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#74 Organizers Cancel Fusion Session for United Nations General Assembly Science Summit

Sep 092021

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By Steven B. Krivit
September 9, 2021

Yesterday, Declan Kirrane, one of the organizers of a science summit for the 76th United Nations General Assembly, taking place Sept. 14-30, cancelled the summit’s scheduled session on nuclear fusion.

Several months ago, Kirrane approached Michel Claessens, one of two former spokesmen for the ITER organization, and asked him to help organize the fusion session for the summit. Kirrane was scheduled to be the chair of one panel. Claessens, the author of the book ITER: The Giant Fusion Reactor: Bringing a Sun to Earth, was scheduled to be the chair of the other panel.

Yesterday, Kirrane wrote to Claessens that the ITER organization decided not to participate in the program. Kirrane quickly began learning about the conflicts.

“This morning I had contact with the ITER organization. I learned that you and they have some differences of views. ITER will not participate in any meeting or activity that you have anything to do with. I have therefore decided to cancel the UNGA76 session on nuclear fusion,” Kirrane wrote.

Rather than accommodate the ITER organization’s implicit demand, Kirrane cancelled the entire session.

Even before he left the ITER organization in 2015, Claessens was concerned about the integrity of the organization’s public claims.

In 2017, when he was working for the European Commission, he learned more details about the previously hidden reactor power values and encouraged an open, public discussion. Claessens told New Energy Times that Laban Coblentz, the current ITER organization spokesman, immediately began encouraging Claessens to shut up.

Planned panelists for “Can ITER and Fusion Energy Play a Role in Fighting Climate Change?”

Panel Moderator: Declan Kirrane
Shira Tabachnikoff (deputy head of communications for the ITER organization)
Melanie Windridge (spokeswoman for Tokamak Energy Ltd., and the U.K. spokeswoman for the Fusion Industry Association)
Kirsty Gogan (managing partner of LucidCatalyst)
Samuele Furfari (chemical engineer at Université Libre de Bruxelles)

Planned panelists for “Will Fusion Energy Become Commercial Before 2050?”

Panel Moderator: Michel Claessens
Bernard Bigot (director-general of ITER Organization)
Michel Laberge (chief scientist at General Fusion)
Bob Mumgaard (founder and chief executive officer of Commonwealth Fusion Systems)
Mark Henderson (United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority)

Bigot is featured in the documentary film ITER, The Grand Illusion: A Forensic Investigation of Power Claims.
Laberge, Mumgaard, and Henderson are featured in the investigative analysis “When Will We Get Energy From Nuclear Fusion?”
Henderson is featured in the Public Broadcasting Radio program “A Fusion Experiment Promised to be the Next Step in Solving Humanity’s Energy Crisis. It’s a Big Claim to Live up To”

Affordable and Clean Energy

ITER is a $65 billion science experiment that, if successful, will inject 50 million Watts of thermal power into the fusion fuel and, in turn, produce fusion reactions with 500 million Watts of thermal power. The experiment is designed to run for 500 seconds and scientists hope it will achieve its peak 500 MW output sometime around 2045.

If ITER succeeds in this, its primary scientific goal, the correlated result for the overall reactor will be an equivalent loss of about 250 million Watts of thermal power. The equivalent loss, normalized to electric power, will be 100 million Watts.

In some universe, this may prove that fusion is an affordable, commercially viable form of clean energy. But not ours.

Promoters of fusion have been claiming that commercial fusion energy is “right around the corner” for most of the last 70 years of the global fusion research program. Despite an overwhelming array of recent designs on paper, magnificent-looking devices, and the generous contributions by private investors, not one fusion reactor has ever produced a single Watt of thermal power in excess of the electricity required to operate the reactor. In light of the complete absence of experimental evidence that a fusion reactor can produce net energy, and in light of the overwhelming presence of false and misleading claims, fusion research has more potential to become the world’s biggest science scam than a practical source of energy.

Records for Science Summit for the 76th United Nations General Assembly

List of fusion sessions (Retrieved Sept. 8, 2021)
Summit Schedule (Retrieved Sept. 8, 2021)
Summit Schedule (Retrieved Sept. 9, 2021)

Sept. 12, 2021 Update: Details about the background conflict have been added.

#73 National Ignition Facility Achieves Ignition in Historic Nuclear Fusion Experiment

Aug 292021

Laser Fusion and NIF
News Reports #73, #102, #103, #104

Some of the 192 lasers in the National Ignition Facility (Photo: S. Krivit)

Some of the 192 lasers in the U.S. National Ignition Facility (Photo: S. Krivit)

By Steven B. Krivit
August 29, 2021

New Energy Times has learned from scientists at the U.S. fusion lab that the recent results from the National Ignition Facility indicate that the lab has not only approached the threshold of nuclear fusion ignition but also achieved this historic breakthrough.

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is a nuclear fusion research installation that is privately operated by Lawrence Livermore National Security LLC on behalf of the publicly owned Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). It is located in Livermore, California, just east of San Francisco.

The lab issued a press release on Aug. 17, 2021, announcing that its Aug. 8, 2021, experiment had reached the “threshold of fusion ignition.” However, during our conversations with Kimberly S. Budil, the director of the lab, and Omar A. Hurricane, the chief scientist for the inertial confinement fusion program at the lab, and after our discussions about the data, they unofficially acknowledged that the fusion device had accomplished this historic threshold.

Laser fusion is an informal term for a type of inertial confinement fusion. Whereas most experimental fusion devices in the world initiate fusion through high temperatures, laser fusion does so by high compression.

In the NIF laser fusion experiment, electricity from the grid is sent into the world’s largest array of lasers. (See photos here) That bank of 192 lasers shoots optical energy into a tiny target chamber called a hohlraum. Inside the hohlraum is the fuel capsule. It contains a mixture of hydrogen isotopes.

The NIF hohlraum target (Photo: LLNL)

Diagram of the NIF hohlraum showing the fuel capsule (Diagram: LLNL)

When sufficient energy reaches the fuel, fusion reactions take place. The lab uses three metrics to measure progress.

Starting from the outside of the hohlraum and going in, the first metric is called target gain. This is the ratio of energy produced by the fusion reaction to the energy delivered to the entire hohlraum target. The second metric is called the capsule gain. This is the energy produced by the fusion reaction to the energy delivered to the fuel capsule. The third metric is called fuel gain. This is the energy produced by the fusion reaction to the energy delivered to the fuel.

For the Aug. 8, 2021, results, here are the three gain values:

We Have Ignition
New Energy Times reviewed the gain values above with Hurricane for accuracy. We then located several pages on the LLNL Web site, like this page, which defines ignition as the fusion process generating “energy equaling or exceeding the energy delivered to the capsule.” The Aug. 8 capsule gain achieved a value of 5.6, which is 5.6 times greater than the defined LLNL threshold for ignition. We presented this analysis to Hurricane for comment.

“Yes, many technical assessments of ignition have been made indicating ignition, but we are still processing the data,” Hurricane wrote. “Our team is waiting on claiming ignition until we dot the i’s and cross the t’s. There are many technical definitions of ignition, so we are going through them. This work will be presented in a peer-reviewed publication before we claim it.”

Budil was conditionally willing to agree that, according to the lab’s definition, it had achieved ignition, but she acknowledged that a 1997 report prepared by members of the fusion community under the auspices of the National Academies sets a reference for ignition based on target gain rather than capsule gain.

“Yes, although the National Academies adopted the definition of target gain = 1 for ignition, we do not want to push on this until we have more data and hopefully a bit higher yield,” Budil wrote. “[There is] no official declaration of ignition from us, although others have made this exact point in print.”

Throughout the 24 years since that National Academies’ report was published, LLNL has published on many of its Web pages statements that capsule gain, rather than target gain, is the lab’s reference measurement for ignition.

The Question of Energy
Before we talk about laser fusion as a possible source for energy, it’s crucial to know that the primary purpose of NIF is to test nuclear weapons materials in an enclosed space rather than for fusion energy research.

So what is the likelihood that the NIF device might ever demonstrate that laser fusion can be a source of energy? “Zero chance,” Hurricane wrote. “The NIF was never designed for net energy production since it’s just a research facility.” Here’s the math for the overall device gain, normalizing the electrical input energy to thermal energy based on a 33 percent conversion efficiency:

It’s less accurate, but some people may prefer to compare the electrical input value to the thermal output value. Here’s what that calculation looks like:

The Aug. 8, 2021, experiment, which produced 1.3 megajoules of energy, did so at an energy cost of at least the 400 megajoules required for the lasers. Regardless of whether the capsule gain value or the target gain value is used as the reference for the definition of fusion, the NIF device lost at least 99.7 percent of the energy it consumed.

The lab publishes this claim on its Web site: “Achieving ignition would be an unprecedented, game-changing breakthrough for science and could lead to a new source of boundless clean energy for the world.” The first part is credible; the second part strains credulity. The claim has been published on the LLNL Web site at least since 2014, long before Budil was in charge.

#72 National Ignition Facility Fusion Photo Montage

Aug 222021

See full news story here.

The publicly owned and funded National Ignition Facility privately operated by the Lawrence Livermore National Security corporation.

Looking down toward the laser banks

Looking up at toward the bottom of the laser banks

Looking up toward the bottom of the laser banks

The termination point of three of the 192 lasers

The hohlraum, the fuel pellet. It's the size of your thumb

The hohlraum, the fuel pellet. It’s about a quarter of the size of your thumb

The modern control room

The old control room

Energy gain!

#71 Review of The Fairy Tale of Nuclear Fusion by L. J. Reinders

Jul 112021

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Review of The Fairy Tale of Nuclear Fusion by L. J. Reinders
Springer, May 21, 2021, 650 pages
ISBN-13: 978-3030643430

UPDATE: Reinders now has a condensed, less-technical version of the book available: Sun in a Bottle?… Pie in the Sky!: The Wishful Thinking of Nuclear Fusion Energy. (ISBN-13 ? : ? 978-3030747336)

By Steven B. Krivit
July 11, 2021

A good non-fiction book is informative. A great non-fiction book also takes readers on a journey. When I got to the end of this book, I did indeed feel that this author had taken me on an amazing journey.

The Fairy Tale of Nuclear Fusion, by L. J. Reinders, stands alone. No book about nuclear fusion research approaches the objective and sober examination that Reinders provides. His research, foundation, and synthesis make this book an exemplary historical resource.

Before I go any further, I must disclose that I am not without bias; I am one of the sources cited in this book. Reinders cites my investigation of the required input power for the only three experimental fusion reactors in history to use real fusion fuel. I have a second disclosure: I did not pay close attention to some parts of the book. I will explain more about that in a moment.

A person need not read more than the title of this book to understand its key message. But Reinders did not approach the topic with an agenda to support his resultant thesis. In fact, the opposite is true.

Reinders, now retired, had a career in high-energy physics and worked at various research centers in Europe and Japan. When he began writing the book, as he explained, his intention was to urge more public support for fusion research. It seemed to him a promising endeavor that had a high probability of great social value. To his surprise and dismay, it became apparent to him that “nuclear fusion was a fantasy pursued by single-minded individuals that were apparently unable to see reason and the fundamental failings of their efforts.”

Despite his revelation, he continued and completed a book that not only serves well to separate facts from falsehoods but also succeeds in two other areas. First, despite his emergent despair about fusion, Reinders has created an encyclopedic tool that chronicles the historical development of the nuclear research field. Second, despite the fact that the window of practical fusion energy is as far away as it has always been, Reinders performs several “what-if” examinations to consider best-case scenarios. Rather than take the easy path of pot-shots or cynicism to provide the foundation for his thesis, he pursued various scenarios to thoughtfully consider the possible outcome of practical fusion energy.

The technical density of this book likely will make it a challenge for most lay readers. On the other hand, Reinders does have a forthcoming book that is intended for a lay audience. The book is called Sun in a Bottle?… Pie in the Sky! The Wishful Thinking of Nuclear Fusion Energy. The technical level in Fairy Tale provides the defense Reinders might need if he is critically attacked from people invested, either monetarily or by career choice, in the fusion establishment.

In a few places in the book, Reinders expresses his anger at the nonsense, dishonesty, and self-delusion that this book reveals. For readers who are new to the fusion illusion, Reinders’ emotive writing may be distracting, but it does not invalidate the facts he brings to light. For readers who have seen behind the illusory fusion curtain, his opinions will be a welcome reminder of the reality illuminated within the book. For example, he provides the statement from the prestigious International Atomic Energy Agency that “fusion is, today, one of the most promising of all alternative energy sources.” With not one practical Watt of power produced by fusion in 70 years, readers will begin to see the discrepancies between fusion reality and fusion fantasy.

I did not read thoroughly two areas of the book. The first area is the early section of the book, in which Reinders goes into great depth about the history of various fusion devices and approaches. In another area, Reinders goes into detail about the mechanics of various experimental devices. These are excellent topics to include in the book and will be useful for some readers. For me, as someone who holds no hope for controlled thermonuclear fusion as an energy source, these sections of the book were not sufficiently interesting.

I have one problem with the book. The fusion community regularly uses a form of doublespeak with key phrases such as “fusion power” and “scientific feasibility.” Reinders did not seem to recognize the double meanings and how they contributed to the gap in understanding between fusion scientists and fusion fans. As a result, Reinders inadvertently uses some of the fusion lingo and perpetuates some of the confusion.

There are two paragraphs in his book that I found infinitely illuminating:

In view of the almost insurmountable challenges remaining ahead on the way to a fusion-powered future and the almost total lack of scientific and technological progress achieved through erratic high-level global partnership as well as the decreased publicly funded research and development, which has now attracted the vultures of venture capital, it is unwarranted and incomprehensible that there is still trust in fusion as a promising option to provide a sustainable, worldwide supply of energy for centuries to come.

There is no other endeavor or project undertaken by mankind on which energy and money have been spent for close to a hundred years without any tangible results, only a dim prospect of success in another fifty years or so. The reason must be that there is a lot at stake, or perceived to be.

From my own interactions with key players and leaders in the fusion field, I believe that it is not money that is primarily at stake. Nor is it scientific achievement. From my perspective, what is at stake for the fusion players — scientists, educators, students, and international organizations — is relevance.

Nuclear fission research and its associated field of nuclear engineering became relevant within a few years of the successful operation of the first fission reactor. The horizon for the relevance of nuclear fusion, on the other hand, continues to recede every decade. This book shows why.