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By Steven B. Krivit
Nov. 21, 2020

This article describes a fascinating correspondence I had over the course of three days in October 2020 with Dr. Tim Luce, the chief scientist of the ITER organization. I initiated the conversation in response to a statement he made about the rate of thermal power output the ITER reactor is designed to produce.

A little background information will help newcomers to my ITER investigation, but if you’re already familiar with it, you may want to drop down to the subheading THE MONEY.

JET
On October 31, 1997, the Joint European Torus (JET) reactor in Culham, U.K., had produced fusion particles with a record-setting level of thermal power for two seconds. At its peak, the fusion reactions produced thermal power at a rate of 16 million Watts. That’s the blue line in the graph below. The graph and the text are from a slide presentation by Nick Holloway, the spokesman for the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority.

In 2014, I had figured out that many fusion scientists and their promoters had been making false claims about the results of this experiment. They had done so since at least 1974. It had become commonplace to say that JET had produced thermal power from fusion at a rate of 16 MW from a total input rate of only 24 MW. Here’s an example from the ITER organization’s Web site before I advised them to correct it. Here’s an example from a European Parliament publication before I told them fusion experts had misled them.

I and, it seemed, everybody else who was not a fusion scientist, including Holloway, thought that JET had produced its 16 MW world’s record from a total reactor input power rate of only 24 megawatts of electricity, thus producing 65 percent of the power rate consumed by the entire reactor.

When I realized in 2014 that the 24 MW input value was not the correct value for the reactor input, I searched the Internet for the real value. As far as I could tell, it did not exist on any public Web page. So I sent Holloway an e-mail and asked him for the information. He didn’t know, either, but he asked his colleague Chris Warrick. Two days later, Holloway got back to me. They said that JET needed an input electrical power rate of 700 MW, not 24 MW. That meant that JET’s world-record of 16 MW of power was not 65 percent of the power input rate, but only 1 percent.

ITER
Soon after I received this revelatory information, I began looking at the public claims that fusion scientists and their promoters were making about the newer and larger ITER reactor. I could see that they were using the same ambiguous language they had used with JET for years. I knew that the expected thermal power output rate of 500 MW was accurate. I knew that the claimed input power rate of only 50 MW — for the overall reactor — was false. But the ITER organization did not clearly publish the correct input value on its web site. I didn’t have time to hunt down the correct input power rate until the end of 2016.

In December 2016, I sent an e-mail to Bernard Bigot, the director-general of the ITER organization, and asked him for the correct input power rate for the overall reactor. He didn’t respond. I began an e-mail conversation with Laban Coblentz, the spokesman for the organization. Coblentz told me it would be too difficult to figure out a simple, single value for the required input power for the reactor.

Only recently, in hindsight, I realized that, buried deep in his e-mails, the information was there. But it was for me, at the time, technical mumbo-jumbo. I would have had to synthesize the input power value from two primary sets of power drains Coblentz had given me for the reactor. The first power drain will consume electrical power at a rate of 150 MW, and the other will be 120 MW. So Coblentz knew that the required input power rate for ITER — to produce its 500 MW thermal output rate — was 270 MW of electricity.

If we assume that Coblentz knew the well-known loss associated with converting thermal power to electrical power, then he knew that the projected net ITER reactor output was equivalent to zero Watts. Nevertheless, since January 2017, Coblentz has continued to publish press releases and Web pages on the organization’s Web site that falsely state or create the false impression that the overall ITER reactor output should be ten times the overall reactor input and that the ITER reactor design is equivalent to that of a small, commercial electric power plant.

300 MW
The first person to give me a clear, concise input power rate value for the ITER reactor design — 300 MW — was Daniel Jassby, a retired plasma physicist from the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. This was in the summer of 2017. He was also the first person to clearly explain to me how the ITER reactor is designed to consume the various types of electrical power feeds. Soon after, I located two other sources who independently gave me numbers in the same ballpark. (All of my sources are listed here.)

440 MW
But if there’s one person in the ITER organization who knows the rate of input electrical power that the overall reactor is designed to consume, it’s Ivone Benfatto. He’s the head of the Electrical Engineering Division for the ITER organization.

I’ve had a copy of his scientific article “Power Converters for ITER” for many years, but I didn’t understand it well until recently. One of the tricky things to understand is that, although the reactor needs three categories of input power, only two of them are consumed. In the graph and caption below, Benfatto calls one of them “active power” and the other “plant auxiliary systems.” The third category is called “reactive power.” That power is stored, returned, and not consumed. It’s primarily used by the superconducting magnet system.

I knew early on from my conversations with Coblentz and Jassby that, when the ITER reactor begins its 500-second experiment, a brief spike is expected for about 20 seconds. When it shuts down, a short period of power oscillation is also expected. Coblentz called these “end-effects.”

Benfatto ran a computer simulation of the power loads expected during the experiment. For most of the 500-second experiment, the active power demand is expected to plateau at a rate of about 320 MW. I’ve highlighted that part of the power waveform. The plant auxiliary systems will use another 120 MW, bringing the total input electrical rate to 440 MW. I don’t know why Benfatto’s overall input power value is higher than the 300 MW value that other sources provided to me, but I have used the 300 MW number in my reports to be conservative. I’ve sent Benfatto several e-mails, but he’s never replied.

ZERO NET POWER
I’ve spent a lot of time talking with fusion experts about the thermal power that could be recovered from a reactor design like ITER. The consensus, assuming an input power load of only 300 MW (rather than 440 MW) and relatively optimistic gains and losses, is that the ITER design, if its thermal output was converted to electricity, would produce about zero Watts. (Click here for a full breakdown of the power balance.)

THE MONEY
Here’s the next piece of background information on the Tim Luce story: In 2013, the U.S. Congress, after seeing delays in the ITER construction schedule, began questioning whether it should continue spending the public’s money on ITER. Congress directed Ernest Moniz, the Secretary of Energy to look into it. Three years later, in 2016, Moniz recommended that the U.S. continue to be a partner for another two years, through fiscal year 2018. But Moniz advised that the U.S. participation should be reevaluated at that time. The secretary’s office asked the National Academies of Sciences to help. In turn, the academy formed a blue-ribbon committee of fusion authorities to ponder the matter. The committee recommended continued U.S. participation in the international project.

LUCE
Before the National Academies of Sciences committee review concluded, it held several meetings to talk about ITER. On February 1, 2018, it held its fourth meeting. It took place at ITER headquarters in France. The meeting began with a welcome address from Bigot. After that, senior members of the European fusion community gave presentations. In the afternoon, Luce gave his presentation.

Luce said that the ITER reactor design represents the minimum power production needed for a commercial fusion power plant.

The only way that the ITER reactor, designed for a gross thermal output of 500 MW, could be the “minimum for a power plant” is if it didn’t require the majority of the 300 MW of power it would need to operate. I emailed Luce and told him that a commercial fusion reactor designed with the parameters of ITER wouldn’t be able to produce one Watt of electricity.

Luce disagreed, and wrote back that ITER’s output, if converted to electricity, would be 100 MW, enough for a small fusion power plant:

My assumption is that “power plant scale” is >100 MW of electricity generation. 500 MW fusion power with a balance-of-plant efficiency of 0.2 (not economically viable, but the minimum) would be at 100 MW electric.

I showed him my analysis of the ITER reactor design power balance. Luce argued that the power values in my analysis included something called recirculating power. I told him that my values did not include recirculating power. Then he argued that my values included the temporary (reactive) power drain for the magnet system. I told him that they didn’t. Finally, in e-mail No. 17, Luce told me that the electrical power rate needed to operate ITER wasn’t 300 but somewhere between 100 and 150 megawatts and, therefore, the reactor would produce net output power equivalent to a rate of 100 MW of electricity.

I realized then that Luce had no idea about the rate of electrical power ITER would need to operate. I sent him my sources. A day later, after seeing my sources, Luce wrote back to me and said that his original calculation was an “off-the-cuff estimate.” He backtracked further and emphasized that the ITER project was not designed for net electricity.

I wrote back to him and told him that everybody knows that ITER is not designed for net electricity. The problem, I said, was that he told everybody at the National Academies’ meeting and he told our government that the ITER design would demonstrate the minimum performance needed for a working power plant. The only way this could be true was if Luce was underreporting the required input power. I asked Luce whether he disputed the 300 MW reactor input value and, if not, whether he would withdraw his statement that, in the ITER design, “fusion power of ~500 MW is the minimum for a power plant.”

Three weeks later, Luce wrote back. He continued to defend his claim.

“To a scientific audience,” Luce wrote, “I argued that this was the minimum size to be credible as saying the demonstration was from a plasma at the power plant scale.”

Yes, certainly, a 500-megawatt plasma itself is at “power-plant scale.” But if the input power required to create that plasma is subtracted, you get a net output rate of zero Watts — not quite “the minimum for a power plant.”

He argued that I didn’t understand the subject because I had used some terms incorrectly. Next, he wrote a long paragraph saying that the sources I had quoted for the 300 MW number — including Laban Coblentz, the ITER organization spokesman; Steve Cowley, the director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and the former director of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority; and Hartmut Zohm, the head of the Tokamak Scenario Development Division at the Max-Planck-Institute of Plasma Physics — were not credible.

The only thing Luce did not factually dispute was the 300 MW number I had been given by these independent sources. Luce ended his e-mail with a demand that I not publish any parts of our conversation.

See No Evil, Hear No Evil
The fact that the chief scientist of the largest and most expensive science project on Earth seemed unfamiliar with such a crucial fact is the first part of this story. The second part is that every fusion scientist who was in the room either went along with Luce’s false and exaggerated claim or didn’t realize it was false.

Consistent Trend
Here’s part three of the story. I was curious about other public power claims Luce might have made. Claiming a falsely lower input power rate is effectively the same as claiming a falsely higher output power rate. Either falsehood results in an exaggeration of the net output.

I learned that, when Luce spoke with other journalists, he didn’t just tell them, as he told me, that ITER’s required input power rate was between 100 MW and 150 MW. He told them ITER would need a rate of only 50 MW to operate.

In a 2018 article in La Repubblica, Luce told the journalist, “We plan to produce 500 megawatts with 50 megawatts of consumption.”

He was playing the same trick as everyone else who had been making false claims about ITER. He gave the journalist the 50 MW value, which is only the value of the heating power rate that is injected into the fuel. Luce implied that this 50-megawatt value was the rate of power that the entire reactor would need to operate. But the 50-megawatt value represents, at most, only 16 percent of the power that the entire reactor would need continuously to operate.

I was puzzled. Why would a scientist in such a prominent position, representing the most expensive science project on Earth, tell a journalist that ITER would consume only 50 megawatts rather than 300 megawatts? Even if Luce mistakenly believed that ITER would need an input rate of only 100 megawatts to operate, why did he tell the journalist it would need only 50 MW? I looked to see whether these statements were exceptional or the norm for Luce.

I found an article in the Guardian from 2019. After speaking with Luce, the journalist conveyed to the Guardian readers the same falsehood, that ITER is designed to produce 10 times as much power as it needs to operate.

I found an article in Le Parisien in which Luce told journalists that the objective of the reactor was to produce 10 times more energy than it consumes, a 500 megawatt output for a 50 megawatt input.

Luce was interviewed in August this year by Intellect Interviews. He said the same thing, “We’re getting 10 times the energy out than we’re putting in.” Here’s the key point in all of his public communications: Luce made no effort to identify his 50 MW value as the rate of thermal power injected to heat the plasma. Instead, he clearly and consistently implied that the overall reactor would need a rate of only 50 MW to operate.

I also found an article from September 2020 in which Luce and Bigot were interviewed by Nature magazine and Luce said that ITER, without limiting the values to the plasma thermal input and output, was designed to produce 500 megawatts of power, ten times the input.

Why would a smart and knowledgeable scientist keep telling journalists and the public, and maybe government officials, that ITER is designed to produce 500 megawatts of power from only 50 megawatts of input power without making any effort to inform people what those numbers really meant? I considered writing another e-mail and asking him.

But I realized why he had given misleading information to the news media, the public, and the government about what ITER is designed to do. That’s what Bigot paid him to do.

 

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By Steven B. Krivit
Nov. 14, 2020

Inconceivable
I remember speaking on the phone with Henry Fountain, the New York Times journalist who wrote that ITER “will produce about 10 times more power than it consumes.” I spent 20 minutes explaining to him that, if the project is successful, the reactor will produce only about the same rate of power as it consumes. For the next 10 minutes, Henry kept saying, “But there must be some misunderstanding; you must have some misunderstanding.”

Henry couldn’t imagine that, during his visit to the ITER reactor site in France, Laban Coblentz, the head of communications for the ITER organization, could have pulled the wool over his eyes and and misrepresented the facts. It’s well known, of course, that it’s much easier to fool someone than it is to convince them that they been fooled. The fusion power discrepancies were inconceivable to me too when I first stumbled on them. Some perspective may help.

Most of my colleagues in mainstream science journalism who write about fusion are now aware of what’s going on. But this is an ugly story, and there is there is little incentive to reporting the story. Yet the public needs to know what it is getting for the project it is funding. It needs to be informed about what this science experiment is and is not expected to do. Elected officials need to make informed decisions on behalf of the public. Other participants in the scientific community need to know the facts. So do many people in the energy and environment sectors.

Winning Formula
Four years ago, a journalist who was enthusiastic about fusion research sneered when I began reporting on the ITER power discrepancies. He said that I couldn’t be proposing the existence of a worldwide conspiracy by fusion scientists to fool everyone.

Yet, as hundreds of examples show, government staff writers in the U.S., the U.K., and Europe, journalists in many countries, and elected officials, at least in the U.S. where I have looked, have been misled by the statements from fusion experts. A conspiracy is not required to explain what happened; the misleading statements seemed to work, led to continued funding, so they continued the practice.

The practice of making misleading claims about fusion reactors has been going on at least since 1978 when Anne Davies, then a U.S. Department of Energy fusion program manager, spoke with a journalist from Popular Science. Davies said that the next big fusion reactor, the Princeton Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor, was intended to “get out as much energy as we put in” and that “TFTR will achieve not just a power breakeven but it will be a net power producer in terms of heat.”

Fact-check: TFTR consumed high-grade electrical power at a rate of 950 MW and in return produced low-grade thermal power from fusion at a rate of 10 MW.

There is no evidence in the article that she told the journalist that when she was talking about the concepts of breakeven, or net power, that she was only comparing the reactor output to the injected thermal power. Everything in the article indicates that she led the journalist to believe she was comparing the reactor output to the overall electrical input for the reactor.

When I interviewed Davies, she blamed the Popular Science journalist for failing to understand her. Davies told me that she intended to inform the journalist that the rate of thermal power produced by the fusion particles would be greater than the rate of thermal power used to heat the fusion fuel. But the Popular Science article gives no indication that Davies attempted to explain this to the journalist. And the same thing happened when Davies spoke with other journalists in years following. After Davies testified before Congress in 1993, Senators J. Bennett Johnston (D-LA) and Bill Bradley (D-NJ) also came away with the same misunderstandings as Davies had given the journalists.

But this is not just about Davies. Every fusion expert whose congressional testimony I have reviewed uses similar language, similar terms, and similar omissions.

As Davies had done, fusion scientists and their promoters learned that they could swap out the injected heating power value for the reactor operating power value and nobody would notice. Or if any experts had noticed, they chose to stay silent, thus fostering an open secret in the community. Once this precedent in public communication of fusion reactor claims was set, and the expectation was established, it became difficult or even impossible to correct the misleading practice.

Decades ago, fusion scientists and their promoters learned that they could use the phrase “fusion power” for two meanings, one practical and one scientific, without defining the scientific meaning. This ambiguity allowed them to incorrectly promote ITER as a reactor that is designed to produce “500 megawatts of fusion power,” when the reactor, as a system, is actually designed to produce zero net power.

See No Evil, Hear No Evil
For readers who have not seen examples of the victims of the deception, here is a sampling of the hundreds of fundamentally incorrect statements about ITER, written by authors who did not realize they were wrong.

• The Austrian Chamber of Commerce wrote that ITER “will reach industrial size with a capacity of 500 MW. … The energy consumption will be 50 MW; the output, ten times.”

• The French Commission Nationale du Débat Public, charged with the responsibility to facilitate open debate and discussion, told villagers in the French countryside where ITER was to be built, that “L’objectif final affiché est de générer une puissance de 500 MW durant plus de six minutes à partir d’une puissance de 50 MW.” [“The final objective displayed is to generate a power of 500 MW for more than 6 minutes from a power of 50 MW.”]

• The European Commission told participants in its ITER Industry Day conference, “By producing 500 MW of power from an input of 50 MW — a gain factor of 10 — ITER will be the stepping stone for future demonstration of the feasibility of fusion power plants.”

• The European Parliament staff told members of Parliament that “ITER is designed to produce 500 MW of fusion power from 50 MW of input power, i.e., a tenfold return on energy.”

• The White House issued a press release saying that, “If successful, ITER would create the first fusion device capable of producing thermal energy comparable to the output of a power plant, making commercially viable fusion power available as soon as 2050.”

• Representative Eric Swalwell Jr. (D-CA) said in a congressional fusion hearing, “Now is the right time to build and operate experiments that can finally demonstrate that a man-made fusion system can consistently produce far more energy than it takes to fuel. For the magnetic fusion approach, the next episode clearly is ITER. ITER is designed to produce at least 10 times the energy it consumes.”

• Davide Castelvecchi and Jeff Tollefson wrote in Nature that ITER “is predicted to produce about 500 megawatts of electricity.”

• Robert Stern wrote in The New York Times that “ITER would provide a record 500 megawatts of fusion power for at least 500 seconds, a little more than eight minutes, during each experiment. That would meet the power needs of about 140,000 homes.”

Nobody in the fusion community objected to these false statements. Perhaps that’s because every one of these falsehoods favorably exaggerated the perceived value of ITER.

The Press Release
On July 28, 2020, Coblentz, under the leadership of Bernard Bigot, the director-general of the ITER organization, directed a staff member, without her understanding, to publish a press release with an even bolder false claim 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. Had Bigot and Coblentz 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.

Had any solitary federally funded scientist made such an outrageously false claim in a press release, the person would have been branded a fraud and forced to bear the stigma for the remainder of his or her career. But this is ITER, which is sending $25 billion to $65 billion of public money to thousands of fusion scientists, engineers, and contractors who are working on the project.

The press release was issued to announce the fact that the ITER organization was beginning the assembly phase of the reactor. That milestone is a decade behind schedule.

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 sent an e-mail to Coblentz, Griffith, and Bigot and asked them if there had been a mistake. Nobody responded.

The press release, uncorrected, is still on the EurekaAlert! Web site, which is operated by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. (AAAS disclaims responsibility for the accuracy of news releases posted to the site.)

Dynamic Duo
Bigot hired Coblentz in September 2015, after the departure of Michel Claessens, the prior head of communications. Toward the end of his employment with the organization, Claessens told me, he began asking senior management about the ITER organization’s public power claims. Claessens now works for the European Commission and is the author of the 2020 book ITER: The Giant Fusion Reactor. Claessens is enthusiastic about the project, but he is also transparent about his critique of the project in his book.

Sometime between Nov. 8, 2015, and Nov. 13, 2015, within two months of his September hire date, Coblentz overhauled the organization’s Web site and significantly expanded the organization’s publication of the false power claims, focusing on the false claim that the reactor was designed to produce 500 megawatts of output power from only 50 megawatts of input power.

The following year, in 2016, Bigot and Coblentz went to Washington, D.C., to encourage members of Congress to continue giving the public’s money to the ITER project. The video clip below from the hearing shows Bigot testifying before Congress that the ITER reactor will produce 500 megawatts of power with an input of only 50 megawatts.

“ITER will have delivered the full demonstration that we could have 500 megawatts coming out of the 50 megawatts we will put in.”

A year later, I learned through my investigation that the reactor would require an electrical input power rate of 300 MW, not 50 MW, to produce the 500 MW result. I published that information in October 2017 along with a list of false and misleading claims on the ITER organization’s Web site. Within a month, Bigot and Coblentz corrected many of the false statements.

But they continued to publish claims that were “only” misleading. The “50 MW in – 500 MW out” idea conveys valid meaning for people who understand the nuances of fusion research. For everyone else, it is deceptive.

In 2018, Bigot testified before Congress again, but this time, instead of claiming that ITER would have an output of 500 megawatts for an input of 50 megawatts, he qualified the output as “fusion power.” For people who didn’t know the undisclosed scientific meaning of “fusion power,” his claim still exaggerated the apparent intended output of the reactor. Congress signed the check and kept the U.S. scientists and contractors in the ITER game.

Monkey See, Monkey Do
I mentioned that Davies’ congressional testimony in 1993 was echoed and reinforced by other respected fusion authorities. In the same way, Bigot and Coblentz are not lone players in the present-day situation. Many of my previous reports have shown similar patterns of falsehoods. As I show below, the “200,000 Watts/200,000 homes” false claim has been popular among the fusion leadership.

It was one of several false claims that Johannes Schwemmer, the director of the ITER European domestic agency, made for several months earlier this year until the European Commission instructed him to stop.

Schwemmer’s organization is responsible for the on-site construction of the ITER project. At least €4.4 billion of taxpayer money has flowed through his organization to more than 550 companies, 1,800 subcontractors and at least 70 R&D organizations working on the project.

The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory participated in the “200,000 Watts/200,000 homes” false claim for nearly a decade. It showed up in a brochure on the Princeton University Web site and on the U.S. Department of Energy PPPL Web site.

Before becoming the current director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Steve Cowley, the former director of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, was also fond of the “200,000 Watts/200,000 homes” false claim. Here’s a video clip in which he made the claim during a lecture he gave at the Oxford Martin School.

Teamwork
I’ve written to Bigot twice, once in 2017 and again in 2018. I wrote to him a third time, on Nov. 3, 2020. I politely encouraged him to fix the claims on his organization’s Web site, and I encouraged him to be more accurate and transparent. He did not respond. He’s directed his staff to fix the false statements but not the misleading statements. In his personal statements about ITER, he’s been careful to avoid making false power claims. However, in advance of his lectures, members of his staff have been including the exaggerated power claims in the announcements for those lectures.

Two recent examples are the lecture Bigot gave remotely in 2020 through Princeton University and his presentation in 2019 at the World Conference of Science Journalists. The abstract for that lecture told journalists that the ITER reactor was designed to produce 10 times its input energy. Years after Bigot and Coblentz clearly understood the power values for ITER, they have consistently shown their intent to mislead the public and the news media.

 

 

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November 3, 2020

Dr. Bernard Bigot
Director-General, ITER Organization 

Dear Dr. Bigot,

When one or two journalists fail to understand the facts about a science story, the failure is usually theirs. When nearly every journalist fails to understand the facts provided by scientists on a story, the failure likely falls on the shoulders of the scientists. When the communication failure is about the ITER project, that responsibility is yours.

That’s why I wrote to you on May 1, 2017. I encouraged you to direct your staff to revise statements on your organization’s Web site that were directly and significantly contributing to misunderstandings about the primary measurable design objective of the ITER project. For example:

Since that time, I have identified more than two hundred examples of the misunderstandings caused by the ambiguous, misleading, and at times false claims you and your peers have made about the ITER project. In that letter, I showed you these three examples:

• Henry Fountain, New York Times, March 27, 2017, “ITER will benefit from its larger size, and will produce about 10 times more power than it consumes.”
• Geoff Brumfiel, Scientific American, June 2012, “It will generate around 500 megawatts of power, 10 times the energy needed to run it.”
• Nathaniel Scharping, Discover magazine, March 23, 2016, “ITER is projected to produce 500 MW of power with an input of 50 MW.”

But, after my May 2017 letter, you did not make any corrections to prevent these kinds of misunderstandings. Nor did you reply to my letter or dispute my criticism.

In particular, I would like to draw your attention to the false statement written by Davide Castelvecchi and Jeff Tollefson in Nature on May 26, 2016: “[ITER] is predicted to produce about 500 megawatts of electricity.” The reason this particular false statement is important is that you read the article, wrote to the authors, and asked them to add an extra statement from you about your confidence in achieving the first plasma deadline.

The fact that the authors said that ITER was designed to produce electricity didn’t concern you. The fact that the authors said that ITER was designed for a reactor (rather than a plasma) output of 500 MW didn’t concern you. You chose to allow the most prominent general science magazine in the world to publish an exaggerated claim about your project.

Soon after I wrote my first letter to you, I obtained information from three credible sources that the ITER reactor will require an electrical input rate of at least 300 MW to produce 500 MW of thermal power from fusion.

Four months after I wrote to you, your organization had done nothing to correct any of the false and misleading statements on its Web site. Among other claims, you and your team were still saying that the overall ITER reactor was going to consume power at a rate of only 50 MW.

I published the 300 MW value in October, and a month later you and your team corrected only the most egregiously false claims on the ITER Web site. But you chose to continue publishing an array of misleading claims about the primary measurable design objective of the reactor.

On March 28, 2018, I published a news report of your March 6, 2018, testimony before the U.S. Congress. Within 24 hours, you and your staff corrected more of the false power claims on your Web site. But several misleading claims remained. So on June 17, 2018, I wrote to you again and encouraged you to correct them so that ITER power claims are described accurately and transparently for your public audience. You are still publishing those misleading claims.

Separately, on Feb. 8, 2018, members of the European Parliament — Michèle Rivasi (Verts/ALE), Bart Staes (Verts/ALE), Rebecca Harms (Verts/ALE), and José Bové (Verts/ALE) — formally asked European Commissioner Miguel Arias-Cañete about the accuracy of the claims made by your organization.

On April 25, 2018, Commissioner Arias-Cañete, on behalf of the commission, reassured the members of Parliament that all the problems had been fixed and that the ITER organization was then accurately and transparently communicating its primary goal to the public. Here’s what Arias-Cañete wrote:

The IO Web site now states unambivalently that the performance of ITER will be assessed by the so-called fusion Q, i.e. by comparing the thermal power output of the plasma with the thermal power input into the plasma.

But the person who gave that information to the commissioner was mistaken. An array of misleading claims was then, and is now, on your organization’s Web site.

I have exchanged many letters with Massimo Garribba, director of Nuclear Energy, Safety & ITER in the European Commission’s Directorate General for Energy. I understand from him that the European Commission has formally requested the same things I have requested of you: accurate and transparent claims about ITER for a public audience that does not have expertise in nuclear fusion.

Your actions so far imply that accurately and transparently communicating the primary measurable design objective of the ITER project for a public audience is not a priority for you. Because you are the head of the world’s largest and most expensive science project on Earth, a lack of scientific integrity in your stewardship would be extremely concerning.

You have been entrusted to manage a public science project serving more than half the world’s population. It is your responsibility to ensure that what you promise to the public, in exchange for the tens of billions of dollars you have received from the public, is what you intend to deliver to the public.

You do not intend to deliver a fusion reactor that produces 10 times its input; you intend to deliver a fusion reactor that produces a fusion plasma that has 10 times the power injected into the plasma. I realize that the false and misleading claims on your organization’s Web site were there before you were appointed director-general. But it’s your responsibility now. And the fact that you inherited this problem from previous directors gives you a wonderful opportunity, if you choose to take it, to show your courage and fix this long-standing problem. I ask you one more time to communicate the primary measurable design objective of ITER with scientific integrity.

I am not going to analyze every claim on your organization’s Web site again. Instead, I’m going to summarize the conceptual requirements for you to ensure accurate and transparent claims about the primary measurable design objective of ITER for a public audience.

1. You must not create any impression that the reactor is designed to produce thermal power at a rate significantly greater than the power it is expected to consume. You must not claim that the reactor is designed to produce net power. Instead, you must ensure that any claims of power output or power gain explicitly refer to the relationship between the thermal power output of the plasma and the thermal power input to the plasma. As an aside, members of the public who understand the difference between the terms power and energy would certainly appreciate your organization’s improved and precise use of those terms, as well.

2. If you choose to continue publicizing the 500 MW value, you must ensure that your statements clearly associate that value with the produced plasma rather than the overall reactor.

3. If you choose to continue publicizing the 50 MW value, you must ensure that your statements associate that value with the injected thermal power used to heat the plasma. Because of the widespread confusion among input power to the reactor, input power to the reactor’s heating systems, and input power injected into the plasma, you would serve the public well by being explicit when mentioning the 50 MW value.

4. Claiming that the design is intended to produce a 500 MW plasma from 50 MW of injected thermal power would be appropriate. It would not be appropriate to create the impression that the ITER design is intended to produce a 500 MW plasma from only a 50 MW input because, based on the design, a 300 MW electrical input will be necessary to produce a 500 MW plasma.

5. The public, in general, does not know the scientific meaning of “fusion power.” It knows only the practical meaning. Unless you publish the definition of the scientific meaning of “fusion power” in your glossary, and you ensure that any future use of the scientific meaning of this phrase can be clearly distinguished by the public from the practical meaning of this phrase, your claims that ITER will produce “500 MW of fusion power” will mislead the public.

It is irrelevant that the “fusion power” phrase has been used for more than half a century by members of the fusion community to describe the thermal power output associated with fusion-produced nuclear particles. It was a bad idea when the practice of using the same two-word phrase for these two very different meanings started decades ago, and it’s still a bad idea today.

I realize that you may believe that the way you have been making claims about ITER is acceptable because this is how the fusion community has been doing it for decades. That doesn’t mean it was the right thing to do. As you know, because I have cc’d you on many of the e-mails, I’ve already been in direct contact with many of your colleagues and their respective public information officers.

Some of them, like Shishir P. Deshpande, at the time the ITER India project director, made a complete and appropriate correction to the ITER claims on his organization’s Web site without any argument or discussion. On the other end of the spectrum is Johannes Schwemmer, the director of the ITER European domestic agency. Three years and a dozen e-mails were insufficient to convince Schwemmer of the wisdom of making honest claims to the public. A request to his governing board was insufficient. He made the necessary corrections only after I contacted high-level officials in the European Commission. This left little doubt about his intentions. Now it’s time to find out your intentions.

Because you have not responded to either of my previous letters, I’m going to publish this as an open letter and send it to interested parties to ensure that you know about this letter.

I realize that your staff might need some time to go through the English and French versions of your organization’s Web site to perform the necessary corrections — if that is your intention. However, if you intend to ensure that your organization’s Web site communicates the primary measurable design objective of the ITER reactor in a manner that is accurate and transparent for public audience, please let me know by November 12.

Sincerely,
Steven B. Krivit
Publisher and Senior Editor, New Energy Times

DISTRIBUTION
European Commission
Ursula von der Leyen, President
Kadri Simson, Commissioner, Directorate-General for Energy
Ditte Juul Jørgensen, Director-General, Directorate-General for Energy
Massimo Garribba, Director, Nuclear Energy, Safety & ITER, DG for Energy
Klaus-Dieter Borchardt, Deputy Director-General, DG for Energy
Renatas Mazeika, Directorate D4: ITER, DG for Energy
Mariya Gabriel, Commissioner, DG for Research and Innovation
Jean-Eric Paquet, Director-General, DG for Research and Innovation

European Union/Parliament
Jeppe Tranholm-Mikkelsen, Secretary-General, Council of the European Union
Klaus Welle, Secretary-General, European Parliament
Riccardo Ribera D’alcala, DG, Internal Policies of the Union, European Parliament
Marian-Jean Marinescu, Member of the European Parliament, (Horizon Europe)
Michèle Rivasi, Member, European Parliament
Étienne Bassot, Director, Members’ Research Service, European Parliament
Jerzy Buzek, President, European Parliament (Former Chair, ITRE)
Cristian-Silviu Bu?oi, Chair, ITRE
Patrizia Toia, Vice-Chair, ITRE
Christian Ehler, Member, ITRE
Angelika Niebler, Member, ITRE

ITER
Luo Delong, ITER Council Chairman, Director of ITER Domestic Agency, China
Johannes Schwemmer, Director of ITER Domestic Agency, EU
Kathy McCarthy, Director of ITER Domestic Agency, US
Ujjwal Baruah, Director of ITER Domestic Agency, India
Shishir Deshpande, Former Director of ITER Domestic Agency, India
Kijung Jung, Director of ITER Domestic Agency, Korea
Makoto Sugimoto, Director of ITER Domestic Agency, Japan
Anatoly V. Krasilnikov, Director of ITER Domestic Agency, Russian Federation