geopolitical lithium resource conflicts.
Using lithium for fusion will be even less practical than using it for batteries, because only about 7.5 percent of the lithium in that 0.2 ppm contains the needed lithium-6 isotope. Additionally, ocean-harvested lithium-6 is subject to all of the same problems as discussed above (lack of processing plants, proliferation risks, etc.) that mined lithium is.
Tritium Breeding
Putting aside all of these practical inconveniences, lithium, from the perspective of physics, can certainly breed some tritium through an induced fission reaction. The crucial question has always been whether fusion power plants can breed enough tritium. (References and Sources)
The answer, according to a peer-reviewed paper published in the preeminent journal Nuclear Fusion in 2020, is no:
We focus in particular on components, issues and research and development necessary to satisfy three “principal requirements”: (1) achieving tritium self-sufficiency within the fusion system, (2) providing a tritium inventory for the initial start-up of a fusion facility, and (3) managing the safety and biological hazards of tritium. A primary conclusion is that the physics and technology state-of-the-art will not enable [the European] DEMO [reactor] and future power plants to satisfy these principal requirements.
The authors represent some of the most renowned fusion research laboratories:
Mohamed Abdou, University of California, Los Angeles
Marco Riva, University of California, Los Angeles
Alice Ying, University of California, Los Angeles
Christian Day, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
Alberto Loarte, ITER Organization
R. Baylor, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Paul Humrickhouse, Idaho National Laboratory
Thomas F. Fuerst, Idaho National Laboratory
Seungyon Cho, National Fusion Research Institute, Republic of Korea
(References and Sources)
The peer-reviewed scientific research from these credible scientists stands in contrast to claims by fusion promoters like Michel Laberge, the founder of General Fusion Inc. Here’s what Laberge said in a 2014 TEDx lecture in Kansas City:
The fuel that you need for fusion, you can extract it from the ocean. You can extract the fuel from the ocean for one-thousandth of a cent per kilowatt-hour. If the whole planet was run on fusion, there would be enough fuel in the ocean for 2 billion years. So there’s enough fuel, and it’s nice, and it’s clean, and it’s fantastic.
Jan. 27, 2022: This article was updated to add the Lithium in Seawater section.
March 14, 2022: This article was updated to add the paragraphs about Donné.
#98 The Fuel for Nuclear Fusion Doesn’t Exist was last modified: June 14th, 2022 by sbkrivit
