Oct 172020
 
Niek Lopes Cardozo

Niek Lopes Cardozo

Return to ITER Power Facts Main Page

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

     
MW
MW
 
   Efficiency of Heating Systems [1]
%
   
   Calculated Electrical Power Needed for Heating Systems
MW
   
MW
   
MW
MW
           
MW
   
           
         
   Calculated Neutron Power Thermal Output (80% of Fusion Power)
MW
MW
 
   Blanket multiplier [1]
%
   
   Calculated Additional Blanket Thermal Power
MW
MW
 
           
         
   Calculated Thermal Power of 4He (20% of Fusion Power)
MW
   
   Percent of 4He Power Recovered from Divertor or First Wall [2]
%
   
   Calculated 4He Power Recovered from Divertor or First Wall
MW
MW
 
 
MW
 
   Efficiency of Converting Heat to Electricity [1] [3]  
%
 
   Calculated Total Electrical Power Produced      
MW
           
MW
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.

 

 

 

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.

 

 

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

Oct 022020
 

Self-sustaining fusion reaction “will be achieved within a few years,” researchers say.

by Clifford B. Hicks

The best evidence of progress in this field is not success, but lack of failure. As former Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis L Strauss has pointed out: “We think the fact that we have worked with it now for a number of years and have not been able to prove it impossible is a very considerable gauge of its eventual success.”

Dr. Arthur E. Ruark, chief of controlled nuclear research for the AEC, confirms the optimism: “There is general belief in the American laboratories that the ignition temperature, the temperature at which the fusion reaction is self-sustaining, will be achieved within a few years.” …

Scientists in attendance [at the Geneva conference] estimated that sometime within the next 10 or 20 years, the switch will be thrown and the first full-scale, power-producing fusion reactor will go into operation. Even this first crude reactor probably will have a power output comparable to the huge hydroelectric plant at Hoover Dam.

Publication Date: January 1959
Source: Popular Mechanics

Sep 302020
 

Sept. 30, 2020

Leo Rafael Reif
President, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Dear President Reif,

In a consistent, multi-year, public-relations campaign, Dennis G. Whyte, the director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, and Martin Greenwald, the deputy director of the center, have communicated with members of the news media and created the false impression that their next reactor design, known as SPARC, is designed to produce power at a rate two-to-ten times as much as the reactor will require to operate.

The root of the deception is founded on the intersection of two conflicting themes. On the one hand, for 70 years, fusion scientists have promised the public a fusion reactor that produces more energy than it consumes. Most news articles that discuss fusion remind us that this is the penultimate goal, short of producing electricity. But no electricity from fusion will ever be produced unless the net power gain of an overall reactor is positive rather than negative. The second of the intersecting themes is that, for 70 years, fusion scientists have known that no fusion reactor — including the planned SPARC and ITER reactors — has been designed to produce power at a rate greater than it will consume.

Fusion representatives, for decades, have leveraged this foundational disparity and structured the language in their claims to feed the public’s expectation of a fusion reactor that will produce a net positive power rate, despite the fact that the representatives knew that no such reactor is imminent. Fusion representatives create the illusion with two well-established tactics. The tactics apply to the forthcoming SPARC and ITER reactors and perhaps other planned fusion reactors.

The first tactic is that, without clearly explaining to the public and news media, they offer input power values that are not associated with the overall reactors. Instead, they provide input values that are associated only with the rate of thermal power that enters the reaction chambers to heat the fuel.

The second tactic is that the fusion representatives never disclose the rate of input electrical power that these fusion reactors will require to operate. If a journalist is savvy enough to realize what the scientists are doing, and the journalist asks the fusion representatives for the rate of required electrical input power for the reactors, the representatives then say that the question is irrelevant because present fusion reactors are not designed for overall net power rates. This is circular reasoning.

Here’s a brief summary of the recent activities of the directors in the MIT fusion center.

March 9, 2018, Press Release
The first press release that MIT issued about SPARC said this:

SPARC is designed to produce about 100 MW of heat. While it will not turn that heat into electricity, it will produce, in pulses of about 10 seconds, as much power as is used by a small city. That output would be more than twice the power used to heat the plasma, achieving the ultimate technical milestone: positive net energy from fusion.

Your scientists created the illusion that SPARC’s projected output would be sufficient for a small city. They created the illusion that SPARC would produce an output of 100 megawatts of heat that — if the reactor was so designed — could be turned into electricity. This is dishonest; it is an example of a bait-and-switch technique. People who are experts in fusion will recognize the nuanced language. The MIT fusion scientists were not talking about net power from a fusion reactor. Instead, they were talking about net power from a fusion reaction.

Net energy from a fusion reactor means you have some amount of power left over, after subtracting the input power used to operate the reactor. Net power from a fusion reaction refers only to the pure physics; it does not account for or subtract the input power required to operate the reactor.

Thus, for example, MIT scientists misled Jeff Tollefson, a journalist with Nature, to write that SPARC is “a prototype reactor that can generate more energy than it consumes.”

No Reactor Net Power
Because the plans for SPARC specify that the rate of thermal power injected into the fuel will be 25 to 30 megawatts, this means that the rate of electrical power required to produce the injected thermal power will be at least 75 to 90 megawatts. That leaves the question of the rate of electrical power required to operate the machine. I asked Greenwald for that value last year. He didn’t respond to my e-mails or phone messages.

Unless the SPARC reactor design requires an extraordinarily low rate of input electrical power, there will not be a sufficiently high net output power rate to, hypothetically, power a single light bulb, let alone a small city. But again, this is the point at which fusion representatives use circular reasoning to claim they are unfairly judged; they insist that their experiments are not designed for net reactor power output.

June 27, 2019, Press Release
In a June 27, 2019, press release, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, the private spin-off associated with MIT, said that SPARC will “demonstrate net energy gain from fusion for the first time in history.” This claim played into the public’s expectation and long-awaited hope of net energy gain from a fusion reactor. Yet, by its ambiguity, the claim provided a deceptive but thin veil of scientific accuracy that could be defended as net energy gain from a fusion reaction.

Aug. 5, 2019, Physics World Article
On Aug. 5, 2019, an MIT student and a visiting scientist writing in Physics World claimed that SPARC would be a new “fusion device aiming to be the first to achieve net energy gain.” That phrase, if read by itself, is unequivocally false because the device is not designed to achieve net energy gain. Knowing this, the authors tried to provide cover by immediately following that claim with a definition of net energy gain for a fusion reaction, not a fusion device. In other words, they made a false claim, then tried to defend it with a definition that was inconsistent with device net energy gain.

Sept. 29, 2020, Press Release
The Sept. 29, 2020, press release continued propagating the half-truth about MIT’s fusion research. The MIT scientists said that, according to the design, SPARC will produce twice as much fusion energy “as the amount of energy pumped in to generate the reaction.” Then they said it might even produce ten times as much.

It was the same deception; the MIT fusion scientists were only referring to the pure physics, the power going into and coming out of the reaction. They were not comparing the power going into and coming out of the reactor. By telling this half-truth to members of the news media who are not expected to be fusion experts, they manipulated the news media to unknowingly exaggerate what SPARC is designed to do.

Thus, MIT scientists misled, for example, Henry Fountain, a journalist with the New York Times, to write that SPARC, if successful, will “produce as much as 10 times the energy it consumes.”

Research Integrity
Journalists are not to blame for failing to discern the technical nuances of nuclear fusion experts. Scientists are responsible for communicating clearly and transparently, particularly when making claims in press releases. Your fusion scientists repeatedly breached their duty to communicate their research accurately and transparently. They saw the advantageous results from their first press release and did it again, and again.

This leaves the question about how your university teaches its students about research integrity and whether your university condones this type of behavior.

I welcome your response.

Steven B. Krivit
New Energy Times

DISTRIBUTION
Leo Rafael Reif, President, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Maria T. Zuber, Office of the Vice-President for Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Sarah McDonnell, Media Contact, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Martin Greenwald, Deputy Director, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Plasma Science and Fusion Center
Dennis G. Whyte, Director, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Plasma Science and Fusion Center
Jeff Tollefson, Nature
Henry Fountain, New York Times

RELATED:

Did MIT and Commonwealth Fusion Systems Mislead Fusion Investors?

50. Omitting the ITER Input Power – Martin Greenwald’s Role

 

© 2025 newenergytimes.net