A Memory From the New Energy Times Fusion Archives
On Dec. 9 1993, fusion researchers at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory achieved a “Kitty Hawk moment,” analogous to the Wright brother’s first flight. Their reactor produced an output of 3 million Watts of “fusion power.”
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the “world-record burst of more than 3 million watts of fusion energy was enough to momentarily light some 3,000 homes.” (Archive copy)
The DOE neglected to mention that the reactor consumed 950 million Watts of electricity, equivalent to the average consumption of a city of a half-million residents.
#96 Kitty Hawk Moment Achieved in Fusion was last modified: January 22nd, 2023 by sbkrivit
Michael Barnard, writing for Cleantechnica.com, has injected a healthy dose of reality into the latest media craze about nuclear fusion. Cleantechnica is a web site that focuses on news and commentary about clean technology.
With all the money flowing into private fusion ventures lately, significant new scientific results must be fueling the fusion frenzy. However, I haven’t seen any new experimental results of power production — the only results with practical relevance — since 1997.
That’s when the Joint European Torus (JET) reactor consumed electrical power at a rate of 700 megawatts and produced fusion reactions with 16 megawatts of power for about one-tenth of a second. Technically, the output wasn’t even thermal power. Instead, the 16 MW was the measurement of the kinetic energy of the emitted neutrons. JET lost about 99 percent of the power it consumed.
So now we need a fusion system to be only 100 times more efficient to finally see a reactor that produces net power.
Barnard did an excellent job summarizing the long-running propaganda for the ITER machine, focusing on the power discrepancy associated with the project.
“I had assumed, as most press and indeed pretty much everyone involved with it asserted, that it would be generating more energy than it consumed, when it finally lit up,” Barnard wrote.
He had located the research I published on the New Energy Times web site, specifically my ITER power research and analysis page and learned a lot from it. But Barnard was confused about one point. He wrote that my “numbers didn’t add up” and said that I should have used values expressed in MW instead of MWh. He thought that the values shown on the Japanese JT-60SA used “the right units.” But, as I told him, that site also used values in MW.
For anybody who works in an industry that produces or distributes electricity, the relevant unit is kilowatt-hour, a unit of energy, rather than a unit of power. In my phone call with Barnard, I explained to him that, in magnetic confinement fusion research, values are and have always been provided in units of power, not energy.
Barnard made another point that’s worth mentioning:
I expected more from ITER. Not much more. I mean, it is a million-component fission reactor expected to light up in 2040 and not generate any electricity at that point. But I had assumed, based on all the press, that it would generate more electricity than it used to operate if you bolted a boiler and some turbines to it, even if it were grossly expensive. Apparently not. Just grossly expensive, no net new electricity.
Barnard had every reason to believe that the reactor was designed to generate more electricity than it used, if it was configured for thermal to electric conversion. The ITER organization suggests exactly this on its web site:
#95 Cleantechnica Covers Fusion, Minus the Hype was last modified: April 16th, 2022 by sbkrivit
The ITER project has officially fallen behind schedule again. However, instead of explaining the delay, the organization now says its previous progress benchmark was never a “real target.”
In a press release issued at the end of the semiannual meeting of the ITER Council on Nov. 17-18, the ITER organization said nothing about the long-touted milestone of “first plasma in 2025.”
Instead, the organization said the new goal is “fusion power operation,” which, it claims, it can achieve in 2035. The “fusion power” milestone would mark the completion of experiments with test fuels and the beginning of experiments with a deuterium-tritium fuel mixture.
First plasma will be the milestone marking the end of construction of all the required reactor components and the beginning of experiments with test fuels.
In an earlier press conference, on Sept. 17, 2021, Bernard Bigot, the director-general, implied that “first plasma” was an artificial target date. After telling journalists that “first plasma in 2025 is no longer technically achievable,” he said, “We will be able to keep to the real target” — deuterium-tritium experiments by 2035.
New Energy Timesfirst reported the expected delay of the first plasma milestone six months ago.
On Sept. 26, 2021, we reported that component issues are the real reason for the reactor delay.
On Oct. 26, 2021, we reported that the realistic and achievable date for first plasma is now 2031. We also reported that, based on our analysis and information, the realistic and achievable date for “fusion power operation” is not 2035, but 2039.
According to our timeline projections, ITER scientists will run experiments with full input power no earlier than 2041 — just 20 years from now.
Finally, if ITER achieves its scientific goal, the fusion plasma will produce a thermal output 10 times higher than the heating power injected into the plasma. If this happens, the correlated net output of the reactor will be about zero, thus proving that large-scale fusion reactors like ITER are not a viable path to commercial fusion energy.
#94 ITER “First Plasma” Date Slips Again; Fusion Organization Moves Goalposts was last modified: April 16th, 2022 by sbkrivit
Popular Mechanics
By Clifford B. Hicks
January 1959
Here is where we stand in harnessing nuclear fusion. It may come sooner than you think!
Scientists estimate that sometime within the next 10 to 20 years a 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.
That moment, if it comes, will be a pivot point of history. Nations need never fear that their power sources will run dry. For a time, obviously, petroleum will remain as a source of mobile power, and coal will continue to provide industry with heat.
You can’t change a way of life overnight. But eventually, according to the fusion experts, oil will give way to stored electrical power which has been derived from the fusion reaction, and coal will be simply another source of industrial chemicals.
At that supreme moment, man can look ahead through the halls of time for literally billions of years and still see a plentiful supply of fuel. Billions of years! When new kilowatts are needed, they simply will be plucked from sea water.
Fusion reactors will be so much better than today’s fission reactors because the fuel supply will be inexhaustible and inexpensive.
Scientists Are Optimistic
Scientist, who normally are cautious men [and women], tend to be surprisingly optimistic about one or more of these approaches. An AEC brochure at the Geneva exhibit, for example, states that when Stellerator C is completed in 1960 “is expected to be capable of producing abundant thermonuclear fusion reactions.”
Even if reactions are achieved, there is no guarantee that a true power-producing reactor is possible. But the stakes are so high in this game that most countries are boosting their ante each year. Since 1953, the AEC funds for fusion research have increased 1000 percent.
The best part of this game is that if one player wins, all win. It seems quite likely that within the next year, scientists at a laboratory somewhere on the face of the earth, will capture significant quantities of genuine thermonukes. And in 10 to 20 years, the first successful fusion reactor will go into operation.
Such a tremendous stride will herald the day when bottled stars will glow everywhere, and every man [and woman] will have an incredible amount of power at his [and her] fingertips.
Scientists working on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Commonwealth Fusion Systems collaboration have misled members of the science news media again. The latest casualty is Philip Ball, an experienced U.K. science reporter.
In a Nov. 17, 2021, news story, Ball wrote that scientists working with the MIT/CFS collaboration are planning to deliver the “first fusion machine expected to generate more energy than it uses” in 2025.
Actually, the MIT/CFS SPARC reactor is designed only to produce a fusion plasma that produces power at a higher rate than it consumes power. That measurement does not account for the input power required to operate the reactor. It’s the same trick that fusion promoters used to sell the idea of ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.
The intended gain for the SPARC reactor applies to only the plasma, not the overall reactor, as MIT explained in a Sept. 8, 2021, press release written by David Chandler, who works in the MIT news office.
The MIT/CFS collaboration plans to “to build the world’s first fusion device that can create and confine a plasma that produces more energy than it consumes,” Chandler wrote. “That demonstration device, called SPARC, is targeted for completion in 2025.”
However, a few pages later, Chandler wrote that “the successful operation of SPARC will demonstrate that a full-scale commercial fusion power plant is practical.” SPARC, like ITER, is a zero-net-power reactor design. Chandler was confused or simply wrote what the MIT/CFS scientists told him to write.
Maria T. Zuber, a geophysicist who serves as the vice president for research at MIT, was also confused or misled by the fusion scientists. She told Chandler, “I now am genuinely optimistic that SPARC can achieve net positive energy.” She did not say in the press release that she was talking about only the plasma gain rather than the reactor gain. If she did mean to say that she was talking only about the plasma gain rather than the reactor gain, this was a serious omission — and one that went unnoticed by every person who reviewed that press release before it went out. Zuber has oversight responsibility for research misconduct at MIT and must be aware of the pitfalls of inaccurate science communication.
The fusion con has been going on for decades. Two years ago, fusion scientists told Ball that JET “set a world record for the highest ratio of energy out to energy in.”
“But that was still just two-thirds of the break-even point where the reactor isn’t consuming energy overall,” Ball wrote.
Actually, the 1997 JET experiment came to just one-one hundredth of the reactor break-even point. The input power rate for JET wasn’t 25 MW; it was 700 MW. It’s the same con: taking plasma gain values and creating the illusion that they are reactor gain values.
In the Nov. 17, 2021, Nature article, fusion scientists continued to mislead Ball and his colleagues about ITER. ITER will need 300 to 400 megawatts of electricity to operate, not just 50 megawatts, as Ball thought in 2019.
Ball is still having difficulty explaining ITER properly. Here’s what he wrote about ITER in the Nov. 17 Nature article:
[ITER has a] goal of continuously extracting 500 MW of power — comparable to the output of a modest coal-fired power plant — while putting 50 MW into the reactor. (These numbers refer only to the energy put directly into and drawn out of the plasma; they don’t factor in other processes such as maintenance needs or the inefficiencies of converting the fusion heat output into electricity.)
Fusion scientists told Ball that the remainder of the input power ITER will need is for “maintenance.” They lied. The 300 MW (minimum) is needed to operate ITER during the experiments, as plasma physicist Daniel Jassby explained to New Energy Timesfour years ago. Had Ball’s sources explained the projected power balance to him correctly, Ball would have understood that the equivalent net power output of ITER — if it is successful — will be about zero. That’s a bit less than the output of “a modest coal-fired power plant.”
The consequences — false hope given to the public, potential fraud affecting decision makers, and damage to the credibility of science journalism — are serious.
In Ball’s chart, his date for ITER’s “test runs” is already obsolete. Bernard Bigot, the director-general of the organization, announced in a press release on Sept. 17, 2021, that “first plasma in 2025 is no longer technically achievable.” We told our readers that news three months earlier.
Journalists jumping on the fusion cheerleader bandwagon would be wise to study the saga of fraudster Andrea Rossi, who, year after year, made extraordinary fusion claims. Each time one of his contraptions was debunked, he developed another contraption and made even bigger and bolder claims, always saying he would soon be delivering fusion power plants for sale. He delivered nothing but hot air and walked away with $11 million, thanks to the generosity of a dozen investors.
For journalists who would like to avoid the pitfalls of reporting on nuclear fusion, I strongly encourage watching my documentary film “ITER, The Grand Illusion: A Forensic Investigation of Power Claims.”
#92 Commonwealth Fusion Cons Nature Magazine Journalist was last modified: April 16th, 2022 by sbkrivit
