Return to ITER Power Facts Main Page
Oct. 10, 2020
By Steven B. Krivit
This is a concise, five-page report that explains how the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, a zero-power experimental nuclear fusion reactor now under construction in France, was misleadingly sold as a 500-megawatt reactor. Download the Report
Bernard Bigot, director-general of the ITER project, testifying before Congress in 2018.
by Hans Fantel
The cheapest and most plentiful fuel on earth would be water — if you could burn it. That’s no longer a pipe dream. From the way it looks now, we may soon have practical fusion reactors to liberate the atomic forces in seawater. The world would then have a virtually boundless source of energy.
Atomic fusion — the principle basic to the use of seawater as fuel — has been known since the dawn of the atomic age during World War II. But so far, no practical fusion device has been built (unless you consider the hydrogen bomb as practical). But to gigantic research projects — one at Princeton University, the other at the University of Rochester — are finally getting within spitting distance of producing useful energy from fusion reactions. ...
The latest version of the tokamak has been able to reach stellar temperatures, trigger a fusion reaction and sustain it long enough to generate significant amounts of power. So far, the big machine has managed to keep this up for about 20 milliseconds. To become an efficient energy producer, it will have to run much longer than that — about 10 seconds or more for each power burst. But keeping the tokamak going for so long is very tricky task.
The trouble is that no material on Earth can contain the raging stream of stellar stuff inside the tokamak. If the swirling deuterium touches the wall of the metal tube containing it, the deuterium cloud breaks up, cooling to the point where the fusion reaction falters. So the torrent inside the tokamak must race inside the ring-shaped tube without ever touching its walls. It is, therefore, contained in what is called a magnetic bottle — an ultra-strong magnetic field, shaped to hold the deuterium suspended within the doughnut, away from its walls.
Unfortunately, the bottle still leaks. Often, the hot material breaks through the magnetic restraint, cools off instantly, and stops the reaction. That’s the main reason why the tokamak is still just a research tool, rather than a working power source.
But this may change by the late 1980s. A machine almost twice as big as the present tokamak — called the TFTR, the tokamak fusion test reactor — is nearly completed, and its size alone may help solve the problem. …
Dr. Harold P. Furth, director of the tokamak project, believes that it might break even by the mid-1980s. The breakeven point would be reached when a reaction lasts long enough to generate as much energy as is consumed in the heating process.
Publication Date: September, 1982
Source: Popular Mechanics
Self-sustaining fusion reaction “will be achieved within a few years,” researchers say.
by Clifford B. Hicks
The best evidence of progress in this field is not success, but lack of failure. As former Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis L Strauss has pointed out: “We think the fact that we have worked with it now for a number of years and have not been able to prove it impossible is a very considerable gauge of its eventual success.”
Dr. Arthur E. Ruark, chief of controlled nuclear research for the AEC, confirms the optimism: “There is general belief in the American laboratories that the ignition temperature, the temperature at which the fusion reaction is self-sustaining, will be achieved within a few years.” …
Scientists in attendance [at the Geneva conference] estimated that sometime within the next 10 or 20 years, the switch will be thrown and the first full-scale, power-producing fusion reactor will go into operation. Even this first crude reactor probably will have a power output comparable to the huge hydroelectric plant at Hoover Dam.
Publication Date: January 1959
Source: Popular Mechanics
Sept. 30, 2020
Leo Rafael Reif
President, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dear President Reif,
In a consistent, multi-year, public-relations campaign, Dennis G. Whyte, the director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, and Martin Greenwald, the deputy director of the center, have communicated with members of the news media and created the false impression that their next reactor design, known as SPARC, is designed to produce power at a rate two-to-ten times as much as the reactor will require to operate.
The root of the deception is founded on the intersection of two conflicting themes. On the one hand, for 70 years, fusion scientists have promised the public a fusion reactor that produces more energy than it consumes. Most news articles that discuss fusion remind us that this is the penultimate goal, short of producing electricity. But no electricity from fusion will ever be produced unless the net power gain of an overall reactor is positive rather than negative. The second of the intersecting themes is that, for 70 years, fusion scientists have known that no fusion reactor — including the planned SPARC and ITER reactors — has been designed to produce power at a rate greater than it will consume.
Fusion representatives, for decades, have leveraged this foundational disparity and structured the language in their claims to feed the public’s expectation of a fusion reactor that will produce a net positive power rate, despite the fact that the representatives knew that no such reactor is imminent. Fusion representatives create the illusion with two well-established tactics. The tactics apply to the forthcoming SPARC and ITER reactors and perhaps other planned fusion reactors.
The first tactic is that, without clearly explaining to the public and news media, they offer input power values that are not associated with the overall reactors. Instead, they provide input values that are associated only with the rate of thermal power that enters the reaction chambers to heat the fuel.
The second tactic is that the fusion representatives never disclose the rate of input electrical power that these fusion reactors will require to operate. If a journalist is savvy enough to realize what the scientists are doing, and the journalist asks the fusion representatives for the rate of required electrical input power for the reactors, the representatives then say that the question is irrelevant because present fusion reactors are not designed for overall net power rates. This is circular reasoning.
Here’s a brief summary of the recent activities of the directors in the MIT fusion center.
March 9, 2018, Press Release
The first press release that MIT issued about SPARC said this:
SPARC is designed to produce about 100 MW of heat. While it will not turn that heat into electricity, it will produce, in pulses of about 10 seconds, as much power as is used by a small city. That output would be more than twice the power used to heat the plasma, achieving the ultimate technical milestone: positive net energy from fusion.
Your scientists created the illusion that SPARC’s projected output would be sufficient for a small city. They created the illusion that SPARC would produce an output of 100 megawatts of heat that — if the reactor was so designed — could be turned into electricity. This is dishonest; it is an example of a bait-and-switch technique. People who are experts in fusion will recognize the nuanced language. The MIT fusion scientists were not talking about net power from a fusion reactor. Instead, they were talking about net power from a fusion reaction.
Net energy from a fusion reactor means you have some amount of power left over, after subtracting the input power used to operate the reactor. Net power from a fusion reaction refers only to the pure physics; it does not account for or subtract the input power required to operate the reactor.
Thus, for example, MIT scientists misled Jeff Tollefson, a journalist with Nature, to write that SPARC is “a prototype reactor that can generate more energy than it consumes.”
No Reactor Net Power
Because the plans for SPARC specify that the rate of thermal power injected into the fuel will be 25 to 30 megawatts, this means that the rate of electrical power required to produce the injected thermal power will be at least 75 to 90 megawatts. That leaves the question of the rate of electrical power required to operate the machine. I asked Greenwald for that value last year. He didn’t respond to my e-mails or phone messages.
Unless the SPARC reactor design requires an extraordinarily low rate of input electrical power, there will not be a sufficiently high net output power rate to, hypothetically, power a single light bulb, let alone a small city. But again, this is the point at which fusion representatives use circular reasoning to claim they are unfairly judged; they insist that their experiments are not designed for net reactor power output.
June 27, 2019, Press Release
In a June 27, 2019, press release, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, the private spin-off associated with MIT, said that SPARC will “demonstrate net energy gain from fusion for the first time in history.” This claim played into the public’s expectation and long-awaited hope of net energy gain from a fusion reactor. Yet, by its ambiguity, the claim provided a deceptive but thin veil of scientific accuracy that could be defended as net energy gain from a fusion reaction.
Aug. 5, 2019, Physics World Article
On Aug. 5, 2019, an MIT student and a visiting scientist writing in Physics World claimed that SPARC would be a new “fusion device aiming to be the first to achieve net energy gain.” That phrase, if read by itself, is unequivocally false because the device is not designed to achieve net energy gain. Knowing this, the authors tried to provide cover by immediately following that claim with a definition of net energy gain for a fusion reaction, not a fusion device. In other words, they made a false claim, then tried to defend it with a definition that was inconsistent with device net energy gain.
Sept. 29, 2020, Press Release
The Sept. 29, 2020, press release continued propagating the half-truth about MIT’s fusion research. The MIT scientists said that, according to the design, SPARC will produce twice as much fusion energy “as the amount of energy pumped in to generate the reaction.” Then they said it might even produce ten times as much.
It was the same deception; the MIT fusion scientists were only referring to the pure physics, the power going into and coming out of the reaction. They were not comparing the power going into and coming out of the reactor. By telling this half-truth to members of the news media who are not expected to be fusion experts, they manipulated the news media to unknowingly exaggerate what SPARC is designed to do.
Thus, MIT scientists misled, for example, Henry Fountain, a journalist with the New York Times, to write that SPARC, if successful, will “produce as much as 10 times the energy it consumes.”
Research Integrity
Journalists are not to blame for failing to discern the technical nuances of nuclear fusion experts. Scientists are responsible for communicating clearly and transparently, particularly when making claims in press releases. Your fusion scientists repeatedly breached their duty to communicate their research accurately and transparently. They saw the advantageous results from their first press release and did it again, and again.
This leaves the question about how your university teaches its students about research integrity and whether your university condones this type of behavior.
I welcome your response.
Steven B. Krivit
New Energy Times
DISTRIBUTION
Leo Rafael Reif, President, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Maria T. Zuber, Office of the Vice-President for Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Sarah McDonnell, Media Contact, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Martin Greenwald, Deputy Director, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Plasma Science and Fusion Center
Dennis G. Whyte, Director, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Plasma Science and Fusion Center
Jeff Tollefson, Nature
Henry Fountain, New York Times
RELATED:
Did MIT and Commonwealth Fusion Systems Mislead Fusion Investors?
Martin Greenwald
Return to ITER Power Facts Main Page
By Steven B. Krivit
Sept. 29, 2020
Promoters of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, ITER, have had a long history of telling the public how much thermal output power they should expect from this experimental reactor. At the same time, they have had a long history of omitting the required input power. Perpetual-motion scams do the same thing, only with mechanical tricks.
More than 200 examples show that the ITER promoters fooled staff members of industry, government agencies, and energy organizations; editors for English, French, and Italian Wikipedia pages; scores of journalists, including those with the New York Times, Science magazine, Nature magazine, and The Guardian; university students, including those at Stanford and Princeton; and staff writers for the European Commission, European Parliament, and the White House.
Earlier this year, I spoke with Martin Greenwald, one of the fusion scientists who had helped promote ITER. Greenwald is the deputy director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Plasma Science and Fusion Center.
ITER is not designed to produce electricity; nor is it designed to produce overall net power. It is designed specifically for a purely scientific outcome: a fusion plasma that produces thermal power at a rate 10 times greater than the rate of thermal power injected into the plasma. This goal, if achieved, translates to a net-zero output for the overall reactor. Representatives of the fusion community who have spoken about ITER publicly have told the public for three decades that the overall reactor was designed to produce significant net power, that the overall reactor was designed to produce power at a rate 10 times greater than the power the reactor would consume. That’s not what its designed for. If it works, it will produce thermal power at the same rate as it consumes the equivalent rate of electrical power.
In 2012, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) published a report called “Program on Technology Innovation: Assessment of Fusion Energy Options for Commercial Electricity Production.” Greenwald was one of the fusion experts consulted. The report makes the following claims about ITER:
I first asked Greenwald how he derived his gross thermal output value: 635 MWth. It was close but didn’t match my value of 686 MW. He explained his calculation and taught me something new: A significant portion of the thermal energy of the fusion-produced alpha particles, the 100 MW of internal heating, is expected to be recovered by the divertor.
In the next part of our discussion, he gave me a more detailed breakdown of the gross thermal output value, which he recalculated as 618 MW instead of 635 MW. From the 618 number, he used a high thermal-to-electric conversion rate of 0.454 and ended up with 280 MW gross electric output.
With a mutual agreement about those numbers, I moved on and asked him how he concluded that the device could “realistically generate net electricity” considering the steady-state input power requirement of 300 MW of electricity.
The 300 MW input power value was new to him. He didn’t know where that value came from. He didn’t seem to have a basic understanding of the reactor power drains. I showed him how the 300 MW value was calculated and showed him my sources. Then he stopped responding to my e-mails. Here’s a record of those two messages.
Around the same time, I began a conversation with ITER scientist Gregory DeTemmerman to crosscheck the new information Greenwald had given me about thermal recovery from the divertor. I also cross-checked the divertor thermal recovery with Hartmut Zohm, a fusion scientist at the Max-Planck-Institute of Plasma Physics. After I obtained a consensus, I updated my “ITER Reactor Power Values — Bar Chart” and, in a group e-mail, sent it to the sources who contributed to the information in the chart.
In one of the messages in that discussion thread, I reminded Greenwald that he had not answered my question about how ITER was supposed to “realistically generate net electricity.” I asked him whether I was missing something or whether his report contained an inaccuracy. Here is his response:
1. During a pulse, the ITER facility as a whole will produce substantial net power. 2. That magnitude of excess power, if it were converted from thermal to electrical power, would very roughly balance the input.
His point No. 1 was not valid because it was an apples-to-oranges comparison: comparing electric power in to thermal power out. Without directly admitting it, his point No. 2 confirmed that he and his colleagues had made a false claim. They had claimed that ITER, if coupled to an energy conversion system, would be capable of generating 280 megawatts of electricity. They had omitted the expected input power required to operate the reactor. Had they included the input power, their text would have read “ITER, if coupled to an energy conversion system, would be capable of generating 0 megawatts of electricity.”
| © 2025 newenergytimes.net |
