#56. The Question Fusion Scientists Don’t Want to Answer

Oct 312020
 

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By Steven B. Krivit
Oct. 31, 2020

In December 2014, I performed a test to see what journalists might learn from a sampling of fusion scientists if journalists wanted to know how close fusion research had come to demonstrating practical levels of power. I sent e-mails to each of the 20 members of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee. I asked them one question: “What is the best total net power output from any kind of fusion experiment thus far?” The answers I received were less than helpful.

The answer to my question was the Oct. 31, 1997, experiment at the Joint European Torus, known as JET. For an input of 700 megawatts of electricity, JET produced fusion reactions with 16 megawatts of thermal power. Those paired values, 16 and 700, reflect the reactor power gain, which is an output/input ratio of 0.01. In that experiment, 24 megawatts of thermal power were injected into the plasma to heat the fuel. Those paired values, 16 and 24, reflect the fusion reaction power gain, which is an output/input ratio of 0.67.

To summarize, the reactor power gain for JET was 0.01. The fusion reaction power gain for JET was 0.67.

Members of the public, judging by the vast majority of fusion news stories in the last 50 years, don’t care about fusion reaction power gain. John and Jane Q. Public care only about reactor power gain. That’s what they’ve been promised for their tax dollars: a fusion reactor that produces net energy. They don’t want fusion energy science. They want fusion energy.

The responses I received from members of the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee, which used to be known as the Fusion Energy Advisory Committee, would surely have misled me had I not stumbled on the 700-megawatt value and the difference between reactor power gain and fusion reaction power gain a month earlier.

The communication gap evident in the responses I received partly explains how so many journalists received information from fusion experts and, in turn, reported the incorrect power values. The other reason journalists reported ITER incorrectly is the result of the misleading language by ITER proponents and the input power values they omitted, as explained in this report.

In one of more than 200 examples that demonstrates the communication failure, Columbia University professor Gerald A. Navratil, an internationally recognized fusion expert, told journalist Patrick J. Kiger that “ITER will allow us to achieve its goal of producing 500 megawatts of fusion power with 50 megawatts of power input into the plasma.”

Fusion scientists did not use distinct terms when discussing “reactor power” or “fusion reaction power.” They used the phrase “fusion power” for both meanings and imagined that non-experts would be able to figure out the right meaning by context. When non-experts didn’t figure it out, fusion experts never corrected them because the incorrect interpretation always resulted in a grossly exaggerated perception of fusion progress.

Thus, Kiger wrote that experimental fusion reactors have “required more energy to operate than the fusion generates. But ITER hopes to overcome that. … ITER will use 50 megawatts of power input to generate 500 megawatts of fusion energy, in the form of heat.” Actually, the ITER design calls for 300 megawatts of input power, not 50.

The failure of fusion scientists to clearly distinguish between reactor power gain and fusion reaction power gain was and still is pervasive. The eight responses I received from members of the committee provide a focused examination of their failure to communicate effectively with journalists.


Christopher J. Keane
Christopher J. Keane, vice president for research and professor of physics at Washington State University, did not try to answer my question. Instead, he wrote that I should direct my question to Stephen Dean, a former U.S. Department of Energy fusion research director, who cofounded a fusion advocacy organization.


Robert Rosner
Robert Rosner, a professor in the departments of Astronomy and Astrophysics and Physics at the University of Chicago, wrote that JET’s net output/input power ratio was “well below 1,” but he didn’t provide further details. From his response, I could not determine whether he was referring to 0.67, JET’s fusion reaction power gain ratio, or 0.01, JET’s reactor power gain ratio.


John E. Foster
John E. Foster, associate professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, directed me to the JET experiment, but he did not state a value for total net power output.


Bruce Cohen
Bruce Cohen, an associate program leader for magnetic fusion theory and computations in the Fusion Energy Program at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, responded but was initially vague.

I wrote back to him: “Does this mean that the best fusion performance so far, of total system output over total system input, was 0.65, at JET?”

“Yes,” he replied.

I knew that was wrong so I wrote to him a third time:

Let me double-check any possible assumptions. As a non-expert in fusion research and the associated terminology, are there any major unstated assumptions that I should be aware of for this number? In other words, is the 0.65 number generally accurate for the measure of total system output power over total system input power?

Here is his response:

The fusion gain factor Q is defined as the amount of fusion power output divided by the total power input to maintain the plasma at steady state.  There is a nice discussion of this in Wikipedia (where else?). So Q= fusion power out / power in.  Yes is the answer to your question.  JET got Q~0.65. This achievement represented steady progress over forty years and many, many orders of magnitude improvement in fusion performance in laboratory experiments.

But I wasn’t asking about a comparison of output power to the “total power input to maintain the plasma at steady state.” I had repeatedly asked about a comparison of output power to “total system input power.”

“Yes,” which he provided twice, was not the honest or accurate answer to my question.


Steve Zinkle
In a similar manner, Steve Zinkle, in the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Tennessee, answered my question only in the context of fusion reaction power gain rather than reactor power gain. He made no effort to ensure that I knew he was talking only about the former rather than the latter:

Net power production has not yet been demonstrated in any fusion experiment to date; that is one of the missions of the international ITER device that is under construction in France, where power production on the order of 10 times the power used to heat the plasma is intended to be studied. In the mid- to late-1990s, three international Tokamak devices achieved equivalent ratios of power produced divided by input power (Q) of 0.27 (TFTR in Princeton), 0.65 (JET in Culham, England), and ~1 (JT-60 in Oarai, Japan).

Zinkle made no effort to make sure that I understood that his use of the term “input power” was limited to only the power that is injected into and reaches the plasma rather than input power required and used by the overall experiment or reactor.


Troy Carter
Troy Carter, in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University of California, Los Angeles, responded to my question in a similar way:

The highest fusion power produced to date in the laboratory was in the JET experiment where 16MW of fusion power was generated (for about 1 second); however, around 22MW of heating power was used to keep the plasma hot enough to allow fusion to occur. This was back in 1997, the last time a magnetic confinement experiment used tritium fuel. JET is due to have another tritium campaign soon (2017) and reaching break-even is a goal. The recent experiments on NIF might have a higher power level (very short duration) but are also not net producers of energy.

Carter answered my question only in the context of fusion reaction power gain rather than reactor power gain and made no effort to ensure that I knew he was talking only about the former rather than the latter.


Gertrude Patello
Gertrude Patello, a senior project manager in the Energy & Environment Directorate at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, declined to answer my question but directed me to the chairman of the committee, Mark Koepke.


Mark Koepke
Mark Koepke, professor of physics at West Virginia University, chair of the Department of Energy’s Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee and the immediate past chair of the Plasma Physics Division of the American Physical Society, provided me with the 0.65 value attained at JET. I asked him to confirm that he was telling me JET’s total system output over total system input was 0.65. Here is his full response:

Fusion power output over injected power was 0.65. I am being specific to fusion power when I talk about output, rather than using the phrase total system output, so that I am not including extraneous quantities. I am being specific to injected power when I talk about input, which refers to neutral beams and radio-frequency heating, rather than using the phrase total system input, again so that I am not including extraneous quantities. In some sense, my ratio is more relevant to “scientific” break-even rather than “engineering” break-even or “commercial” break-even. I don’t know what JET’s engineering or commercial ratio values were in 1997.

Finally, Koepke was the first to make an effort to differentiate between reactor power gain and fusion reaction power gain. Nevertheless, Koepke brushed aside the 700 megawatts of electricity needed to operate the reactor as “extraneous.” His ratio was not “more relevant” “in some sense” to scientific rather than engineering breakeven. His ratio was explicitly and exclusively associated with scientific breakeven but he didn’t want to be direct.


Dale Meade
In addition to committee members, I also asked Dale Meade, who had been the leader of the Princeton TFTR experiment. Here’s his first answer:

In 1994, TFTR produced 10.7 MW of fusion power by heating the plasma with 40 MW, for a fusion gain of 0.27. In 1997, JET produced 16 MW of fusion power by heating the plasma with 25 MW, for a fusion gain of 0.64.

I reminded him of my questions: “What is the best net total system power output in Watts? What was the percent of total system power out/total system power in?”

Meade said that, in fusion, “there is a central power core that produces or amplifies input power,” and he repeated his first answer using the phrase “fusion power core.”

I repeated my request for “net total system power output.” He said that total reactor power balance was not one of the crucial remaining unknown issues. All the power requirements to operate a fusion reactor, aside from heating the plasma, Meade said, were “standard technology.” He also said that he didn’t know the net power values for the Princeton reactor (TFTR) or JET:

For magnetic fusion energy, the crucial unknown issues have to do with the fusion power core (the hot plasma fuel), and we spend essentially all our effort on the fusion power core. The so-called balance-of-plant (magnets, pumps, AC power conversion, and plasma heating power supplies) are more standard technology. The numbers I gave you for fusion power produced, fusion power gained for TFTR and JET are the numbers from experiments carried out twenty years ago that I carry in my head (and laptop). However, I do not have the power consumed by the other balance-of-plant systems, and it will not be trivial to get them.

So, again, repeating what I said before in my first set of answers in the format that I prefer – JET has produced 16 MW of fusion power, when the plasma fuel was heated by 25 MW with a fusion core gain (fusion power produced) / (power injected to heat the plasma fuel) of 0.64. So the core did not produce net power; the net core power was -8MW. If you add the power required for the balance-of-plant, the deficit is much larger, but I don’t have the numbers to determine how much larger.

I had obtained the total input power value (which Meade calls balance-of-plant) of 700 megawatts, for JET, in November 2014 from Nick Holloway, the public information officer for the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy. Sometime later, I searched for the total input power used for TFTR. The only place I was able to locate that value, 950 megawatts, was in the Jan. 14, 1980, issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly.

Earlier this year, I tried to cross-check that number directly with the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. I first contacted Andrew Zwicker, the public information officer for the lab, on May 26, 2020. Zwicker referred me to Meade, who replied to me on June 8:

The information you requested is related to the experiment carried out 25 years ago on Nov. 2, 1994. I spent several hours reviewing my personal records at home and information available online. I have also spent time contacting several PPPL retirees who were directly involved in those experiments to see if they had access or recollections of that information. No luck yet, but I am still trying.

As of the publication of this article, Meade is still trying to find out how much electrical power the biggest and most important fusion reactor in the history of U.S. fusion program consumed. For now, we can use the value given in the Princeton Alumni Weekly. Here’s a chart showing the power values for TFTR, JET, and promised power values for ITER.

Conclusions
Through these and discussions I have had with other scientists, I realized that fusion experts do not ordinarily think about the total amount of electrical power that goes into any given reactor. In general, the net power output of any given fusion reactor doesn’t cross their minds. They don’t think about the electrical power that is used to heat the plasma. Instead, they think only about the thermal power that is injected and used to heat the plasma.

There are good reasons for the general mode of thinking by fusion experts. First, most fusion experts are plasma physicists. This is a discipline almost exclusively associated with scientific research. It’s been that way for 70 years. Fusion experts are generally not nuclear engineers, who work in a field primarily associated with real, working, practical nuclear fission reactors. Second, fusion experts know that no reactor design, including that of ITER, has ever approached the possible range in which a practical output would be a reasonable conversation topic — but none of the fusion scientists I asked wanted to tell me that directly.

These fusion experts were consistently unable or unwilling to respond accurately to the most likely question any journalist might ask. This gap has contributed greatly to the spread of false information about fusion progress for decades.

#55. Fusion Progress and Promises: The First Three Decades

Oct 242020
 

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By Steven B. Krivit
Oct. 24, 2020 

New Scientist magazine is the singular best archival tool to examine fusion progress and promises in the early decades of the research field. This is because no other news organization has more consistently chronicled the development of thermonuclear fusion research. New Energy Times examined every issue of New Scientist magazine through 1986, the inception of ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. At that time, a broader group of news organizations began paying attention to fusion research, and those news stories are more readily available.

The following excerpts are representative of New Scientist articles that mention fusion research, with a focus on progress and promises.

“Can We Get Power From Nuclear Fusion?” by Tom Margerison, New Scientist, Jan. 24, 1957
“The sun and stars derive their energy from fusing small items to make larger ones. Harwell scientists published this week six reports on their attempt to build a synthetic sun for generating power.”

“Thermonuclear Fusion: The Task and the Triumph,” by Sir George Thomson, New Scientist, Jan. 30, 1958
“The secret of the Harwell success with Zeta (zero energy thermonuclear assembly) is the stabilizing of the current at least partially by another magnetic field supplied by a current in coils outside the torus. … It is clear that there is a long way to go, from 5 million to about 500 million degrees, before one can make a power station out of Zeta. ”

“The Next Stages With Zeta,” by Sir John Cockcroft, New Scientist, Jan. 30, 1958
“In the small controlled nuclear fusion experiments conducted so far, the energy produced is small compared with the energy input. Vastly higher temperatures and new techniques will be required before the stage of commercial application can be reached.

“It has long been the ambition of scientists to emulate the sun by making use of reactions between the light elements to release energy for practical applications. Papers published in Nature (January 25) describe a first stage of experimental work carried out at Harwell, AEI Research Laboratories, Aldermaston, and Los Alamos, USA, with this long-term objective.

“We will have many problems to face in this second stage. New methods may have to be devised to heat the gas to higher temperatures, and new techniques will be required to measure the temperatures. Even if all goes well and we meet no roadblocks, we would still have the further engineering problem of designing and constructing a prototype of a practical and economic thermonuclear power station. This would be stage III, and after that, there would be stage IV, commercial application.”

“What I Saw in Russia,” by Sir John Cockcroft, New Scientist, Dec. 4, 1958
“Soviet scientists are working on many different lines towards controlled fusion. Resources of men, materials and money are ample. Strides in technology generally are due to the great post-war development of scientific education.”

“The Latest Steps Towards Fusion Power,” by Peter Stubbs, New Scientist, May 2, 1963
“Present efforts fall far short of maintaining relatively dense gas at the necessary high temperatures for long enough to obtain a useful power.”

“Time to End the Thermonuclear Confusion,” by Michael Kenward, New Scientist, October 12, 1972
“The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority’s Culham laboratory for fusion research and plasma physics has waited too long for a decision on the future of the controlled thermonuclear power program in Britain.”

“Intense Electron Beams — a Fusion Match?” By James Benford and Gregory Benford, New Scientist, November 30, 1972
“With the problems of confining the thermonuclear plasma looking less insuperable, fusion scientists are now tackling some of the other obstacles that stand between them and a commercial fusion reactor. One problem is how to heat up the plasma to a high enough temperature.

“An economical fusion reactor must trap a hot, dense plasma of light nuclei long enough for the nuclei to react. The aim is to sustain the reaction so that more energy is produced by fusion that is used to set up the containment system.”

“Modest Reprieve for U.K. Fusion Research,” by Michael Kenward, New Scientist, March 29, 1973
“After five years in the doldrums, Britain’s fusion researchers were last week given the go-ahead to spend more money and to build a big new machine. But the government’s decision to improve the status of the fusion program is not as progressive as it might seem.

“For a long time, fusion scientists seemed only to be able to discover new drawbacks and reasons for doubting that fusion would ever provide power on earth as it does in the stars.

“Last year, the Atomic Energy Authority set up a panel under the chairmanship of Sir Harry Massey to review the program of research into controlled thermonuclear fusion as a means of generating electricity.

“Until very recently, the magnitude of the plasma physics barriers between existing experiments and an electricity-producing system has seemed so great that no one really paid much attention to reactor problems.”

“America’s Fusion Director,” by Norman Metzger, New Scientist, April 12, 1973
“Dr. Robert Hirsch, at 38 the youngest man to direct the U.S.-controlled thermonuclear research program, adopts a strictly pragmatic approach to the dizzying problems of plasma physics which the program involves.

“The chart gives timetables and interrelationships among fusion projects underway or planned for the future, topped by the now-formal goal of scientific feasibility by 1980-1982.

“The PLT is now designed to be a halfway station on the road to scientific feasibility, proof that a fusion reaction can be thorough enough to provide an excess of extractable energy. However, if the PLT [Princeton Large Torus] performs to its ultimate, there is an outside chance that it may show that fusion really is feasible.

“Hirsch exudes confidence over the prospects for the current fusion program, which is rather remarkable in the light of the tortuous history of the fusion effort, marked as it is by peaks and valleys of optimism and gloom and often to the accompaniment of puzzled growls from Congressmen.”

“Fusion Reactors – the Ultimate Solution?” By Michael Kenward, New Scientist, December 27, 1973
“New technology cannot hope to have more than a minor impact on today’s energy crisis. However, controlled thermonuclear fusion could guarantee our energy supplies from the 21st century onwards. After years of rising and falling fortunes, fusion research is now making its next tentative step forward.”

“Fusion Reactors – the Ultimate Solution?” By Robert Hirsch, quoted by Michael Kenward, New Scientist, December 27, 1973
“At present, the principal program task is to demonstrate that a plasma of light nuclei can be confined at sufficient temperature and density for a long enough period of time to release more energy by means of a controlled thermonuclear fusion process than was required to create the plasma.

“Present estimates indicate that an orderly aggressive program might provide commercial fusion power about the year 2000, so that fusion could then have a significant impact on electrical power production by the year 2020.”

“Power Struggle in Fusion Research,” New Scientist, Feb. 21, 1974
“Clearly, technology will play an increasingly important role in fusion research and development as fusion approaches the marketplace — reactor design will dominate fusion research toward the end of the century. A meeting held over the past three weeks at the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority’s Culham laboratory (the home of fusion research in Britain) underlined this trend in fusion research. As the men who run the program put it: ‘Fusion is no longer a physics program, it is a power program.’ There is an increasing realization that the days of pure plasma physics are numbered.”

“Energy File,” by Christopher Parkes, New Scientist, March 4, 1976
“Last week’s EEC meeting in Brussels of the Council of Research Ministers got nowhere in the search for an acceptable site for the Joint European Torus (JET) – the proposed next step in Euratom’s fusion research program.

“Whereas Euratom’s role has previously been one of ensuring that different countries do not build identical experiments, collaboration now requires that national projects give way to international projects. This is because no country in Europe can afford to build experiments as big as JET.”

“Fusion: The Way Ahead,” by Michael Kenward, New Scientist, August 17, 1978
“Remember Zeta? Well, forget it. This week’s news that inexpensive and inexhaustible energy from seawater is just around the corner may be another instance of newspapers misunderstanding a scientific story. … At Princeton, they have made a truly significant step forward. But they haven’t solved the world’s energy crisis once and for all, and if some snags crop up over the next 30 years or so, we cannot blame the scientists for raising false hopes. If anybody is responsible for that, it is the newspapers whose muddled accounts prove, if nothing else, that there still is room for good old scientific sensationalism of the sort that was common in the 1950s.”

“Fusion Research — The Temperature Rises,” by Michael Kenward, New Scientist, May 24, 1979
“A fascinating scientific challenge that could solve all our energy problems — that is how fusion researchers see their work. Researchers have increasing confidence that the next generation of experiments will answer most of the remaining scientific questions. Then come the engineering difficulties.

“Why are fusion scientists all over the world now confident that, in just a few years’ time, they will be in a position to build a fusion reactor? The easy answer to these questions — and the one you would get from most descriptions of the fusion effort — is to say that bigger and bigger fusion experiments have brought the researchers nearer and nearer to the conditions they need to reach in a reactor.

“Neutrons generated in Zeta turned out to be produced by a process other than fusion. Even now, fusion research still has not reached the stage of proving that a fusion reactor can be built, although over the past decade, confidence has grown that one day soon there will be a thermonuclear equivalent of the Chicago pile.”

“The Challenge of Fusion,” New Scientist, March 12, 1981
 “‘Fusion is very difficult. The promise is infinite, but the chance of being economic is zero.’ So says Dr. Walter Marshall, the new chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, about the prospects for thermonuclear fusion.”

“Polarization Brings a New Twist to Fusion Research,” by Michael Kenward, New Scientist, September 24, 1981
“Researchers at Princeton University are now working on an experiment that will, later this year, try out a way of polarizing atoms of some of the isotopes of hydrogen.”

“Fluctuating Fortunes for Fusion Forces,” by Michael Kenward, New Scientist, September 24, 1981
“If, as is very likely, experiments finally prove the ‘scientific’ feasibility of fusion in the next few years, there will be plenty of interest in the topic.”

“Cuts Mean the End of £20 Million Fusion Project,” by Michael Kenward, New Scientist, September 24, 1981
“A £20 million experiment in fusion research has been canceled by the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority. The reversed field experiment — RFX — would have meant building a machine to look at new ways of containing the plasma within which fusion occurs. Sixty percent of the cost would have come from other countries. But cuts in the budget for fusion research and the rising cost of Europe’s collaborative fusion venture — JET — have forced the authority to ditch its plan.”

“Tough Time Ahead for Fusion, Too,” New Scientist, Jan. 21, 1982
“Ex-Congressman Mike McCormack told the American Association for the Advancement of Science that ‘the time has come for the U.S. to move into an aggressive program of magnetic fusion engineering development and materials testing.’

“McCormack thinks such a program could be as important scientifically to the U.S. as was the Apollo manned mission to the moon. Its object would be ‘building and successfully operating a magnetic fusion electric power demonstration plant by the year 2000’ at a cost of $20 billion.”

JETs Plasma Fits Fusion to a D,” New Scientist, April 29, 1982
“Over the years, tokamaks have grown, and the conditions within their plasmas have come nearer and nearer to those required for fusion reactors: both JET and TFTR expect to come very close to reactor conditions, if not to reach them.”

“Experts Back All the Runners in the Fusion Race,” by Christopher Joyce, New Scientist, September 9, 1982
“Fusion energy research in the U.S. has reached an awkward stage in its adolescence. The time is fast approaching when it must abandon the freedom to pursue novel notions at will and instead choose a single course toward a workable fusion reactor.

“Congress, in 1980, passed the Magnetic Fusion Energy Engineering Act, which called for a ‘demonstration’ fusion reactor by the end of the century. Plans were laid for a fusion engineering device (FED) halfway to a demonstration reactor. This would cost some $1 billion and would be built by about 1990. It would have been the first big step away from physics, still the focus of current work, toward the technology needed for a commercial reactor. Now, the Reagan administration’s energy advisers say the FED is too expensive and have canceled it.”

“The Shadow of Zeta,” New Scientist, January 20, 1983
“Twenty-five years ago, Zeta was heralded as proof that science had tamed the process that powers the hydrogen bomb — fusion. Cheap electricity would soon be issuing forth from reactors fed by and inexhaustible resource — seawater. It did not work out like that, and the world still awaits that scientific proof. The scientists involved blame the press and its lurid headlines for giving people the wrong impression about Zeta. But if the project’s scientists — and the intellectual giants who ran Britain’s nuclear program at the time — weren’t all that sure about the measurements, why did they call large press conferences and flood the scientific press with detailed descriptions of the work? The answer to these questions lies in the intense international rivalry to be first with fusion, a rivalry that persists to this day. ”

“Fusion Research 25 Years After Zeta,” by R. S. Pease, New Scientist, January 20, 1983
“A quarter of a century ago, the news broke that scientists had come near to taming the hydrogen bomb and turning fusion power into a source of energy for power stations. In the event, the announcement was premature; but fusion researchers have come a long way since then.

“If machines such as JET prove the scientific feasibility of fusion, there will have to be even larger machines if we are to prove fusion’s technical and economic feasibility.

“The International Atomic Energy Agency of the United Nations organizes the INTOR workshops. INTOR stands for International Tokamak Reactor, although most of the work is actually carried out by groups working in their various home laboratories. The leading groups meet Indiana periodically to bring the work together. The INTOR workshop has already produced a first broad proposal, a definition of an envisaged plant and its objectives. INTOR is presently conceived as a 600 MW (thermal) reactor that would run for 10 years, researching and, we hope, demonstrating the practicability of repeated long pulses burning thermonuclear fuel in a tokamak. … INTOR would not produce electricity, that would come later in the so-called demonstration plant.”

“Juggling With Magnetic Doughnuts,” by Michael Kenward, New Scientist, April 21, 1983
“As science gets nearer to proving that thermonuclear fusion is scientifically feasible, concern grows as to the best machine to build.”

“A Fusion of Talents,” by Michael Kenward, New Scientist, June 23, 1983
“Ignition is the stage where a tokamak’s auxiliary heating can be turned off, leaving it to the fusion reactions to produce enough energy to maintain the plasma’s temperature. [Paul-Henri] Rebut believes that JET has a 50 percent chance of achieving ignition. If JET turns out as Rebut intended, it will bring us access to an almost unlimited supply of energy.”

“Pro Fusion and Con Fusion,” by Michael Kenward, New Scientist, Oct. 4, 1984
“After three decades of research, fusion scientists are finally approaching their goal of an almost limitless energy source. But they still don’t understand all that is going on within their experiments. … There is every confidence among fusion scientist that they will fulfill the promise they made three years ago. But it could be that they will finally get their act together, to use a phrase that makes sense for a change, only when the IAEA next brings the world’s fusion community together to plot some more points on the curve of increasing [the parameters]. The fusion researchers could then begin to think about turning all this esoteric science into power stations — a task that should keep them busy for at least another quarter of a century.”

“U.S. May Give Up Independent Fusion Research,” by Christopher Joyce, New Scientist, Nov. 15, 1984
“The United States may be about to give up its race with the Europeans and Japanese to be the first to win energy from magnetic fusion. Its scientists are becoming so disillusioned with progress that they may soon opt for cooperation with their rivals rather than competition.”

“More Cuts for Fusion Research,” by Michael Kenward, New Scientist, Jan. 10, 1985
“Over the next three years, Britain’s budget for research on thermonuclear fusion will fall by around 20 percent. … The reduction in Culham’s budget comes at a time when fusion researchers are finally assembling the experimental evidence that will prove that they can produce energy by fusing the nuclei of hydrogen, to produce heavier nuclei, releasing energy in the process.”

“International Fusion on Fusion Research,” New Scientist, Jan. 30, 1986
“The International [Atomic] Energy Agency has united the U.S., Europe. and Japan. The agreement, signed recently, calls for collaboration between the teams working on the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor at Princeton, New Jersey, the Joint European Torus, at Culham in Oxfordshire, and JT-60 in Naka-machi, Japan.”

[Ed: Fusion research funding problem solved.]

 

#54. Omitting the ITER Input Power – Cardozo’s Role

Oct 172020
 
Niek Lopes Cardozo

Niek Lopes Cardozo

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By Steven B. Krivit
Oct. 17, 2020

Promoters of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, ITER, have a long history of telling the public how much output power they should expect from this experimental reactor. At the same time, they have a long history of omitting the required input power. Perpetual-motion scams do the same thing, only with mechanical tricks.

Earlier this year, I contacted Niek Lopes Cardozo, one of the fusion scientists who had helped promote ITER. Cardozo is a professor of science and the technology of nuclear fusion in the Applied Physics Department of Eindhoven University of Technology, and he is the interim chair of the science domain of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.

Cardozo is the former leader of the Dutch fusion research programme (2001-2009) and served on top-level European fusion governance committees, and he was the vice-chair of the governing board of the ITER European domestic agency known as Fusion for Energy, which was involved in false power claims about ITER. Cardozo was a co-founder of FuseNet, a European educational organization that teaches students about fusion. For at least eight years, FuseNet had published a fundamentally false claim about the promised ITER power production.

ITER is not designed to produce electricity; nor is it designed to produce overall net power. It is designed specifically for a purely scientific outcome: a fusion plasma that produces thermal power at a rate 10 times greater than the rate of thermal power injected into the plasma. This goal, if achieved, will translate to a net-zero output for the overall reactor. Representatives of the fusion community who have spoken about ITER publicly have told the public for three decades that the overall reactor was designed to produce significant net power, that the overall reactor was designed to produce power at a rate 10 times greater than the power the reactor would consume. That’s not what its designed for. If it works, it will produce thermal power at the same rate as it consumes the equivalent rate of electrical power.

In his own communications, Cardozo contributed to many false claims about ITER. He was willing to respond to my e-mails — up to a point.

In his presentation (date unknown) “Fusion: the 7 scientific challenges between us and clean power,” Cardozo displayed two slides saying that ITER is designed for a “tenfold power multiplication.” His slides gave no indication that the power multiplication applied only to the plasma rather than to the overall reactor, thus leading his audience to believe the false idea that the overall ITER reactor was designed for a tenfold power multiplication.

When I asked him to explain this apparent misrepresentation, he said that, when he introduces the “10-fold power multiplication,” he always explains to his audience that he really means “that the fusion power is 10 times the power needed to sustain the plasma.”

Changing Measurement Scales
I found a 2015 slide presentation he had given called “Why We Have Solar Panels But Not Yet Fusion Power.” Cardozo wrote that the net power output of a fusion reactor is not a relevant measure of fusion progress.

It was a peculiar statement because nearly every news story about nuclear fusion for the last 50 years has described the penultimate goal of fusion research as a fusion reactor that produces net power output. On the other hand, a fusion reactor that produces no net power has scientific value but, on a practical level, is useless.

When Cardozo wrote “fusion power level,” he was using a phrase that fusion scientists commonly use – a phrase with a double meaning. Cardozo was not talking about the practical meaning, which is the potentially usable rate of power produced by a fusion power plant. He was talking only about the scientific meaning: the rate of power associated with particles produced by the fusion reactions, which does not account for any of the input power.

But the public doesn’t care about the kinetic energy of fusion particles; for 70 years, the public has been promised and has been waiting for a fusion reactor that creates more energy than it consumes. Cardozo’s assertion that net reactor output power was “not a relevant number” was inconsistent with the real purpose of fusion research, so I asked him what he had in mind. Here’s what he told me:

Fusion has the peculiar property that it has to reach ignition, which in the case of magnetic fusion, basically requires upscaling. For a long time, the input power is simply [going to be] much larger than the fusion power; then [we will] get to a machine size where the two cross, and from there on, [we get to] the net power production size.

A note about ignition: All magnetic fusion reactors require heat to be injected into the reaction chamber to create nuclear fusion reactions. However, fusion scientists believe that, when they eventually build a reactor that has all the right parameters, the fusion reactions inside the reactor will create so much heat that no external heating power will be required. They call this “ignition.”

In his explanation, Cardozo was saying that net reactor output power was irrelevant only because, for the time being, there is no fusion reactor capable of positive net reactor output power. Once a fusion reactor reaches the ignition level and no external heating power is required, Cardozo expected a fusion reactor to have net positive reactor output power. In that case, according to Cardozo, net reactor output power would be relevant. Before ignition, Cardozo expects that net reactor output power will remain negative. After ignition, he expects that net reactor output power will be positive. More simply, Cardozo doesn’t want to use the net reactor output power value now because it gives a negative number.

In the same presentation, Cardozo said that ITER is supposed to produce enough thermal power that, if converted to electricity at a 30% rate of efficiency, would yield 150 megawatts of electric power.

Cardozo’s claim that ITER would hypothetically be able to produce electrical power at the rate of 150 megawatts seemed wrong because Cardozo’s value didn’t account for the 300-megawatt rate of electricity the reactor is expected to consume. I asked him to explain the omission of the required input power, but he did not respond directly to my question. Instead, he told me that in recent years he has been critical about the prospects of fusion as a practical source of energy in a relevant and useful time frame, and he directed me to a journal article he wrote last year.

Volte Face
Cardozo’s article is a radical shift from his earlier outlook. His previous public comments about fusion, like those of so many other fusion scientists, were filled with the same imaginary projections that fusion scientists have been talking about for half a century. His new outlook was based on sobering, thoughtful analysis. He asked, and answered the question, what if ITER works as planned? Then what? Based on what we know of nuclear engineering, what would it take to develop fusion into an energy technology that makes any difference in the world energy mix? How long would it take?

Cardozo concludes that “within the mainstream

     
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scenario – a few [demonstration-type] reactors towards 2060, followed by generations of relatively large reactors — there is no realistic path to an appreciable contribution to the energy mix in the 21st century if economic constraints are applied.”

In his estimation, the first-generation fusion power plants, optimistically offered to the market in the 2070 timeframe, likely will provide an average electric power comparable to what wind power provided in the year 2000. Moreover, he wrote, such fusion power plants would require an upfront investment of hundreds of billions of Euros. Cardozo asked: Who would pay for that? And why? Cardozo wrote that other energy technologies have already provided proof of technical viability at investment levels orders of magnitude lower.

Leaving the Past in the Past
Despite his turnabout, a large part of my work recently has been an attempt to explain the past and how we got where we are now, or at least where we were three years ago, when almost every major fusion organization was publishing false or misleading claims about ITER. I wanted to know whether Cardozo could and would explain his role as a contributor to the widespread false understandings about ITER. I sent him several examples:

  1. Oct. 20, 2006, News Report in Technisch Weekblad, “ITER Has To Keep All Promises”
    In this news report, after speaking with Cardozo, the reporter wrote that “ITER promises to be the first fusion reactor to deliver more power than it needs to run: 500 MW for ten minutes, ten times more than what is put into it.” This was false. If ITER works, it will only be the first fusion reactor to deliver the same amount of power that it consumes.
    –
  2. September 2010, Cardozo’s Abstract for the 9th Liege Conference on Materials for Advanced Power Engineering
    As Cardozo had written in a slide presentation, his abstract for this meeting said that ITER “will demonstrate 10-fold power multiplication at the 500 MW level.” This statement gave the clear but false impression the expected power gain is for the overall reactor and not limited to only the plasma.
    –
  3. April 20, 2009, Press Release About Cardozo’s Chair Appointment
    This press release, which relied on Cardozo as the expert, said the ITER “installation will generate 500 MW of power from nuclear fusion, ten times more than is necessary to operate the reactor.”
    –
  4. Eindhoven University of Technology Web Site
    The Master Science and Technology of Nuclear Fusion Web page at Cardozo’s university says, “ITER will demonstrate 10-fold power multiplication at the 500 MW level.” The press release mentioned above said that Cardozo would be setting up this nuclear fusion master’s program.
    –
  5. FuseNet Association
    Cardozo was the founding chair of the board, from 2010 to 2014. From at least 2011 to 2019, he and his peers told students on the association’s ITER page that “the fusion reactor itself has been designed to produce 500 MW of output power, or ten times the amount of power put in.”

Silence
I didn’t know whether, like some other fusion scientists, Cardozo had believed that ITER would need only 50 megawatts of power to operate. I didn’t know whether he had been given wrong information by his peers or whether he made a mistake.

I sent him another letter, copied to Robert-Jan Smits, the president of Eindhoven University of Technology, and asked Cardozo for an explanation.

Cardozo did not reply.

 

 

 

#53. How the Zero-Watt ITER Reactor Was Misleadingly Sold as a 500 Megawatt Reactor

Oct 102020
 

Return to ITER Power Facts Main Page

Oct. 10, 2020
By Steven B. Krivit

This is a concise, five-page report that explains how the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, a zero-power experimental nuclear fusion reactor now under construction in France, was misleadingly sold as a 500-megawatt reactor. Download the Report

Bernard Bigot, director-general of the ITER project, testifying before Congress in 2018.

 

 

52. Princeton Lab Anticipates Fusion Breakeven Within Three Years

Oct 032020
 

by Hans Fantel

The cheapest and most plentiful fuel on earth would be water — if you could burn it. That’s no longer a pipe dream. From the way it looks now, we may soon have practical fusion reactors to liberate the atomic forces in seawater. The world would then have a virtually boundless source of energy.

Atomic fusion — the principle basic to the use of seawater as fuel — has been known since the dawn of the atomic age during World War II. But so far, no practical fusion device has been built (unless you consider the hydrogen bomb as practical). But to gigantic research projects — one at Princeton University, the other at the University of Rochester — are finally getting within spitting distance of producing useful energy from fusion reactions. ...

The latest version of the tokamak has been able to reach stellar temperatures, trigger a fusion reaction and sustain it long enough to generate significant amounts of power. So far, the big machine has managed to keep this up for about 20 milliseconds. To become an efficient energy producer, it will have to run much longer than that — about 10 seconds or more for each power burst. But keeping the tokamak going for so long is very tricky task.

The trouble is that no material on Earth can contain the raging stream of stellar stuff inside the tokamak. If the swirling deuterium touches the wall of the metal tube containing it, the deuterium cloud breaks up, cooling to the point where the fusion reaction falters. So the torrent inside the tokamak must race inside the ring-shaped tube without ever touching its walls. It is, therefore, contained in what is called a magnetic bottle — an ultra-strong magnetic field, shaped to hold the deuterium suspended within the doughnut, away from its walls.

Unfortunately, the bottle still leaks. Often, the hot material breaks through the magnetic restraint, cools off instantly, and stops the reaction. That’s the main reason why the tokamak is still just a research tool, rather than a working power source.

But this may change by the late 1980s. A machine almost twice as big as the present tokamak — called the TFTR, the tokamak fusion test reactor — is nearly completed, and its size alone may help solve the problem. …

Dr. Harold P. Furth, director of the tokamak project, believes that it might break even by the mid-1980s. The breakeven point would be reached when a reaction lasts long enough to generate as much energy as is consumed in the heating process.

Publication Date: September, 1982
Source: Popular Mechanics

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