Oct 262021
 

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By Steven B. Krivit
Oct. 26, 2021

In ten years, the ITER schedule has fallen ten years behind schedule.

Bernard Bigot, the director-general of the ITER organization, will provide an official notice of another construction delay to its governing body, the ITER Council, at its meeting in November, according to multiple sources who have spoken with New Energy Times.

But the ITER project timeline is further behind than the organization will be disclosing publicly — even to the ITER Council, an ITER organization staff member told New Energy Times. The employee requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on behalf of the organization.

When construction on ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, is complete, experiments with test fuels — hydrogen and deuterium — are scheduled to begin. This milestone is known as “first plasma.” These test experiments are slated to run for seven years, until scientists feel confident enough to add radioactive tritium to the fuel mixture.

After two years of running experiments with deuterium-tritium fuel, the team hopes to increase the input power and achieve the reactor’s maximum power gain design value.

According to the source, three potential dates for first plasma appear in internal ITER organization documents, along with the following annotations:

2027: Not Realistic, Not Achievable
2029: Realistic, Optimistic
2031: Realistic, Achievable

New Energy Times is therefore adjusting our projected timeline (according to ITER staff, not management) yet again.

Projected ITER First Plasma Date

Projected ITER First Plasma Date

Evasive Answer

In 2006, first plasma had been planned for 2016. By 2012, it was delayed to 2020. In 2014, Nature reporter Elizabeth Gibney spoke with Osamu Motojima, the previous director-general, about the schedule. Gibney had heard rumors that people were talking openly about 2022 or 2023.

She asked Motojima for a new, realistic date for first plasma. He gave an evasive answer. She asked again and mentioned the 2022 and 2023 dates.

“There are a lot of rumors,” Motojima said. “I have the target date, but I need to demonstrate that we can do it with a high-enough probability. It will be around 2022 or 2023, and I will report to the ITER council next June. If the date is 2025, the project will never survive.”

The project did survive, but Motojima’s appointment did not. On March 5, 2015, the ITER Council replaced him with Bigot. When Bigot spoke with Agence France-Presse two months later, he told the news agency that every year of delay adds €200 million to the cost.

Bernard Bigot (at podium) and Laban Coblentz (seated) during 2020 media event

Bernard Bigot (at podium) and Laban Coblentz (seated) during 2020 media event

Date Discrepancy

Later in 2015, Science reporter Daniel Clery learned that the official dates for first plasma were “widely acknowledged to be 2025” by everyone except the ITER administration. Clery wrote that the official schedule had been “widely discredited” by then.

False Power Claims

Clery, however, like everyone else, was misled by the ITER management and its fusion promoters to believe that the ITER reactor was designed to “produce 500 megawatts of power from a 50 megawatt input.” If that were true, the ITER reactor would be on track to produce a tenfold gain in power.

In reality, the 50 MW value applies to only the heating power injected into and used to heat the fuel. In reality, the reactor will need at least 500 megawatts to start up, and it will need between 300 and 400 megawatts continuously. (See the New Energy Times ITER Power Research and Analysis here.)

The scientific goal of the project has nothing to do with the power gain of the reactor. The gain applies to only the power gain of the physics reactions. Thus, if the ITER reactor accomplishes its scientific goal, it will produce zero reactor net power and demonstrate zero reactor power gain.

But fusion promoters rarely disclosed this distinction when speaking with the public — or their own representatives. In 2008, when the ITER organization management told Neil Calder, the organization’s first spokesman, that he should tell journalists that the reactor would need only 50 MW of power to generate 500 MW of power, ITER management misinformed him.

False and misleading 2008 statement by Neil Calder, former head of ITER public communications (Source)

False and misleading 2008 statement by Neil Calder, former head of ITER public communications (Source)

“That’s what everyone was saying, that was it, that was the point of ITER,” Calder told New Energy Times. “I spoke to everyone in senior management at the time, and there was no inconsistency, as far as I remember, across the board.”

When the ITER organization claimed for many years on its Web site that the reactor was “designed to produce 500 MW of output power from 50 MW of input power” — without explaining that the 50 MW value applied to only the injected heating power, without explaining that the 50 MW value didn’t include the majority of the input power the reactor will require — its management misinformed everybody.

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

When the ITER organization claimed in a 2017 press release that the zero-net-power reactor was supposed to “prove that fusion power can be produced on a commercial scale,” its management again misinformed everybody.

When the ITER organization claimed in a 2020 press release that, if the zero-net-power reactor was connected to the electric grid, its 500 megawatt thermal output “would translate to about 200 megawatts of electric power,” its management again misinformed everybody.

Promoters of ITER and of fusion have been misinforming everybody for decades: using the same formula of conflating fusion reaction power values with fusion reactor power values, understating the power that ITER will need to produce a 500 MW thermal output, and failing to disclose that the 50 MW input value omits the majority of power needed for ITER. They used the same formulaic misrepresentations when telling everyone about the JET reactor result, claiming that the reactor had produced 16 MW of thermal power “from a total input power of 24 MW” instead of 700 MW.

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)

The primary measurable objective of the ITER reactor has nothing to do with proving that fusion power can be produced on a commercial scale, contrary to the claims of Laban Coblentz, the current ITER spokesman, in the 2017 press release. It has nothing to do with any theoretical rate of electricity production the reactor might produce, contrary to Coblentz’s statement in the 2020 press release.

Coblentz knew this five years ago. He told New Energy Times on Dec. 22, 2016, that the primary measurable objective of the reactor is to produce “approximately 10 times more power coming out of the plasma than goes into the plasma,” rather than any power gain for the entire reactor.

The Film

ITER is a zero-power experimental fusion reactor concept dishonestly promoted as a 500-megawatt reactor. This April 2021 film documentary tells the story:

Oct 182021
 

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By Steven B. Krivit
Oct. 18, 2021

“When you tell your investors that you can do fusion by 2018, you cannot tell them that the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority agrees with you, because we do not.” — Steven Cowley, July 21, 2015

Six years ago, in testimony before the United Kingdom House of Lords Science and Technology Select committee, Steven Cowley, the highest-ranking UK fusion expert at the time, told legislators that Tokamak Energy Ltd., a UK fusion startup company, was making baseless claims to its investors.

House of Lords

At the time, Cowley was the head of the UK Atomic Energy Authority. Sitting next to Cowley at the witness table was David Kingham, the chief executive of Tokamak Energy Ltd. Cowley objected to statements Kingham made.

David Kingham: I think we are probably in the process of repairing relationships; it was difficult for a while. Partly, that is because Tokamak Energy popped out of nowhere, in a sense, and had some very bold ideas initially. It is only this year that we have been able to produce the level of evidence both on the physics of these compact spherical tokamak devices and on the engineering feasibility, so that we have been able to speak more publicly about our plans and put a stronger case to scientists and engineers around the world.

Steven Cowley: I can see where this is going. In presentations to investors, Tokamak Energy claimed that it could get fusion by 2018. We had several people working with Tokamak Energy. That is not just incredible; it boggles the mind—you cannot get fusion by 2018, not with any of these things. Nuclear licensing would take you 10, 15 years at best; a fusion device is a highly nuclear machine, and so on. So claims to investors of being able to get to fusion by 2018 drove us to say, “We need to have you at arm’s length.” We are very much dependent on our credibility. Back in 1958, Sir John Cockcroft revealed the ZETA results and claimed fusion for the UK, and it did great damage to the credibility of nuclear research in this country. When you tell your investors that you can do fusion by 2018, you cannot tell them that the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority agrees with you, because we do not. We do not think that you can get electricity in 10 years and that that is a credible claim. We have to defend our credibility.

Pot Calling the Kettle Black?

Nevertheless, Cowley’s own pie-in-the-sky claims did not escape the attention of Member of the House of Lords Baron Maurice Harry Peston:

Lord Peston: As background, I must say that I am totally confused by the evidence that you have given us. I hope you will bear that in mind. Professor Cowley, you said in your opening remarks, “I am confident that a commercially sustainable outcome will occur.” How could you possibly say that? What is your evidence? Also as background, let me point out that it is not even obvious that fission stations are commercially viable. You are talking about things that have never been built and are not within a million miles of being built. How can you express any degree of confidence that this is not a total waste of money? Those were your words: “will occur,” not “might occur,” and you repeated it a bit later.

Steven Cowley: Yes, I gave you a timescale, which I think is useful.

Lord Peston: “Will” could be between now and plus infinity, but you could not possibly have meant that.

Steven Cowley: No. I think we need fusion later in this century. What we have now are transitional decarbonizing technologies, which are fission and carbon capture and storage. At some point, we will have to move on from current technology because we cannot do infinite amounts of carbon capture and storage or fission. By the end of the century, we need some technologies to replace them. We have done some fusion at Culham: 16 megawatts of fusion power on JET. We can make the conditions for fusion. We have to make a step to the scientific demonstration of fusion, but that still is not commercial demonstration of fusion. Whether we can do that in the 2040s or whether it will wait until 2080 is the question.

MIT Helps Pave the Way

A Sept. 21, 2015, document that, as of today, is still on the Tokamak Energy Web site includes several gross exaggerations and false claims. (Archive copy)

The company said that, with collaboration and funding, it could turn nuclear fusion into a practical source of energy within a decade. The company dangled the bait for investors: “If successful, this could be one of the most lucrative opportunities yet.”

The company then provided multiple statements that implied that planned near-term fusion reactors would be producing net energy. To be clear: each of the claims implied that the tokamak reactors — the full systems — would produce more energy than they would consume.

But the Tokamak Energy fusion scientists responsible for the deceptive message knew full well that the near-term reactor plans (including their own) for net energy apply only to the physics reactions, rather than to the overall reactors.

Dennis Whyte, the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology fusion center, helped establish the false foundation in the company’s article.

“This puts net energy gain from fusion on a decade timescale,” Whyte said.

If Whyte had really intended to convey that he was only talking about net energy gain of the physics reactions, rather than the reactor, he had six years to request a correction. But Whyte had a track record of using the bait-and-switch language.

In 2017, Whyte told a writer from the MIT News Office that MIT’s planned reactor, SPARC, “will carry out the world’s first demonstration of net energy from a fusion experiment — making SPARC the first fusion device to make more power than it consumes.”

Whyte implied that the SPARC reactor — not reaction — is designed for net energy. After I asked Whyte for reactor specifications that would support his claim, MIT removed the entire article.

An MIT science writer Whyte spoke with in September 2021 wrote “the successful operation of SPARC will demonstrate that a full-scale commercial fusion power plant is practical.” But SPARC is not designed, as a reactor system, to produce net energy. The SPARC design, like that of ITER, if it accomplishes its scientific objective, will demonstrate a correlated overall reactor net power output of zero. That’s not very practical.

Maria Zuber, the vice president for research at MIT — and the person responsible for oversight of research integrity — made a misleading claim about the SPARC reactor design.

“I now am genuinely optimistic that SPARC can achieve net positive energy,” Zuber said.

The Road to Fusion Fraud

After the fusion pump by Whyte, the Tokamak Energy article then repeated the long-running lies about JET and ITER:

Scientists have yet to produce a net energy gain in fusion. The world’s current largest tokamak — the Joint European Torus (JET) —  located at the Culham Center for fusion energy in the UK —  produced a record 16 megawatts of energy in 1997 from 24 megawatts of input energy.

ITER’s goal is to produce 500 megawatts of output power — ten times the amount of energy put in. ITER is an internationally-united endeavor to realize net fusion energy gain. … ITER’s goal is to produce 500 megawatts of output power — ten times the amount of energy put in.

The JET reactor, as readers of New Energy Times know, produced 16 megawatts of power (not energy) in 1997 from 700 megawatts of input power. The ITER design, if it works correctly, will produce not a tenfold power gain but a zero-power gain, or less.

On these false foundations, Tokamak Energy then told the public — and its investors — that the company “aims to achieve net energy gain in fusion in five years and generation of electricity in ten.”

Fusion critic and author L.J. Reinders, a retired high-energy physicist, once asked a plasma physicist who works at Tokamak Energy, “What do you mean by connected to the grid?” His colleague replied, with an embarrassed smile, “Well, it depends what you mean by grid.”

 

Oct 162021
 

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By Steven B. Krivit
Oct. 16, 2021

Laban Coblentz, the head of communications for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) organization, has provided inaccurate, ambiguous responses when asked about the ITER reactor input power requirement. He has also published fraudulent claims in a press release.

Krivit to Bigot and Coblentz

This was the first news inquiry I sent to the organization:

Subject: MEDIA INQUIRY ITER POWER
Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2016 15:46:12 -0800
From: S.B. Krivit
To: cab-public@iter.org, itercommunications@iter.org
Bernard Bigot, Director General

Dear Dr. Bigot,

You have shown on your Web page https://www.iter.org/sci/Goals, in very simple language, without conditions, that “ITER is designed to produce a ten-fold return on energy (Q=10), or 500 MW of fusion power from 50 MW of input power.”

In very simple language, without conditions, can you please tell me whether the entire ITER reactor, including all of the major power-consuming components, will require more than 50 MW in total power input to obtain 500 MW of fusion power?

If so, what is the best estimate of the power consumption for all the required major power-consuming components of ITER to obtain 500 MW of fusion power?

Thank you,
Steven

Coblentz to Krivit

Bigot never responded, but Coblentz did. By Dec. 22, Coblentz and I had exchanged 10 e-mails. In none of them did he answer my question. Finally, in e-mail #11, he responded to my fourth request.

According to what he said, he had not known, until that point, the answer to my question:

As head of communication, I don’t have access to – nor do I focus on – the exact electrical requirements of all ITER systems, whether tokamak systems or “plant systems.” The individuals who have those numbers are unfortunately scattered about at the moment, since you’ve caught us just at the holiday season. In short, it has taken time because I wanted to provide you the best estimates I can.

At the end of his e-mail, Coblentz gave his best answer to my question:

Finally, regarding your question: “What is the best estimate of the power consumption for all the required major power-consuming components of ITER to obtain the 500 MW of plasma power?”

Site requirements at steady state will enable the consumption of roughly 120 MW of power to support the “plant systems” such a cooling, cryogenics, vacuum, Tritium Plant and fuelling, Diagnostics, Test Blanket Modules, etc.

Even though I had not yet learned the correct input power rate for the reactor, I knew that Coblentz’s answer was wrong. He had omitted the largest power-consuming reactor drains: the plasma heating and current drive systems.

Five months later, Jassby taught me how to understand the various ITER power drains and was the first person to tell me that ITER would need at least 300 MW of electricity to produce the 500 megawatts of thermal output power. I then revisited the e-mail from Coblentz and saw that he had mentioned an additional 150 MW power needed for the plasma heating and current drive systems. But Coblentz had omitted the 150 MW value from his “120 MW” answer.

Based on my examination of Coblentz’s full e-mail, I cannot determine whether he failed to understand the information he had received from his experts or whether he did not want me to understand that information.

Coblentz to Izoard

Here’s what journalist Celia Izoard wrote about her attempt to ask Coblentz the same question:

Asked the same day about ITER’s total power consumption, Laban Coblentz, communications director, replied that he did not know. After a written request, plus fifteen days of waiting and several reminders, Coblentz provided approximate numerical values confirming those of Steven B. Krivit, but he accompanied them by a long dissertation on the need to “place these answers in the context of the mission of ITER.”

Coblentz to Claessens

In his books, Claessens cited my research to obtain and confirm the 300 MW value: “Krivit estimates the average total power consumption of ITER to be 300 MW.” But he did so only as a counterpoint to the official input power value he cited from the ITER organization: 110 MW.

“During operations, the electrical consumption of the ITER machine and its facilities should be on the order of 110 MW,” Claessens wrote.

Claessens has a Ph.D. in physical chemistry so he cannot be faulted for mixing machine power requirements and facility power requirements. For example, the street lights in the reactor facility parking lot do not count against the required input power for the reactor. Moreover, the ITER Web site, on its “Power Supply” page, also combines “electricity requirements for the ITER plant and facilities.” Regardless, not even the machine and its required components can operate on just 110 megawatts of electricity.

For the 110 MW value in his books, Claessens cited a news article by Robert Arnoux, a journalist who became part of the ITER public relations team. But there is no “110 MW” value in Arnoux’s article; instead, there is a “100 MW” value associated with the AC current. But Claessens didn’t understand that the DC current represents a separate and additional input power flow. Claessens missed something else Arnoux wrote in his article: “A plasma shot will require an input of 300 MW.”

Claessens has since agreed with me that the 300 MW value is more accurate. But where did Claessens get his 110 MW value from? He explained it to me last year:

– I sent an e-mail to [redacted] on 3 April 2017 to confirm that the total average electric consumption of the site is 110 MW (reactor + all installations)
– The day after (4 April), I received an e-mail from Laban saying that he will ask [redacted] to answer me. Because I had not copied Laban on my e-mail to [redacted], I suspect that [redacted] asked him for permission to answer me.
– On 20 April, [redacted] confirmed that the electric consumption of the site will be “around 100 MW.”
– I remember I then had a phone discussion with [redacted] and, a few weeks or months later, with [redacted].
– The only public information on the ITER site I found about this is https://www.iter.org/newsline/-/2589, which I quote in my books.
– If you write about this, please do not mention explicitly the names of my former colleagues, as they may have problems with their hierarchy.

Press Release with False Claims

Several years later, on July 28, 2020, Coblentz, under the leadership of Bernard Bigot, the director-general of the ITER organization, published a press release with intentionally false, and therefore fraudulent claims, about the reactor:

When ITER is finished, it is expected that it will demonstrate that fusion power can be generated sustainably on a commercial scale. … How much power will the ITER Tokamak provide? The plant at ITER will produce about 500 megawatts of thermal power. If operated continuously and connected to the electric grid, that would translate to about 200 megawatts of electric power, enough for about 200,000 homes.

Bigot and Coblentz omitted all of the electrical input power the reactor is designed and expected to consume. If Bigot and Coblentz had included the input power and if ITER was connected to the electric grid, ITER’s net output would translate to about zero Watts of electricity.

The ITER design, “if operated continuously and connected to the electric grid,” isn’t enough to power a single light bulb, let alone capable of demonstrating that fusion power can be generated sustainably on a commercial scale.

The day after the press release, I called Sabina Griffith, the staff member in the ITER organization’s public relations office whose name appeared on the press release. Griffith consented to an audio recording of our telephone call. In our conversation, it became clear that she did not have sufficient understanding of the scientific details to understand the press release bearing her name. But she didn’t write it, and she disavowed responsibility for the statements.

“I’m not the spokesperson of ITER. I’m a press officer,” Griffith said. “I’m just providing media, so for this question, regarding the content of the press release, I would have to ask you to talk to Laban Coblentz who is our head of communications. … I am not responsible for the statement printed in the press release.”

I invited Coblentz to provide a comment. He said nothing. But he removed the July 28, 2020, press release.

 

Oct 102021
 

Return to the Fusion Fuel Main Page

By Steven B. Krivit
Oct. 10, 2021

The First of a Three-Part New Energy Times Investigative Science Report
Part 2: The Tritium Fusion Fuel Discrepancy: The Misleading Claims
Part 3: Serious Discrepancies with ITER and Nuclear Fusion


ABSTRACT

Significant discrepancies exist about the forthcoming ITER fusion reactor. These discrepancies could spell disaster for the ITER project as well as for future fusion reactors. Fusion promoters sold the idea of ITER to the public, news media, and elected officials primarily based on these two false claims:

FUEL SOURCE: They said the fuel for fusion was abundant, inexpensive, and universally available. Actually, one of the two required fuel components is. The other does not exist as a natural resource on Earth.

POWER GAIN: They said the ITER reactor (not just the physics reaction) was designed to produce 10 times the power it would consume. They said ITER would be the first fusion reactor (not just the physics reaction) to demonstrate net power production. Actually, if ITER works correctly, there will be no reactor power gain. The reactor will lose power.

FUSION INVESTIGATION
New Energy Times uncovered the input power requirement for the JET reactor, and thus the discrepancies with the JET and ITER reactors, on Dec. 1, 2014. We began reporting on the ITER power discrepancy on Dec. 14, 2016. We uncovered and published the input power value for ITER on Oct. 6, 2017. We began reporting on the fuel discrepancy on July 1, 2017, and published extensive reporting on the fuel discrepancy on Oct. 10, 2021.


Scientists who promoted nuclear fusion research to the public, news media, and elected officials have long claimed that the fuel needed for nuclear fusion reactors will be abundant, inexpensive, and virtually unlimited. Those claims are only half-true.

The main approaches to nuclear fusion require a mixture of two forms, or isotopes, of hydrogen: deuterium and tritium. The consensus among fusion scientists is that a 50-50 fuel mixture of the two isotopes will be required for commercial fusion reactors.

One of these isotopes (deuterium) can be separated from water in the ocean and can thus legitimately be described as abundant, inexpensive, and virtually unlimited.

The other hydrogen isotope — tritium — does not exist on Earth as a natural resource.

Here are some examples of the claims made by fusion scientists:

  • “If the whole planet was run on fusion, there would be enough fuel in the ocean for two billion years.” (Michel Laberge)
  • Nobody owns the fusion fuel. The machines are expensive, but the fuel cost is essentially zero.” (Thomas Klinger)
  • “Fuels are plentiful and available all over the world.” (Johannes P. Schwemmer)
  • “The energy content stored in the ocean would last humanity for 100 million years.” (Mark Henderson)
  • “It’s an inexhaustible, carbon-free source of energy that you can deploy anywhere and at any time.” (Dennis Whyte)
Lots of Deuterium

A normal hydrogen isotope contains only a positively charged proton in its nucleus, but the deuterium isotope adds a neutral particle: a neutron. The hydrogen isotope known as tritium has one proton and two neutrons in its nucleus. Both deuterium and tritium are required for the fuel mixture in fusion reactors.

When deuterium and tritium react and undergo nuclear fusion, a lot of energy is released. In the process, the tritium and deuterium are transmuted into a single, larger atom — helium — along with a leftover neutron.

Deuterium-tritium nuclear fusion reaction diagram

Deuterium-tritium nuclear fusion reaction diagram

The deuterium-tritium fuel mix is necessary to produce energy levels and reaction rates that have any hope of producing practical levels of energy.

Is fusion possible with deuterium but not tritium? Yes; but achieving useful power levels from fusing pairs of deuterium under conditions available on Earth is considered impossible. Can a smaller fraction of tritium permit fusion reactors to produce useful levels of energy? No. Well-known scientific data show that a 50-50 mixture of tritium and deuterium is required to provide the necessary output level for useful power. Would a tritium-tritium reaction perform better? Actually, no. The deuterium-tritium fuel mix gives the highest energy yield.

Among the seven known isotopes of hydrogen, normal hydrogen, designated with a superscript 1 followed by the letter H, comprises 99.985 percent of all forms of hydrogen on Earth. Deuterium, designated with a superscript 2 followed by the letter H, comprises the remaining 0.015 percent of hydrogen isotopes on Earth.

Natural abundance of deuterium on Earth. Courtesy www.periodictable.com

Natural abundance of deuterium on Earth. Courtesy www.periodictable.com

Even at an abundance of only 0.015 percent, ocean water has enough deuterium to qualify as a nearly unlimited resource. But tritium is another story.

Tritium Issue #1: It Doesn’t Exist as a Natural Resource

Tiny amounts of tritium are produced by nature in the upper atmosphere when cosmic rays strike nitrogen molecules. This tritium is incorporated into water and falls to Earth as rain. Of the three hydrogen isotopes, tritium comprises about a billionth of a billionth percent. Earth has so little tritium that its natural abundance is listed as “none.” Therefore, we can accurately say that tritium does not exist as a natural resource on Earth.

Natural abundance of tritium on Earth. Courtesy www.periodictable.com

Natural abundance of tritium on Earth. Courtesy www.periodictable.com

The situation is not completely hopeless, however; there are ways to make tritium. The U.S. military had operated complex and costly reactors that could make tritium, but they have since been decommissioned, according to Daniel Jassby, a retired plasma physicist from the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, who is the author of two articles in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

That’s because tritium doesn’t last. It’s radioactive, and the moment fresh tritium is produced, it starts undergoing radioactive decay and begins changing into non-radioactive helium. After 12.3 years, half of the initial amount of tritium is gone. For this reason, significant amounts of tritium cannot be produced in advance and stockpiled.

The military always needs fresh tritium. Tritium is used as a component of nuclear weapons, and the helium-3 decay product must be periodically extracted and replaced with fresh tritium, at great expense.

“The military is now forced to generate tritium by implanting lithium control rods in two Tennessee Valley Administration fission power reactors,” Jassby wrote. “The U.S. military has no tritium to sell to anybody.”

Tritium is also made in nuclear fission reactors. It’s an unintended radioactive byproduct of fission reactions. Mohamed Abdou, a fusion and tritium expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, explained this in a 2020 meeting.

“Fission reactor operators do not really want to make tritium because of permeation and safety concerns. They want to minimize tritium production, if possible,” Abdou said. [1]

Abdou is the lead author of a key technical paper on tritium shortfalls for nuclear fusion. [5]

Tritium Issue #2: Production Is Scarce

But not all nuclear fission reactors produce tritium at useful rates.  Most of the world’s fission reactors are light-water, pressurized-water reactor designs. They don’t produce enough tritium to be recoverable, unless special lithium-containing control rods are inserted, as in the Tennessee Valley Administration reactors. Only a few fission reactors, known as heavy-water reactors, produce substantial and recoverable amounts of tritium.

But, among those heavy-water reactors, not all have the special equipment to extract the tritium from the wastewater. Professor Richard Pearson (Open University, United Kingdom) said that “tritium must be extracted from the heavy-water moderator by means of a Tritium Removal Facility (TRF), of which only two [in the world] are currently in operation, one in Canada and one in South Korea, although there are plans for a third in Romania.” [2]

Tritium Issue #3: End-of-Life for Heavy-Water Reactors

Only a handful of countries in the world have heavy-water reactors. Canada has by far the most and is the biggest tritium producer. But its heavy-water reactors, and the others in the world, are approaching or have approached the end of their lifespan. With the possible exception of India, no countries are planning to build new heavy-water reactors.

The graph below, by Kovari et al., displays the past and projected worldwide tritium production rates from heavy-water reactors. By 2060, according to the scientists, the global production rate of tritium will reach zero.

Kovari et al. graph of global tritium production

Kovari et al. graph of global tritium production

Kovari et al. explained, “It is worth noting that, if scheduled heavy-water reactor refurbishments do not go ahead or, for some reason, heavy-water reactors begin to be phased out earlier than expected across the globe, this would result in almost no tritium being available for fusion experiments.” [3]

But even after 2060, some tritium will remain in the worldwide inventory. The remaining tritium inventory should be just enough to start — but not to continuously supply — one or maybe two more fusion reactors after ITER. By 2080, as the authors show in the graph below, only 10 kilograms of tritium will remain in the global inventory — assuming it has not been used already for fusion reactors. However, the authors believe that Canada is the only country that sells tritium. So, in effect, only the Canadian tritium inventory would theoretically be available to the worldwide scientific community.

Kovari et al. graph of global tritium inventory

Kovari et al. graph of global tritium inventory

Tritium Issue #4: ITER Will Use Almost the Entire Inventory

So how much of the global inventory of tritium will ITER consume? At a presentation Abdou gave 14 years ago at the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee meeting, he said that “a successful ITER will exhaust most of the world supply of tritium.” So the 2080 date is actually irrelevant.

What will the effect of ITER’s tritium consumption on the worldwide tritium inventory look like? Abdou shows us in the graph below. The expected scenario, shown in the red line, from 2035 to 2055, is the global tritium inventory level if ITER does use the expected amount of tritium. In the year 2055, this will bring the remaining global tritium inventory to about three kilograms.

If, for some reason, ITER does not get to its final high-power stage, Abdou calculates the worldwide tritium inventory with the blue line, terminating in the year 2055 at around 14 kilograms.

Graph published by Abdou in many of his slide presentations; labels have been rewritten for clarity.

Graph published by Abdou in many of his slide presentations; labels have been rewritten for clarity.

According to Kovari et al., the amount of tritium required for ITER during its total operating period will be 12.3 kg, which concurs with Abdou’s graph. Kovari et al. wrote, as other fusion tritium experts have done, that the post-ITER tritium scarcity is going to be a serious problem.

The ITER Organization and its closely associated EUROfusion organization, in their public relations programs, imply that a single international DEMO-class reactor will follow ITER.

Image from EUROfusion Web site, Sept. 25, 2021

Image from EUROfusion Web site, Sept. 25, 2021

This helps to maintain the expectation that the costs of the presumed reactor will be shared among the 33 nations that are now partners in the ITER project.

But the ITER partners have no plan for a joint international DEMO reactor and never have had one. If the EU is to build its own DEMO fusion reactor, European taxpayers will have to foot the entire bill. European taxpayers, whether they know it or not, are already paying fusion scientists to design the EU DEMO reactor.

In the 2019 version of “A Strategic Plan for U.S. Burning Plasma Research,” U.S. fusion expert Laila El-Guebaly showed that DEMO-class reactors are in the planning stages from five of the seven ITER partners.

Planned DEMO-class reactors, by Laila El-Guebaly

Planned DEMO-class reactors, by Laila El-Guebaly

Kovari et al. provided additional insight into the impending global competition for the last few kilos of tritium on Earth:

There are likely to be serious problems with supplying tritium for future fusion reactors. … If ITER and fusion development are successful, then two or three countries may build their own reactors, giving another major source of uncertainty in tritium requirements. … If Canada, the Republic of Korea, and Romania make their tritium inventories available to the fusion community, there is a reasonable chance that 10 kg of tritium would be available for fusion research in 2055. Stocks would likely have to be shared if more than one fusion reactor is built.

Tritium Issue #5: Fusion Reactors Must Make Their Own Fuel

The solution, fusion scientists propose, is that fusion reactors will make their own fuel. If this sounds too good to be true, skepticism is warranted.

When neutrons react with the element lithium, they produce tritium. Lithium is relatively abundant on Earth as long as there’s no competition from the lithium-ion battery industry.

Fusion scientists have always known that tritium did not exist naturally as a fuel source. They’ve also known for decades that tritium was essential as a fuel component for fusion reactors.

A 1984 conference paper by G.W. Hollenberg explains that fusion reactors will have to make their own tritium: “The on-site production of tritium at a fusion power plant is an established design practice for D-T fusion reactors; no other alternative is envisioned.”

The Hollenberg document refers to a DEMO-class reactor that U.S. fusion scientists envisioned 40 years ago called Starfire. The bar on the left shows how much tritium they expected the reactor to consume every day. The bars on the right show how much tritium they expected worldwide fission reactors could provide. One of the authors was Abdou; he’s been at this a long time.

Starfire tritium requirements, G.W. Hollenberg et al., 1984

Starfire tritium requirements, G.W. Hollenberg et al., 1984  (See 10/17/21 notes)

Tritium Issue #6: Tritium Self-Sufficiency

Because virtually no commercially available tritium will be available in the world after ITER, all fusion reactors planned for operation after ITER will need to be tritium self-sufficient. This means that fusion reactors not only will have to make their own tritium fuel but also won’t be able to get tritium from any outside sources. This is what it means for fusion reactors to be tritium self-sufficient.

People like Abdou have been trying for decades to resolve by calculations and computer modeling whether the achievable rate of tritium that can be produced in a fusion reactor will be sufficient for the continued operation of a fusion reactor.

According to Jassby, only one physical experiment in fusion research history has attempted to breed tritium in a fusion reactor. It was Jassby’s experiment, performed in 1995-1996 in the Princeton Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor. His experiment showed that the total amount of tritium produced in a breeding medium just outside the TFTR vacuum vessel was only 32 percent of the total number of fusion neutrons intersected by that medium [4].

But even if a fusion reactor produces tritium at a rate of 100 percent of the tritium it requires to operate, fusion is a dead end. A reactor has to produce tritium at a higher rate than it consumes tritium in order to compensate for inefficiencies and downtime. According to a Jan. 27, 2020, presentation from Abdou, a fusion reactor would need to produce about 112 percent of the tritium it will consume in order to continue operating.

So, is a production rate (technically known as the tritium breeding ratio) of 112 percent achievable? In a scientific article that Abdou and eight co-authors published recently, they said they don’t know. They said that they have high confidence that a rate of 105 percent is achievable but that they have less confidence that a rate of 115 percent can be realized. The fate of the worldwide effort to commercialize nuclear fusion rests on this razor-thin edge of a few percentage points. But, as the authors wrote, the data are not favorable. [5]

The authors concluded that, based on known physics and state-of-the-art technology, fusion reactors following ITER will not be able to breed enough tritium to be self-sufficient.

Here is exactly what the authors said at the beginning of their abstract:

Excerpt from Abdou et al. 2020 abstract [5]

Excerpt from Abdou et al. 2020 abstract [5]

This means that, even before ITER is finished, based on present knowledge, barring a miracle, fusion reactors cannot and will not be a viable source of energy, regardless of their cost.

Tritium Issue #7: Tritium Start-Up Inventory

Even if a tritium breeding-ratio issue is solved, there’s one more problem. Where will a reactor get the tritium it needs in order to start up? Will the few remaining kilograms of global tritium after ITER be enough? Which country is going to acquire that tritium? The grim reality, according to Kovari et al., is that there may not be enough tritium to start even one DEMO-class reactor:

The tritium available commercially from the Canadian reactor production program after the retirement of ITER may not be sufficient to start [the EU] DEMO. Two factors make the tritium supply for [the EU] DEMO even smaller than previously considered. First, ITER will be severely delayed, and if [the EU] DEMO is similarly delayed, then all the Canadian CANDU reactors will have been shut down, while the civilian tritium stockpile will have undergone decay.

Are there any alternatives? Is it as bad as it seems? Can’t deuterium-deuterium fusion reactions produce tritium? Yes, they can, and Kovari et al. answered this question.

“It is, in theory, possible to start up a fusion reactor with little or no tritium, but at an estimated cost of $2 billion per kilogram of tritium saved, it is not economically sensible,” Kovari et al. wrote.

Why is a cost saving of only $2 billion per kilogram not economically sensible? Because, as the authors wrote, the interest payments alone for the construction costs of the reactor during the time when it’s building up an inventory of tritium and generating zero power would be $6 billion.

Will ITER Breed Tritium?

One final matter needs to be clarified: Will ITER breed its own tritium? One scientist who is capable of answering this question is Tony Donné, the head of the EUROfusion organization. His organization is funded by the EU and is responsible for the design activities for the EU DEMO reactor.

The EU DEMO reactor is expected to use lithium throughout the entire interior structure of the reactor in order to breed the tritium it needs to operate. But ITER will have no such lithium blanket. Here’s what Donné told me about tritium breeding in ITER:

ITER will test four different technologies to breed tritium. So it will actually breed tritium but less than is needed for its own consumption. The experiments in ITER will give guidance to the technologies to be used in DEMO, which is envisaged to have a tritium breeding ratio greater than 1 and, hence, produce its own tritium.

Then I asked Abdou, and I received a very different answer:

ITER is not designed to breed tritium, and it will not breed tritium. ITER has only limited mockup testing of some breeding blanket concepts. The amount of tritium to be produced in these mockups is small and cannot provide a significant fraction for ITER to use. The mockup is a simulation of a blanket module about one square meter of surface area facing the plasma. There will be only four of these. ITER has about 600 square meters of surface area. So all the test mockups cannot produce more than 1 percent of ITER’s tritium consumption, at the best conditions.

Summary of the Tritium Issues
  1. A fusion reactor with a full tritium breeding blanket must be able to achieve a minimum tritium breeding ratio of 1.12, despite the fact that experts do not know how this will be possible.
  2. The global inventory of tritium must be large enough to start at least the first DEMO-class fusion reactor.
  3. The first DEMO-class fusion reactor must go into operation before the last of the tritium inventory disappears.
  4. If successful, the first DEMO-class fusion reactor must be able to produce enough tritium to start the second DEMO-class fusion reactor, and so on.

The only other solution is that the world needs to build new heavy-water fission reactors to produce fuel for fusion reactors. To borrow from “The Matrix,” “fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.” Fusion scientists have been bashing fission reactor technology for decades.

Next: The Fusion Fuel Discrepancy: The Misleading Claims

References
  1. Mohamed Abdou, NAS Committee in La Jolla, Calif., Feb. 26, 2018
  2. Richard J. Pearson, Armando B. Antoniazzi, William J. Nuttall, “Tritium Supply and Use: A Key Issue for the Development of Nuclear Fusion Energy,” Fusion Engineering and Design, (May 31, 2018) 136, (B), 1140-1148
  3. Kovari, M. Coleman, I. Cristescu, and R. Smith, “Tritium Resources Available for Fusion Reactors,” (Dec. 21, 2017) Nuclear Fusion, 58 (2)
  4. L. Jassby, C.A. Gentile, G. Ascione, H.W. Kugel, A.L. Roquemore, and A. Kumar, “Tritium Production in He-3 Gas cells Immersed in the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor Neutron Field,” (1999) Review of Scientific Instruments 70, 1115-1118
  5. Mohamed Abdou, Marco Riva, Alice Ying, Christian Day, Alberto Loarte, L.R. Baylor, Paul Humrickhouse, Thomas F. Fuerst and Seungyon Cho, “Physics and Technology Considerations for the Deuterium-Tritium Fuel Cycle and Conditions for Tritium Fuel Self Sufficiency,” (Nov. 23, 2020) Nuclear Fusion, 61 (1)

Oct. 17, 2021 Notes:  A reader asks: In the Abdou chart it says ITER will burn 0.9kg of tritium per year. In the Starfire chart, it says Starfire would burn 0.5kg per day. That’s about 203 times more than ITER. Why were these tritium consumption numbers are so far apart? Daniel Jassby answers: Starfire was supposed to operate continuously. ITER will have, at most, 1,000 pulses of 400 sec length. 400,000 sec is about 1% of a year. The projected ITER fusion power is about 20% of the Starfire fusion power. There you have a factor of 500.

Thanks to Daniel Jassby for pointing out the following clarification about the alternative tritium sources shown in this graph. Hollenberg et al. show the CANDU tritium production rate at 2.9 kg/year per GW of electric power. According to Jassby, a single CANDU reactor produces 0.2 kg of tritium/yr/GW as an unintended byproduct. Thus, the Hollenberg et al. 1984 value assumes a quantity of 10 tritium-producing CANDU reactors. Hollenberg et al. show the tritium production rate from special light-water reactors, which must be intentionally equipped to breed tritium, at 5.4 kg/yr/GW. According to Jassby, a single such reactor produces at most, 2 kg/yr/GW of tritium. Thus, the Hollenberg et al. value assumes a quantity of 3 such reactors.

 

Oct 102021
 

Return to the Fusion Fuel Main Page

By Steven B. Krivit
Oct. 10, 2021 

The Second of a Three-Part New Energy Times Investigative Science Report
Part 1: The Tritium Fusion Fuel Discrepancy: The Scientific Facts
Part 3: Serious Discrepancies with ITER and Nuclear Fusion

 


ABSTRACT

Significant discrepancies exist about the forthcoming ITER fusion reactor. These discrepancies could spell disaster for the ITER project as well as for future fusion reactors. Fusion promoters sold the idea of ITER to the public, news media, and elected officials primarily based on these two false claims:

FUEL SOURCE: They said the fuel for fusion was abundant, inexpensive, and universally available. Actually, one of the two required fuel components is. The other does not exist as a natural resource on Earth.

POWER GAIN: They said the ITER reactor (not just the physics reaction) was designed to produce 10 times the power it would consume. They said ITER would be the first fusion reactor (not just the physics reaction) to demonstrate net power production. Actually, if ITER works correctly, there will be no reactor power gain. The reactor will lose power.

FUSION INVESTIGATION
New Energy Times uncovered the input power requirement for the JET reactor, and thus the discrepancies with the JET and ITER reactors, on Dec. 1, 2014. We began reporting on the ITER power discrepancy on Dec. 14, 2016. We uncovered and published the input power value for ITER on Oct. 6, 2017. We began reporting on the fuel discrepancy on July 1, 2017, and published extensive reporting on the fuel discrepancy on Oct. 10, 2021.


In Part 1 of this series, we learned that any commercial fusion reactor, if one is ever built, will need a 50/50 mixture of two isotopes of hydrogen: deuterium and tritium. We learned that deuterium, as claimed, is indeed abundant, inexpensive, and virtually unlimited.


We also learned that the other hydrogen isotope — tritium — does not exist on Earth as a natural resource. 
We learned that, without tritium, fusion as an energy source is a dead end.

Part 1 shows that courageous fusion scientists have accurately and transparently explained the disturbing problems about tritium.

However, they have not been the scientists who were communicating with the public, news media, and elected officials. The public representatives of the fusion community said that fusion fuel is abundant, inexpensive, and virtually unlimited.

Sometimes, they said (falsely) that tritium, like deuterium, is abundant, inexpensive, and virtually unlimited.  At other times, they didn’t mention tritium at all. This report provides a few examples.

Mark Henderson

From 2008 to March 2021, plasma physicist Mark Henderson was the section leader of the ITER electron cyclotron heating and current drive system. In July 2019, Henderson spoke at a TEDx conference in Vicenza, Italy:

If I go out to the ocean and take a liter of water, and I take a little bit of a special hydrogen isotope out of that water, put the rest of the liter back into the ocean so I don’t damage the ocean, and I take those two isotopes, and I want to put them together, I want to fuse them together. Each liter would be equivalent to about 200 to 350 liters of gasoline, and with that, we’d be able to power all of Italy: electricity, transportation, heat, industry, everything. The energy content stored in the ocean would last humanity for 100 million years. That’s like seven times the age of the universe. So it’s just a perpetual-motion machine.

Note how Henderson glossed over the second of “those two isotopes.” Note how he implied that the ocean would supply both isotopes.

Here’s another example of Henderson’s communications about fusion fuel from an article in SCI magazine:

If you look at the reserves of deuterium – a hydrogen isotope – in the oceans, there’s enough energy to last humanity 150 million years at our present rate of consumption. If we could tap into this energy source, it would be basically an endless supply of energy, and it almost seems stupid for us not to try to exploit that.

Michel Laberge

Michel Laberge is the founder of General Fusion Inc. His company has now established a partnership with the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, which is run by Ian Chapman.

Here’s what Laberge said at a TEDx conference in Kansas City in 2014:

The fuel that you need for fusion, you can extract it from the ocean. You can extract the fuel from the ocean for one-thousandth of a cent per kilowatt hour. If the whole planet was run on fusion, there would be enough fuel in the ocean for two billion years. So there’s enough fuel, and it’s nice, and it’s clean, and it’s fantastic.”

Thomas Klinger

Thomas Klinger is the scientific director of the Wendelstein 7-X fusion project at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, in Germany. TEDx was again the preferred platform to promote fusion:

It is abundant, enough fusion fuel for millions of years – and is accessible to everybody. So nobody owns the fusion fuel. The machines are expensive, but the fuel cost is essentially zero.

Johannes P. Schwemmer and Massimo Garribba
Johannes P. Schwemmer

Johannes P. Schwemmer

On Jan. 21, 2019, two European Union government officials responsible for fusion research gave a presentation to the European Parliament Committee on Budgetary Control. One was Johannes P. Schwemmer, the director of the ITER domestic agency for the European Union. The other was Massimo Garribba, the European Commission director who represents Europe on the ITER Council.

Schwemmer told those members of the European Parliament that fusion is a promising source of energy because the “fuels are plentiful and available all over the world.”

Garribba, through a European Commission spokesman, told New Energy Times that he was not responsible for slide #2 with the false fuel claim.

But Garribba also spoke at the 52nd Japan Atomic Industrial Forum Annual Conference in 2019 and wrote in his abstract that “fusion may also become a new, non-carbon emitting, safe and virtually unlimited energy source in the second half of this century.”

Sibylle Günter

Sibylle Günter

 

 

Sibylle Günter

Sibylle Günter is the scientific director of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics. In 2011, Günter gave a briefing to the European Parliament. She told the members of the European Parliament that the fuel components for fusion — deuterium and tritium — were “practically unlimited.”

European Parliament workshop cover page (left) and slide from Sibylle Günter (right) 

European Parliament workshop cover page (left) and slide from Sibylle Günter (right)

Maria Zuber

Maria Zuber is the vice president for research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She’s also responsible for research integrity at MIT.

In a Sept. 8, 2021, press release, Zuber told MIT science writer David Chandler that the fuel used to create fusion energy comes from water and that “the Earth is full of water — it’s a nearly unlimited resource.”

Zuber’s direct quote is true. Zuber’s indirect quote is false. The MIT press release has other false statements and inaccuracies. Since the MIT fusion department lost its federal funding several years ago, its professors have been making exaggerated claims and promises.

Last year, a New York Times article by Henry Fountain said that MIT professors published “evidence that SPARC would succeed and produce as much as 10 times the energy it consumes.”

This year, a New York Times article by John Markoff that said that MIT’s commercial partner, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, hopes that their SPARC “prototype, when complete, will produce 10 times the energy it consumes.”

In fact, the SPARC reactor concept is not designed to produce any more energy than it consumes.

However, after SPARC, the MIT/Commonwealth scientists have long-term plans to develop another reactor that is designed for a net positive reactor power gain. It has a similar name: ARC.

But was there a miscommunication because of the similarity in names? Absolutely not. That’s because ARC is designed for a reactor gain of only 3, not 10. (See calculations here.) SPARC is designed for a maximum reaction gain of 10.

The MIT/Commonwealth scientists manipulated public perception in exactly the same way the ITER scientists did: misrepresenting reaction power gain as reactor power gain.

That’s exactly how the ITER communications staff misled Fountain when he went to visit the site for this New York Times article. Fountain wrote that, “although all fusion reactors to date have produced less energy than they use, physicists are expecting that ITER will benefit from its larger size and will produce about 10 times more power than it consumes.”

I’ve spoken with Fountain and Markoff. Neither of them, of course, had realized that the scientists or their representatives had tricked them. Both of them seemed perplexed and incredulous. Neither admitted that they were tricked.

Zuber also told Chandler that she believes the SPARC reactor “can achieve net positive energy.” This means that the MIT/Commonwealth scientists fooled their own research integrity officer. I asked Zuber on what data she based her statement about net positive energy. She did not respond to my e-mail.

Other scientists involved in the MIT fusion project told Chandler that “the successful operation of SPARC will demonstrate that a full-scale commercial fusion power plant is practical.”

But the SPARC zero-net-energy design would fail to demonstrate that a full-scale commercial fusion power plant is practical.

The ITER people said the same thing in a 2017 press release: “ITER is a project to prove that fusion power can be produced on a commercial scale.” (Actually, if ITER works properly, it will lose power.)

In a presentation at “Technology Day 2019: MIT on Climate Change,” Zuber told her audience that the president of MIT keeps a close eye on the university’s climate and energy research.

“It’s my honor and privilege to oversee MIT’s climate and energy work,” Zuber said. “President Reif assigned me to do that because this is an important topic to him and it was very important that somebody who reports directly to him was overseeing it so that he could be kept in the loop on a regular basis.”

So there can be no questions about what the president knew and when he knew it, I keep Reif in the loop, as well.

Dennis Whyte

Dennis Whyte is the director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center. In the same Sept. 8, 2021, press release that featured Zuber, Whyte said, “Fusion is an inexhaustible, carbon-free source of energy that you can deploy anywhere and at any time. It’s really a fundamentally new energy source.”

Whyte went into more detail in a TEDx lecture from 2013:

This is probably the greatest lure of fusion energy. The fuel is so abundant because it is essentially hydrogen. It actually occurs naturally in seawater, and it’s effectively unlimited to all people on Earth.

The example that we’ve put forward here is that, if I extracted a very small portion of and, in fact, harvested these heavy forms of hydrogen from the top inch of Boston Harbor, this would supply all of Boston’s electricity demands for about 100 years. That’s how incredibly intense the energy source is, and you get it from natural seawater. Also, it doesn’t happen to be just where you happen to be on the planet; everybody would have access to the fuel.

So we have a pretty good idea where Zuber got her information from.

Laban Coblentz

Laban Coblentz is the current spokesman for the ITER organization. Here’s what he told environmental journalist Celia Izoard earlier this year:

[Consider] the vast potential for fusion power to reduce and even eliminate more than a century of geopolitical tensions and conflicts focused on competition for access to fossil fuels, by enabling the use of a power-generating technology for which – uniquely among any baseload power generation source – the fuel (in water and lithium) is globally abundant and equally available to all.

Laban Coblentz

Laban Coblentz

Melanie Windridge

Melanie Windridge is a British plasma physicist, spokeswoman for Tokamak Energy Ltd., and the U.K. spokeswoman for the Fusion Industry Association advocacy organization. Here’s what she said at a 2020 science festival:

If we could do this, we could produce abundant energy with no greenhouse gases. We wouldn’t have to worry about running out of fuel because the types of hydrogen we need come from readily available sources like seawater.

 International Atomic Energy Association

The world’s most influential leaders in the nuclear fusion community belong to the International Fusion Research Council, a  standing advisory body of the International Atomic Energy Association. The council has made counterfactual fusion fuel claims, too. Here’s an example from 2005:

Fusion is, today, one of the most promising of all alternative energy sources because of the vast reserves of fuel, potentially lasting several thousands of years.

This IAEA fuel claim brings us full circle, back to the paper that Abdou and his colleagues published online last year, and in print this year, in the IAEA’s scientific journal Nuclear Fusion.

Nuclear Fusion is widely recognized as the leading journal in the field of nuclear fusion research. The list of co-authors below represents six of the most prestigious fusion organizations in the world, including the ITER organization. There’s a good chance that everybody in the fusion community knows about this scientific paper.

Bernard Bigot

Bernard Bigot, the director-general of the ITER organization, gave a video presentation on June 10, 2021, organized by the Bridge Forum. A press release, distributed by the organization a day after the videoconference, said that, according to Bigot, “fusion energy is a predictable baseload power source.”

For 70 years, fusion promoters have been making the same predictions. In 70 years, fusion energy has not delivered a single Watt of usable power.

Here is what the organizers said about Bigot’s fuel claims in their June 11, 2021, press release:

The speaker indicated that fusion fuel, which is made of two isotopes of hydrogen –  deuterium and tritium – is virtually unlimited for hundreds of millions of years and evenly distributed across the globe.

 Bigot also told a half-truth about the planned power goal:

What is the ITER mission? … The goal is to achieve a yield of over 10, which means that the thermal output will be on the order of 500 megawatts while we are just feeding into the plasma 50 megawatts of heating power.

Bigot neglected to mention that 300 megawatts of electricity will also be needed to operate the experiment and produce the 500 megawatts of thermal power.

Bigot also told the audience that the first fusion power plant might be “connected to the grid in Europe by 2060.”

Each of the 200 fusion reactors that have been built in the past 70 years has been “connected to the grid.” So the phrase “connected to the grid” doesn’t mean anything about power contribution to the grid, let alone doing so cost-effectively.

Michio Kaku

Last, we have television’s favorite physicist: Michio Kaku, an American professor of theoretical physics. Kaku spoke with CNBC in August 2021 and told viewers about a “breakthrough” at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory National Ignition Facility.

Kaku told viewers that the laser fusion device “hit breakeven: to extract more energy than you put in.”

Actually, laser fusion scientists have four definitions for breakeven. Kaku didn’t realize this and thus inadvertently led viewers to think that the device extracted more energy than was put into it. It didn’t come close.

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.

Too Good to Be True

Unfortunately, the last part of Kaku’s statement is where he got the story right. But it’s not his fault. He didn’t know. He trusted and believed the fusion scientists who have dominated the public messages.

We all did.

Next: ITER and The Fusion Discrepancies 

 

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