The publicly owned and funded National Ignition Facility privately operated by the Lawrence Livermore National Security corporation.
Looking down toward the laser banks
Looking up toward the bottom of the laser banks
The termination point of three of the 192 lasers
The hohlraum, the fuel pellet. It’s about a quarter of the size of your thumb
The modern control room
The old control room
Energy gain!
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Review of The Fairy Tale of Nuclear Fusion by L. J. Reinders
Springer, May 21, 2021, 650 pages
ISBN-13: 978-3030643430
UPDATE: Reinders now has a condensed, less-technical version of the book available: Sun in a Bottle?… Pie in the Sky!: The Wishful Thinking of Nuclear Fusion Energy. (ISBN-13 ? : ? 978-3030747336)
By Steven B. Krivit
July 11, 2021
A good non-fiction book is informative. A great non-fiction book also takes readers on a journey. When I got to the end of this book, I did indeed feel that this author had taken me on an amazing journey.
The Fairy Tale of Nuclear Fusion, by L. J. Reinders, stands alone. No book about nuclear fusion research approaches the objective and sober examination that Reinders provides. His research, foundation, and synthesis make this book an exemplary historical resource.
Before I go any further, I must disclose that I am not without bias; I am one of the sources cited in this book. Reinders cites my investigation of the required input power for the only three experimental fusion reactors in history to use real fusion fuel. I have a second disclosure: I did not pay close attention to some parts of the book. I will explain more about that in a moment.
A person need not read more than the title of this book to understand its key message. But Reinders did not approach the topic with an agenda to support his resultant thesis. In fact, the opposite is true.
Reinders, now retired, had a career in high-energy physics and worked at various research centers in Europe and Japan. When he began writing the book, as he explained, his intention was to urge more public support for fusion research. It seemed to him a promising endeavor that had a high probability of great social value. To his surprise and dismay, it became apparent to him that “nuclear fusion was a fantasy pursued by single-minded individuals that were apparently unable to see reason and the fundamental failings of their efforts.”
Despite his revelation, he continued and completed a book that not only serves well to separate facts from falsehoods but also succeeds in two other areas. First, despite his emergent despair about fusion, Reinders has created an encyclopedic tool that chronicles the historical development of the nuclear research field. Second, despite the fact that the window of practical fusion energy is as far away as it has always been, Reinders performs several “what-if” examinations to consider best-case scenarios. Rather than take the easy path of pot-shots or cynicism to provide the foundation for his thesis, he pursued various scenarios to thoughtfully consider the possible outcome of practical fusion energy.
The technical density of this book likely will make it a challenge for most lay readers. On the other hand, Reinders does have a forthcoming book that is intended for a lay audience. The book is called Sun in a Bottle?… Pie in the Sky! The Wishful Thinking of Nuclear Fusion Energy. The technical level in Fairy Tale provides the defense Reinders might need if he is critically attacked from people invested, either monetarily or by career choice, in the fusion establishment.
In a few places in the book, Reinders expresses his anger at the nonsense, dishonesty, and self-delusion that this book reveals. For readers who are new to the fusion illusion, Reinders’ emotive writing may be distracting, but it does not invalidate the facts he brings to light. For readers who have seen behind the illusory fusion curtain, his opinions will be a welcome reminder of the reality illuminated within the book. For example, he provides the statement from the prestigious International Atomic Energy Agency that “fusion is, today, one of the most promising of all alternative energy sources.” With not one practical Watt of power produced by fusion in 70 years, readers will begin to see the discrepancies between fusion reality and fusion fantasy.
I did not read thoroughly two areas of the book. The first area is the early section of the book, in which Reinders goes into great depth about the history of various fusion devices and approaches. In another area, Reinders goes into detail about the mechanics of various experimental devices. These are excellent topics to include in the book and will be useful for some readers. For me, as someone who holds no hope for controlled thermonuclear fusion as an energy source, these sections of the book were not sufficiently interesting.
I have one problem with the book. The fusion community regularly uses a form of doublespeak with key phrases such as “fusion power” and “scientific feasibility.” Reinders did not seem to recognize the double meanings and how they contributed to the gap in understanding between fusion scientists and fusion fans. As a result, Reinders inadvertently uses some of the fusion lingo and perpetuates some of the confusion.
There are two paragraphs in his book that I found infinitely illuminating:
In view of the almost insurmountable challenges remaining ahead on the way to a fusion-powered future and the almost total lack of scientific and technological progress achieved through erratic high-level global partnership as well as the decreased publicly funded research and development, which has now attracted the vultures of venture capital, it is unwarranted and incomprehensible that there is still trust in fusion as a promising option to provide a sustainable, worldwide supply of energy for centuries to come.
There is no other endeavor or project undertaken by mankind on which energy and money have been spent for close to a hundred years without any tangible results, only a dim prospect of success in another fifty years or so. The reason must be that there is a lot at stake, or perceived to be.
From my own interactions with key players and leaders in the fusion field, I believe that it is not money that is primarily at stake. Nor is it scientific achievement. From my perspective, what is at stake for the fusion players — scientists, educators, students, and international organizations — is relevance.
Nuclear fission research and its associated field of nuclear engineering became relevant within a few years of the successful operation of the first fission reactor. The horizon for the relevance of nuclear fusion, on the other hand, continues to recede every decade. This book shows why.
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June 16, 2021
By Steven B. Krivit
The government of India has not fully paid its cash contributions to the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), the Indo-Asian News Service (IANS) reported yesterday.
Furthermore, IANS reported, India has not done so since 2017. India has, however, nearly fulfilled delivery of the reactor components it promised. IANS did not specify whether India had stopped paying all or only some of its cash commitment.
Something else happened in 2017. The ITER India domestic agency had displayed the following false statement from 2009 to 2017 on its Web site: “ITER will produce at least ten times more energy than the energy required to operate it.” The ITER design is, in fact, equivalent to a net-zero power output reactor. The reactor is not designed for any net energy.
On Dec. 17, 2017, I contacted Shishir Deshpande, then the project director for the ITER India domestic agency, and Arun Srivastava, the secretary of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission. I advised them of the misunderstanding. The following month they removed the false statement.
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Saturday, June 12, 2021
By Steven B. Krivit
On Friday, E&E News, under the headline “Biden Draws Fire for DOE Fusion Plans,” reported that President Joe Biden said “no” to recent pressure from the U.S. fusion lobby.
E&E News reported that “fusion energy advocates in Congress and private industry are protesting the Energy Department’s lack of support for a pilot reactor this decade.”
Biden’s Department of Energy fiscal 2022 budget request, E&E News reported, “has no funds to start work on a pilot reactor project proposed by two committees of leading U.S. scientists and fusion entrepreneurs as an essential step to keeping the U.S. in competition with European and Chinese projects, said supporters of the efforts.”
Times have sure changed. Decades ago, leading U.S. fusion scientists told Congress that the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) was the way, the only way. My documentary film, “ITER, The Grand Illusion: A Forensic Investigation of Power Claims,” has all the gory details.
Now, four-and-a-half years after I first revealed that leading U.S. fusion scientists hoodwinked Congress to spend the public’s money on ITER, the leading U.S. fusion scientists insist that ITER is not the way — for them.
E&E News spoke with Andrew Holland, the chief executive officer of the Fusion Industry Association, a three-year-old public relations organization that represents the numerous private companies seeking to score profits with fusion. Holland complained that the federal government was not committing enough public money to the domestic public-private fusion pilot plant idea.
“There’s just not enough money there to do the work that needs to be done to get a fusion pilot plant,” Holland said.
The insistence of the U.S. fusion lobby that ITER is no longer the way represents more than just hypocrisy.
The lead paragraph of a news story in Physics Today summarized the proposal from the leading U.S. fusion scientists: “If fusion is to contribute to decarbonizing electricity generation by mid-century, the U.S. must begin to construct a grid-scale pilot fusion-power plant well before a self-sustaining fusion reaction is first achieved.”
Perhaps a more relevant response to the proposal was this succinct comment from someone identified as D.M. Bell, who wrote, “By this reasoning, the U.S. also should construct a public-private pigs-will-fly project well before flying pigs have been achieved.”
Bell’s point was not only witty but also spot-on. When Robert Goldston, the sixth director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laborator, pleaded for public support in an article he published on the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Web site, I asked him how he expected anybody to take the pilot plant proposal seriously. Toward the end of our public conversation, Goldston wrote, “This new idea is to put some electricity on the grid and get some learning-by-doing experience earlier.”
I responded to Goldston:
You have no experimental evidence that a fusion reactor can produce power from fusion at a greater rate than the injected heating power (scientific breakeven/scientific feasibility).
You have no experimental evidence that a fusion reactor can produce power from fusion at the same rate as it consumes electrical power (engineering breakeven).
The most well-documented and most credible fusion reactor design, ITER, if it works correctly, will achieve engineering breakeven sometime around 2045. That still won’t produce enough thermal power from fusion to provide one net Watt of electricity.
Yet you imagine that, now, after 70 years of trial and error, you can skip over the intermediate steps and go right to designing a reactor that would produce net electricity to put on the grid. And you imagine that you can do this by more Edisonian trial-and-error “learning-by-doing.”
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