#116 How Fusion Representatives Created the Power Deception

Apr 092022
 

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By Steven B. Krivit
April 9, 2022

In this article, I will explain how representatives of the nuclear fusion community caused so many people to misunderstand the power specifications of experimental fusion reactors. The fusion fuel deception is an equally important issue, but I have covered that matter in this summary article and its subordinate articles.

In order to keep this article as concise as possible, I’m going to focus on the underlying concepts the representatives used rather than their specific activities. I’ve covered such activities in my documentary film “ITER, The Grand Illusion: A Forensic Investigation of Power Claims.”

The entire nuclear fusion community did not actively participate in the power deception. Only a few of their representatives were directly responsible. However, the rest of the fusion community, with few exceptions, passively allowed it to happen.

For people who are new to the subject, I will first show some examples to provide a sense of how significant this deception was.

National Ignition Facility

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) announced new results in August 2021. Scientists at NIF caused the news organization Vox, for example, to tell its readers and viewers that the NIF laser fusion device came very close to producing net energy. Vox told its audience that the NIF experiment produced an output of 1.3 megajoules of energy with an input of 1.9 megajoules. 1.3 megajoules is enough energy to boil one kettle of water.

The Vox journalists did not understand — and it was by no means their fault — that the NIF laser fusion device actually consumed 400 megajoules of energy. I explained the exact details of how the laboratory created this misunderstanding in an Aug. 8, 2021, article as well as in three follow-up articles starting on Feb. 2, 2022.

The NIF scientists didn’t trick only journalists. They also tricked American professor of theoretical physics and television personality Michio Kaku into thinking that the NIF device produced fusion reactions that released 70 percent of the energy consumed by the device. Kaku spoke on CNBC in August 2021. Kaku didn’t realize that laser fusion scientists at NIF have four definitions for breakeven. Kaku inadvertently led viewers to believe that the NIF device (not just the fusion reaction) “hit breakeven: to extract more energy than you put in.” With 400 megajoules in and 1.3 megajoules out, the NIF device didn’t come close.

Joint European Torus

Fusion scientists misled journalist and author Charles Seife about the Joint European Torus (JET) reactor which produced the most powerful fusion output in the world 25 years ago.

Seife thought, as he wrote in his 2009 book Sun in a Bottle, that JET was not the hallmark of a great power plant because it produced an output of only 6 Watts for every 10 Watts it consumed. The common belief was that JET produced 16 MW from a total input of 24 MW of electricity. How far did JET scientists spin the facts? JET consumed 700 MW of electricity. JET produced fusion reactions with only two percent of the power the reactor consumed.

International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor

Science magazine journalist Daniel Clery has written many articles about ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. Clery describes himself as someone with “a long pedigree in science journalism.”

In 2006, Clery told readers of Science that “ITER aims to produce 500 megawatts of power, 10 times the amount needed to keep it running.”

In 2013, he told readers that “no reactor has yet produced net energy gain.”  He wrote, “ITER is expected to break through that barrier and generate 500 megawatts from a 50 MW input.”

In 2020, he told readers that “ITER is designed to show net energy output can be achieved.”

Actually, the ITER reactor is designed to consume 500 MW of electricity to start and then use 300 to 440 MW throughout the experiment. This will leave nothing left over, with no net energy for the overall device, because the planned 500 MW thermal output is equivalent to 200 MW electrical output.

How They Did It

How were fusion scientists so effective in deceiving so many smart people? The key was their use of terms that have double meanings. Among them, the No. 1 most-effective method was their use of the phrase “fusion power.” There are two examples in the image below.

False claims made by the ITER organization, as published on its Web site, before Oct. 6, 2017 (Click here to see ITER organization’s correction soon after Oct. 5, 2017)

False claims made by the ITER organization, as published on its Web site, before Oct. 6, 2017 (Click here to see ITER organization’s correction soon after Oct. 5, 2017)

#1. Fusion Power vs. Fusion Power

The practical meaning of the phrase “fusion power” is the net power produced by a fusion reactor. The scientific meaning of “fusion power” is the gross thermal power produced by fusion reactions.

The first meaning includes the power required to operate a fusion reactor. The second meaning excludes the required operating power. The fusion community elected not to explain or define this distinction or even advise the public of the existence of the second meaning. The ambiguity worked in the community’s favor. It caused most people to think, using JET as an example, that the reactor produced 16 MW of fusion power when, in fact, it produced only reactions with 16 MW of fusion power. In that sentence, there’s no way that anybody but an expert can tell the difference. Because members of the public knew only one meaning of the phrase “fusion power,” that’s the only meaning they ascribed to “fusion power.”

For more-technical readers: It did not help that fusion representatives added “(Q=10)” in promotional literature, as shown above, because most members of the public did not know anything about “Q.” There was no way for the public to understand that, in these instances, “Q” was supposed to mean Qscientific. Moreover, language as shown above — “from a total input power” — associated “Q” to the wrong Q-value, to Qengineering. Ordinarily, “Q” by itself is associated with Qscientific. By their pervasive association of “Q” with “total input power,” the fusion representatives, in fact, co-opted the meaning of “Q” to imply Qengineering.

#2. Misleading Purpose of Research

Hand-in-hand with the systemic ambiguity of the phrase “fusion power” was the fact that fusion scientists were ambiguous when speaking with the public about the purpose of fusion research. For most of the 70-year duration of the research, scientists implied that their goal was net reactor power. But none of the 100-plus fusion reactors was ever designed to obtain net reactor power output. The goal was always (except until recently) net reaction power output.

#3. Misleading Input Power Values

Whenever fusion scientists told members of the public any input power value, they always gave a power value representing the injected heating power used to heat the fuel. But the scientists rarely explained that to the public. That’s what the “24 MW” and “50 MW” values mean in the example above. Instead, the scientists implied that those values were the required input power to operate the JET and ITER reactors, respectively. In the JET example above, it was more than just implied. They said “total input power.” The fusion community almost never explained that these values — “24 MW” and “50 MW” — represented the injected heating power until I publicly explained the problem in 2018.

#4. Omitted Reactor Input Power Values

In order to complete the false appearance that injected heating power values, like “24 MW” and “50 MW,” represented the total input power value for the reactors, one more component was needed: the complete public omission of the real input power required to operate the reactors. And that’s how this whole house of cards fell apart when, by accident, on Dec. 1, 2014, I learned how much power JET required.

The Fusion Fuel Deception

Equally important to the power deception is the fuel deception. Many fusion scientists and their publicists have told investors and members of the public that the fuel for deuterium-tritium fusion reactors is “abundant, virtually inexhaustible, and equally accessible to everyone.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

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. One of the victims of the fuel deception was Michio Kaku, as revealed when he spoke on CNBC about NIF in 2021.

Here’s what Kaku said about fusion fuel: “And the fuel — the fuel is seawater! Hydrogen from seawater could be the basic fuel. So this is too good to be true.”

Yes, it is too good to be true. A good place to start to understand the fuel deception is my article “The Fuel for Nuclear Fusion Doesn’t Exist.”

 

 

#115 Fusion Q-Values and Breakeven Explained

Apr 082022
 

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By Steven B. Krivit
April 8, 2022

Explained in this article:
— The difference between Qscientific and Qengineering
— The difference between reaction gain and reactor gain
— The difference between scientific breakeven and engineering breakeven
— The difference between Fusion Power and Fusion Power
— The fusion term “scientifically feasible”
— The relevance of experimental fusion results to possible commercial fusion prospects

James McKenzie was the vice president for business at the U.K. Institute of Physics from 2016 to 2020. In March 2022, McKenzie wrote an article in Physics World enthusiastically promoting public support of fusion. He explained why:

Once you achieve fusion, you need to generate more energy than you put in, so that the ratio Q > 1. But a breakeven result has so far never been achieved by a fusion reactor here on Earth. In fact, what you really want is a Q between 5 and 10 so that your reactor produces a useful amount of power.

Full stop. A reactor, like ITER or SPARC, designed to reach a “Q” of 10, cannot produce a useful amount of power.

Fusion experts have had a long history of creating misunderstandings among people who are not experts in the field. McKenzie was only the latest casualty. Even Daniel Clery, Science magazine reporter and author of a popular book on fusion, wrote just a few days earlier that “ITER is designed to show net energy output can be achieved.”

In this explainer, I will clarify the various meanings of “Q” and the proposed values associated with achieving net energy in fusion reactors.

Reaction Performance Q vs. Reactor Performance Q

Fusion researchers use a shorthand notation, based on the capital letter Q, to describe fusion reaction performance. They also use the capital letter Q to describe fusion reactor performance. Reaction performance applies to only the physics reaction, the particles.

Alternatively, reactor performance applies to the overall reactor. Although the physics reaction provides useful information to physicists, only reactor performance can inform us, and answer the age-old question, “How close are we to obtaining useful power from fusion?”

A reasonable question is why fusion scientists use the Q denotation rather than describe reactor performance more simply, using the net power output produced by a fusion reactor. The answer is that, after 70 years and more than 100 experimental fusion reactors, no fusion reactor has produced potentially usable net power.

Perhaps more important, fusion scientists must design reactors first by developing a specification for projected reaction performance, and only then can they calculate projected reactor performance.

The use of capital Q to denote performance is not limited to fusion. Capital Q is a generic concept used in science to designate power or energy gain or loss. In physics, this shorthand can refer to fission, fusion, and nuclear decay reactions.

Fusion researchers have also developed two key milestones that are directly associated with Q-values: scientific breakeven and engineering breakeven. Discussing “breakeven” with a lay audience without clarifying which breakeven is a poor practice, but it is commonplace.

Qscientific

The first Q-value is called Qscientific. Q values followed by the subscript “scientific,” “fusion” or “DT” are usually synonymous. “DT” refers to the most common fuel, a mixture of deuterium and tritium.

Qscientific refers to the ratio of heat produced by a fusion reaction to heat consumed by the fusion reaction. Explained a little more technically, Qscientific is the ratio of the thermal power produced by a fusion plasma to the injected thermal power used to heat that plasma. Technically, heat is not measured directly in fusion reactors, but it is imputed based on the measured kinetic energy of the fusion-produced neutrons.

Qscientific is concerned with only the amplification of the heating power. It does not consider the electrical power required to produce that heating power. Nor does Qscientific consider the electrical power required to operate the rest of the reactor.

By convention, in fusion science, if Q is written alone, without any denotation, it implies Qscientific. Writing Q without any denotation to a lay audience is a poor practice, but it is also commonplace.

When the rate of heat produced by a fusion reaction equals the heat consumed by the fusion reaction, this is called “scientific breakeven.” Mathematically, this is a ratio of 1; that is, Qscientific = 1. Alternatively, for example, if the heat produced by a fusion reaction is 50 megawatts and the heat consumed by the fusion reaction is 100 megawatts, then we have a Qscientific value of 0.5.

When scientists use the phrase “scientifically feasible,” they mean the anticipated condition when a fusion reaction achieves scientific breakeven. But achieving “scientific feasibility” does not mean that the overall reactor has proven that fusion is feasible as a practical source of energy. A reactor that achieves nothing more than “scientific feasibility” would still consume more power than it produces. Therefore, the terms scientific breakeven, scientific feasibility, and Qscientific are useful only in the context of scientific research, rather than in a practical context.

A Qscientific value greater than 1, and its associated scientific breakeven milestone, is a necessary but insufficient condition for practical power generation. Two more steps are required.

Qengineering

Q followed by the subscript “engineering” refers to the ratio of the electrical power produced by a fusion reactor to the electrical power consumed by the fusion reactor. Any Qengineering value greater than 1 means that the reactor can produce net electrical power. If a particular reactor design is not configured to convert its thermal output to electric, the thermal output can be multiplied by 0.4 to get the equivalent electric output.

A scientific paper published by Jonathan Menard, the deputy director for research at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), and his colleagues contains graphs that describe a variety of fusion reactor design variables. These variables, such as reactor size and neutron flux, are of interest to fusion scientists. However, for the rest of us, the scales alone, displayed in the vertical axes in graphs in the paper, provide a meaningful way to see and compare the relationship between the two types of Q-values. I’ve taken these scales, placed them side-by-side, and used them to show the relationship between Q-values in some tokamak reactor designs.

Graph updated April 4, 2022, to correct ARC Qeng value.

Graph updated April 4, 2022, to correct ARC Qeng value.

Copper Versus Superconducting Magnets

The most popular type of fusion reactor is called a tokamak. This category of reactors has two sub-categories: those that use the older, copper magnets and those that use the newer, superconducting magnets. Most fusion scientists expect that only the newer, superconducting reactor designs have the potential to produce useful electrical energy.

No experiments in fusion reactors with superconducting magnets and deuterium-tritium fuel have taken place yet. Thus, to see the state-of-the-art experimental results, we must look at the older copper-magnet reactor designs.

The most powerful result took place on Oct. 31, 1997, in the Joint European Torus (JET) reactor in the United Kingdom. In this experiment, the Qscientific value was 0.67, and the Qengineering value was 0.01. I show these values with the two red squares in the graph above.

No scientist, to my knowledge, has published the Qengineering value for JET — and for good reason. JET was never intended for reactor power gain, only for reaction power gain. I obtained the reactor input power value — 700 megawatts of electricity — on Dec. 1, 2014, from Nick Holloway, who was then the spokesman for the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority. With that, I calculated the Qengineering value: [(16 MW * 0.4) / 700 MW]. (The value of 40% is a reasonable assumption at which thermal energy can be converted into electricity based on current steam turbine technology.)

The scales show that, in order to make one net Watt of electricity, that is, achieving a Qengineering value greater than 1, a copper-magnet-based reactor would need to achieve a Qscientific value above 40. The consensus in the fusion community is that this is never likely (but not impossible) to happen with a copper-magnet-based reactor.

Most of the 700 megawatts that the JET reactor consumed was used for the magnets. Superconducting magnets are significantly more efficient.

The ITER design specification, which uses superconducting magnets, calls for a Qscientific value of 10. The design specification does not set a target for Qengineering. No scientist, to my knowledge, has published the Qengineering value for ITER. As with JET, ITER was never intended for net reactor power gain, only reaction power gain.

I obtained the minimum reactor input power value — 300 megawatts — in the summer of 2017 and I published it on Oct. 6, 2017. This was the first time it appeared in any news article or Web page, though similar numbers appeared in deeply buried technical documents. When I later located these documents, they indicated that the minimum reactor input power value was even higher, up to 440 megawatts of electricity. All of the references and sources are here.

Using the more conservative number of 300 megawatts, if ITER achieves its Qscientific goal of 10, the Qengineering value will be about 0.73. This means that the overall reactor, if it works correctly, will not produce any net power or net energy. I show these values with the two yellow dots in the graph below.

All things being equal, each colored pair on the graph would appear on the scales at the same height. However, every reactor design is based on unique variables that will determine each reactor’s specific Qscientific and Qengineering values.

As well, designers of reactors have the option to choose various design parameters that may be conservative or optimistic. The scales, therefore, provide a baseline for comparison. The values for JET, shown in red squares, are the only experimental results shown on the graph. All other values shown are design projections.

The green circles represent a publicly funded fusion reactor design by the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. The blue circles represent a 2014 reactor design by students and professors then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The purple circles represent a publicly funded fusion reactor design by the EUROfusion organization for the EU DEMO reactor. Menard confirmed the PPPL Q-values in an e-mail to me. Hartmut Zohm, the head of the tokamak scenario development division at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics also confirmed the EU DEMO Q-values in an e-mail to me.

Most fusion scientists believe that, for a superconducting reactor, a Qscientific value greater than 25 would be the minimum needed to demonstrate a proof of concept for practical electricity production from fusion.

Triple-Product Values Do Not Show Power or Energy Gain

Fusion advocates tend to create a lot of news media attention for every incremental step they take forward. But “world-record” achievements of plasma temperature or field strength of magnets do not tell us anything about power gain because neither measures power production or power consumption.

Not even the much-trumpeted “triple-product” value — a scientific term that measures the combined values of plasma density and plasma confinement time and temperature — tells us about power or energy gain. That’s because the “triple-product” value, although it imputes power gain in a fusion reaction, doesn’t measure power production or power consumption in a fusion reactor.

That’s why the graph produced by Department of Energy ARPA-E program managers, Samuel Wurzel and Scott Hsu, is irrelevant to any discussion of power gain in fusion reactors. It is only relevant to fusion reactions and, at that, is only a theoretical inference. Nevertheless, the Wurzel-Hsu graph has recently been used by fusion promoters.

Andrew Holland is the founder of a company called Fusion Industry Association, which took over the fusion advocacy role played for many decades by Stephen Dean, through his company Fusion Power Associates. Holland displayed the Wurzel-Hsu graph in a presentation he gave to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) on Jan. 21, 2022.

Slide displayed by Andrew Holland to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology on Jan. 21, 2022

Slide displayed by Andrew Holland to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology on Jan. 21, 2022

None of the triple-product values or curves in the Wurzel-Hsu graph that Holland displayed to members of PCAST showed measurements of power or energy. This makes Holland’s statements that “fusion is close” and on “the cusp of net gain energy,” essentially meaningless.

The Wurzel-Hsu graph is not even relevant for progress in triple-product values. That’s because Wurzel and Hsu cherry-picked their values for tokamak reactors. They elected not to display the less-favorable triple-product values beyond 1995. They showed only the values up to 1995, displayed below in red. Had they continued to report the subsequent triple-product values, the graph would have included the values I added, shown below in blue. Full details on the story are here.

On March 17, 2022, U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm announced that Hsu had been appointed to the new position to coordinate fusion research at the Department of Energy.

Wurzel-Hsu graph showing progress in triple-product values, with blue values added by Krivit

Wurzel-Hsu graph showing progress in triple-product values, with blue values added by Krivit

A few months earlier, on Oct. 19, 2021, Richard Hawryluk, the former interim laboratory director at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, also promoted fusion to the PCAST members. Here’s a slide he displayed to show fusion performance.

Slide displayed by Richard Hawryluk at the Oct. 19, 2021, PCAST meeting

Slide displayed by Richard Hawryluk at the Oct. 19, 2021, PCAST meeting

The graph on the left shows triple-product values. As I mentioned above, triple-product values do not and cannot measure reactor power or energy gain because they do not measure or account for reactor input power.

The more serious problem with the triple-product graph Hawryluk displayed is that, although it does show an increase in triple-product values, it shows that the highest values were obtained when the plasma durations were shortest: a tenth of a second. That’s not encouraging for a future source of energy. I explained more about this graph in slides 61 and 62 in “When Will We Get Energy From Nuclear Fusion?”

What About the New NIF Result?

The graph on the right of Hawryluk’s slide does, in fact, show energy measurements. They are the results from the National Ignition Facility’s laser fusion device. The graph certainly gives the appearance of dramatic progress in 2021, with a big pink line on the right showing fusion energy production of 1.35 megajoules.

Most of us never deal with Joules in our daily lives, let alone megajoules, so 1.35 megajoules might sound like a lot. It’s enough energy to boil one kettle of water. But to produce 1.35 megajoules of energy, the NIF device consumed 400 megajoules of energy, which Hawryluk did not explain. That means that NIF lost 99.6 percent of the energy it consumed. I explained more about the 2021 NIF result in this article and three follow-up articles beginning on Feb. 2, 2022.

What About the New JET Result?

The new 2021 result from the Joint European Torus (JET) fusion reactor, reported in February 2022, suffers from the same fusion hyperbole. JET produced 59 megajoules of energy last year. It did, in fact, double the energy that it produced 25 years ago. But both experiments consumed 3,500 MJ of energy. So in 1997, JET lost 99.4 percent of the energy it consumed. In 2021, JET lost only 98.3 percent. That is one-tenth of one percent improvement in 25 years.

Other Ambiguities

Press releases from fusion organizations, promotional literature, and quotes from fusion representatives often use the phrases “net positive energy” and “more power out than in.” Commonwealth Fusion Systems uses the phrase “net energy from fusion.” It pays to scrutinize such statements carefully. The vast majority of such phrases apply to only the reactions, not the reactors. People in the fusion business who use these phrases rarely explain this distinction, or if they do, they don’t do so transparently.

The Third Breakeven

If and when fusion scientists achieve scientific breakeven, and if and when they subsequently achieve engineering breakeven, a third milestone would be needed before fusion could become a practical source of energy. It’s called economic breakeven. This would occur when the cost of the produced energy equals the cost of the energy consumed plus the cost of the fuel.

Fifty years ago, fusion researchers began proposing reactor designs that they claimed would achieve engineering breakeven. In this context, the recent plethora of claims of near-term fusion reactors achieving not only the first and second levels of breakeven but also economic breakeven strains credulity. For this reason, I have not attempted to display economic breakeven in the set of scales in my Q-value comparison graph.

Coming back to McKenzie’s hope for a fusion reactor that produces a useful amount of power, the only relevant comment may be a comparison of economic breakeven to a nuclear fission power plant. A small electricity-producing fission reactor like the Ginna plant has a Qengineering value of 12. Let’s assume that the Ginna plant exceeds economic breakeven by a margin sufficient for its fission power to be sold profitably. Now let’s look for a Qengineering value of 12 for a fusion reactor in my graph. It would be off the scale. It would require a Qscientific value greater than 100. This is asking a lot for an industry that has never achieved a Qscientific value greater than 1.

Disclosure: Steven Krivit and New Energy Times do not have any business or financial affiliation with any energy research, energy company, or energy investment. This report is produced and distributed at no charge, as a public service, without sponsorship, advertising, or monetization.

 References:

  1. Scales are based on graphs in J.E. Menard et al (2016) Nuclear Fusion 56 106023
  2. JET Q-values based on N. Holloway e-mail to S. Krivit, Dec. 1, 2014
  3. PPPL Q-values based on Menard, Jonathan E., Grierson, B.A., Brown, T., Rana , C., Zhai, Y., Poli, F.M., Maingi, R., Guttenfelder, W., and Snyder, P.B.,”Fusion Pilot Plant Performance And The Role Of A Sustained High Power Density Tokamak,” (2022) Nuclear Fusion 62 036026, and communication with J. Menard.
  4. ARC Q-values from B.N. Sorbom, J.Ball, T.R. Palmer, F.J. Mangiarotti, J.M.Sierchio P. Bonoli, C. Kasten, D.A. Sutherland, H.S. Barnard, C.B. Haakonsen, J. Goh, C. Sung, D.G. Whyte, “ARC: A Compact, High-Field, Fusion Nuclear Science Facility And Demonstration Power Plant With Demountable Magnets,”Fusion Engineering and Design, 100, November 2015, Pages 378-405
  5. Click here to go to Technical References for Steven B. Krivit’s JET and ITER Power Investigation.
  6. EU DEMO Q-values based on G. Federicia, C. Bachmann, L. Barucca, W. Biel, L. Boccaccini, R. Brown, C. Bustreo, S. Ciattaglia, F. Cismondi, M. Coleman, Loving, F. Maviglia, B. Meszaros, G. Pintsuk, N. Taylor, M.Q. Tran, C. Vorpahl, R. Wenninger, J.H. You, “DEMO Design Activity in Europe: Progress and Updates,” Fusion Engineering and Design, 136 (A) November 2018, Pages 729-741, and communication with H. Zohm.

Fusion Power: Big Energy Fuses With Big Spin

Feb 272022
 

Feb. 24, 2022
By Darrin Durant

Science communication is not a one-way downloading of facts to target audiences but a two-way act of sense-making between audiences. Science communication has multiple goals, the most simple of which is making specialist knowledge claims accessible and generally interesting. Audiences, from general publics to investors to policy makers, also have an interest in science communication that provides both accurate information (reliability) and relevant information (to aid inductive predictions about likely consequences and outcomes of research). More broadly, science communication has the goal of trustworthy information (featuring accountability, integrity and transparency to enable judgements about special interests, uncertainties, risks and benefits).

Read the full article here

#112 French Regulator Halts Assembly of ITER Reactor

Feb 252022
 

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Note: See April 28, 2022, article “More Defective ITER Reactor Sectors” for update and correction.

By Steven B. Krivit
Feb. 21, 2022

The assembly of the reactor core of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is on hold, according to the French nuclear safety authority Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire (ASN).

The reactor core will be assembled from nine massive vacuum vessel sectors, each one 440 tons of steel. Two sectors are on site, waiting to be lowered into the reactor chamber.

On Jan. 25, 2022, Bernard Doroszczuk, the chairman of the board of directors of ASN, sent a letter to Bernard Bigot, the director-general of the ITER organization. Doroszczuk told Bigot that Bigot is not authorized to lower the two sectors into the reactor chamber unless the ITER organization can guarantee that the installed sectors can later be separated and removed.

“Consequently, the assembly of the tokamak cannot be authorized,” Doroszczuk wrote.

At New Energy Times’ request, Evangelia Petit, the press officer for ASN, provided a copy of the letter today.

“The welding of these sectors [inside the tokamak pit] would represent an irreversible operation, which needs ASN’s formal approval in order to take place,” Petit wrote.

According to the timeline published on the ITER organization’s Web site, the first sector subassembly was scheduled to be lowered into the tokamak chamber, also called the tokamak pit, in December 2021.

Vacuum vessel sector supported by a frame in the assembly hall.

Vacuum vessel sector supported by a frame in the assembly hall.

Damaged Vacuum Vessel Sectors

As New Energy Times reported on Nov. 10, 2021, both of the vacuum vessel sectors that have been delivered to the ITER site were damaged during manufacture. Either the sectors or parts of the sectors (details are unclear) fell at the manufacturing sites and sustained dimensional distortion, according to ASN.

As a result of the distortions, the subassembly of these sectors cannot be performed as planned in the spacious assembly hall. Instead, the ITER organization has proposed performing the subassembly of the damaged sectors inside the confined space, where the final assembly of the reactor core will take place.

If the sectors cannot be welded together properly, the reactor could cause excessive radiation during operation. Gamma-ray radiation and neutrons that will be produced during ITER’s operation will require proper conjoining of the nine sectors as well as the presence of a 13-foot-thick concrete wall surrounding the reactor chamber to protect reactor workers.

Last week, Petit explained to New Energy Times that ASN was unwilling to compromise its safety standards:

The specifications provided are not sufficient to demonstrate and guarantee compliance with the requirements, specifically concerning a) radiological protection material and [its] impact on the total weight of the tokamak and b) welding and related controls of the vacuum vessel sectors, given the existence of dimensional non-conformance. In order to go forward, we have requested IO to provide us with a consolidated design, carefully reviewed in order to check [compliance with] all safety and radiological protection criteria.

ASN learned about the damaged sectors during a July 2, 2021, inspection and reported its findings to Bigot on July 20, 2021. Since that time, according to public documents on the ASN Web site, the ITER organization has made repeated requests to ASN to allow the organization to proceed with installation of the damaged sectors using an alternate method.

Impasse

On Jan. 5, 2022, a meeting took place between the ITER organization, ASN, and another French nuclear regulator, Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire (IRSN), in an attempt to resolve the impasse, according to Michel Claessens, former spokesman for the ITER organization, who maintains contacts with sources inside the organization.

“During a special meeting of the steering committee with ASN, IRSN, and the ITER organization on Jan. 5, 2022, ASN announced that the reactor assembly is not authorized, which means, in practice, a shutdown of the project,” Claessens wrote.

New Major Design Review Required

ASN told the ITER organization that the regulator is not satisfied with other aspects of the current reactor design because they present excessive risks of ionizing radiation to workers. These are excerpts, translated from French, from Doroszczuk’s letter to Bigot:

As is evident from the in-depth examination of your file and the many technical exchanges held between your teams and the ASN departments as well as the IRSN experts, the following elements apply:

– The “neutron budget” values that you anticipate during the operation of the installation are greater than the maximum neutron fluence to be taken into account for the dimensioning of installation.

– The elements received concerning the radiological maps do not make it possible to demonstrate that the limitation of exposure to ionizing radiation is controlled, a major challenge for an installation of nuclear fusion.

In particular, the progressive activation of materials under the effect of intense neutron flux is not properly taken into account, and the exposure of workers in adjoining premises to nuclear buildings should be assessed with realistic conservative assumptions. …

Given the elements noted above, ASN considers that this condition is not satisfied at this stage. Thus, the hold point related to the tokamak assembly cannot be lifted before February 1, 2022. Consequently, the assembly of the tokamak is suspended. In the immediate future, I urge you not to take any action that is difficult to reverse concerning the sectors of the vacuum chamber affected by dimensional non-conformities, so as not to impede your capacity to carry out the repairs that would be deemed useful with a view to their welding.

I invite you to make sure that you have a stabilized design of all the equipment associated with the vacuum chamber, the overall consistency of your sizing, with regard to all the requirements that you had set yourselves regarding the protection of workers, the public, and the environment, and the proper accounting of deviations and defects already noted during construction. An in-depth design review needs to be carried out before you again seek authorization to start assembling the tokamak equipment inside the cryostat.

 

 

Feb. 28: 2022: ITER Organization Releases Statement

Feb. 24, 2022: We have received some questions about the details of the damage to the sectors. Here’s a repeat of what we said in this article:

As New Energy Times reported on Nov. 10, 2021, both of the vacuum vessel sectors that have been delivered to the ITER site were damaged during manufacture. Either the sectors or parts of the sectors (details are unclear) fell at the manufacturing sites and sustained dimensional distortion, according to ASN.

The ASN document INSSN-MRS-2021-0650.pdf contains the best available information we have about the damage. Here are the statements in French, also translated to English.

Les inspecteurs ont notamment examiné par sondage le traitement des écarts et des modifications ainsi que les suites des chutes d’éléments de secteurs de la chambre à vide lors de leur manutention sur des sites de fabrication en Corée du Sud et en Italie. La découverte de falsification de certificats de qualifications de soudeurs, à la suite d’une information d’alerte de l’ASN, a également fait l’objet de vérifications.

In particular, the inspectors examined on a test basis the treatment of deviations and modifications as well as that the consequences of the falls of elements of sectors of the vacuum chamber during their handling on manufacturing sites in South Korea and Italy. The discovery of forgery of certificates of welder qualifications, following an alert from ASN, was also the subject of checks.

Chute d’éléments de secteurs de la chambre à vide: Des éléments de secteurs de la chambre à vide ont chuté lors de manutention sur les sites de fabrication, en Corée du Sud en avril 2021 et en Italie en mai 2021.

Falling elements of sectors of the vacuum chamber: Elements of the sectors of the vacuum chamber fell during handling on the manufacturing sites, in South Korea in April 2021 and in Italy in May 2021.

If anyone can provide more specific details about the damage, please let us know!

April 28, 2022: Last paragraph corrected from “Sectors of the vacuum chamber” to “Elements of the sectors of the vacuum chamber.”

#114 Open Letter to Dr. Bernard Bigot, Director-General of the ITER Organization

Feb 242022
 

Return to ITER Power Facts Main Page

By Steven B. Krivit
Feb. 24, 2022

Dear Dr. Bigot,

I noted with interest your letter today responding to our news story published Feb. 21, 2022, “French Regulator Halts Assembly of ITER Reactor.”

You wrote, “Recently some misinformation has circulated at the initiative of a few well-known anti-hydrogen-fusion activists regarding the status of the ASN (Autorité de sûreté nucléaire) oversight of the ITER project.”

You further wrote, “Contrary to what has been claimed by these anti-ITER fellows using social media, the ASN has not shut down ITER construction.”

New Energy Times first reported this story on Monday. Daniel Clery of Science reported the news today. Clearly, you must be referring to us. But New Energy Times did not say that construction at the ITER site had been shut down. I’m certain that there are lots of construction activities at your site. The focus of our article, as our title says, is a halt of the assembly of the reactor.

You wrote, “There have also been claims that the vacuum vessel sectors were dropped – also false.”

Well, sir, I would kindly direct you to what we reported on Monday:

As New Energy Times reported on Nov. 10, 2021, both of the vacuum vessel sectors that have been delivered to the ITER site were damaged during manufacture. Either the sectors or parts of the sectors (details are unclear) fell at the manufacturing sites and sustained dimensional distortion, according to ASN.

Here’s what we reported three months ago based on the July 2, 2021, ASN ITER Inspection Report #INSSN-MRS-2021-0650:

In the report, the most serious issue identified by the inspectors was that parts of two very large components, sectors of the vacuum vessel, fell during manufacturing and sustained damage. The ASN report does not provide details of the damage.

The report also states that inspectors discovered the forgery of certificates of welder qualifications, found gaps in welds, and detected leaks in cooling tower basins. Inspectors wrote that one of the areas at the reactor construction site was not accessible to them on the day of the inspection. Inspectors also noted unsatisfactory responses to their requests for documents from the ITER organization.

Here are the key parts of what the ASN document INSSN-MRS-2021-0650 says, first in French, then translated to English:

Part 1

Les inspecteurs ont notamment examiné par sondage le traitement des écarts et des modifications ainsi que les suites des chutes d’éléments de secteurs de la chambre à vide lors de leur manutention sur des sites de fabrication en Corée du Sud et en Italie. La découverte de falsification de certificats de qualifications de soudeurs, à la suite d’une information d’alerte de l’ASN, a également fait l’objet de vérifications.

In particular, the inspectors examined on a test basis the treatment of deviations and modifications as well as that the consequences of the falls of elements of sectors of the vacuum chamber during their handling on manufacturing sites in South Korea and Italy. The discovery of forgery of certificates of welder qualifications, following an alert from ASN, was also the subject of checks.

Part 2

Chute d’éléments de secteurs de la chambre à vide: Des éléments de secteurs de la chambre à vide ont chuté lors de manutention sur les sites de fabrication, en Corée du Sud en avril 2021 et en Italie en mai 2021.

Falling elements of sectors of the vacuum chamber: Sectors of the vacuum chamber fell during handling on the manufacturing sites, in South Korea in April 2021 and in Italy in May 2021.

More important is that the ITER Organization accepted delivery of these two damaged sectors more than eight months ago. ASN advised you of the damage eight months ago. In response, you continually asked ASN to accept your alternate installation plan and to release the hold point. ASN has repeatedly declined your request to release the hold. Finally, in a meeting on Jan. 5, 2022, ASN specifically instructed you not to proceed unless you could remove the sectors from the pit.

Your Web site says that insertion of the first sector was to take place in December 2021. So assembly of the reactor vessel has been on hold for two months. And you did not share this information publicly.

As always, we take journalistic integrity seriously and welcome any letter identifying any error of fact or context or any significant omission in New Energy Times.

Kind regards,
Steven B. Krivit

Feb. 28: 2022: ITER Organization Releases Statement

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