51. Fusion Researchers: New Reactor Will Create Power Comparable to Hoover Dam

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

#50.5 Open Letter to the President of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Regarding Deceptive Claims by MIT Fusion Scientists

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

 

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

Sep 292020
 

 

Martin Greenwald

Martin Greenwald

Return to ITER Power Facts Main Page

By Steven B. Krivit

Sept. 29, 2020

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

More than 200 examples show that the ITER promoters fooled staff members of industry, government agencies, and energy organizations; editors for English, French, and Italian Wikipedia pages; scores of journalists, including those with the New York Times, Science magazine, Nature magazine, and The Guardian; university students, including those at Stanford and Princeton; and staff writers for the European Commission, European Parliament, and the White House.

Earlier this year, I spoke with Martin Greenwald, one of the fusion scientists who had helped promote ITER. Greenwald is the deputy director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Plasma Science and Fusion Center.

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, translates 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 2012, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) published a report called “Program on Technology Innovation: Assessment of Fusion Energy Options for Commercial Electricity Production.” Greenwald was one of the fusion experts consulted. The report makes the following claims about ITER:

I first asked Greenwald how he derived his gross thermal output value: 635 MWth. It was close but didn’t match my value of 686 MW. He explained his calculation and taught me something new: A significant portion of the thermal energy of the fusion-produced alpha particles, the 100 MW of internal heating, is expected to be recovered by the divertor.

In the next part of our discussion, he gave me a more detailed breakdown of the gross thermal output value, which he recalculated as 618 MW instead of 635 MW. From the 618 number, he used a high thermal-to-electric conversion rate of 0.454 and ended up with 280 MW gross electric output.

With a mutual agreement about those numbers, I moved on and asked him how he concluded that the device could “realistically generate net electricity” considering the steady-state input power requirement of 300 MW of electricity.

The 300 MW input power value was new to him. He didn’t know where that value came from. He didn’t seem to have a basic understanding of the reactor power drains. I showed him how the 300 MW value was calculated and showed him my sources. Then he stopped responding to my e-mails. Here’s a record of those two messages.

Around the same time, I began a conversation with ITER scientist Gregory DeTemmerman to crosscheck the new information Greenwald had given me about thermal recovery from the divertor. I also cross-checked the divertor thermal recovery with Hartmut Zohm, a fusion scientist at the Max-Planck-Institute of Plasma Physics. After I obtained a consensus, I updated my “ITER Reactor Power Values — Bar Chart” and, in a group e-mail, sent it to the sources who contributed to the information in the chart.

In one of the messages in that discussion thread, I reminded Greenwald that he had not answered my question about how ITER was supposed to “realistically generate net electricity.” I asked him whether I was missing something or whether his report contained an inaccuracy. Here is his response:

1. During a pulse, the ITER facility as a whole will produce substantial net power. 2. That magnitude of excess power, if it were converted from thermal to electrical power, would very roughly balance the input.

His point No. 1 was not valid because it was an apples-to-oranges comparison: comparing electric power in to thermal power out. Without directly admitting it, his point No. 2 confirmed that he and his colleagues had made a false claim. They had claimed that ITER, if coupled to an energy conversion system, would be capable of generating 280 megawatts of electricity. They had omitted the expected input power required to operate the reactor. Had they included the input power, their text would have read “ITER, if coupled to an energy conversion system, would be capable of generating 0 megawatts of electricity.”

 

 

49. ITER Claims: Corrections and Retractions

Sep 262020
 

Return to ITER Power Facts Main Page

Originally Published: Sept. 26, 2020
Updated: Oct. 2, 2023
Steven B. Krivit

This page contains a listing of international science, government, and industry organizations that have corrected their false or misleading ITER power claims after I contacted them.

In a nutshell, the ITER reactor is designed for a net power gain across the plasma, not across the entire reactor. The “50 MW” and “500 MW” values always were associated with the plasma gain, but ITER’s promoters said or implied that those values were associated with the entire reactor.

Organizations that have made corrections include the ITER organization, the ITER domestic agencies in Russia, India, South Korea, the U.S., and Europe. They include EUROfusion, the World Nuclear Association, the European Commission, Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire, the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority and Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, the International Energy Agency, the European Parliament, FuseNet, the Atkins Company, and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.

ITER Organization (Bigot Regime)
I wrote to Bernard Bigot, the director-general of the ITER organization headquarters on May 1, 2017. He did not respond or make any corrections. I published the correct required electrical input power rate for the ITER reactor on Oct. 6, 2017. I wrote to Bigot on Oct. 13, 2017, and told him about my report.  Less than a month later, Bigot and his staff made some corrections. Notable among them was the page of “Facts and Figures,” provided for members of the news media. The “500 MW” section was significantly corrected.

On March 6, 2018, Bigot testified before Congress. On March 28, 2018, I reported misleading claims he made at that hearing. Several hours after I published my report, his staff made more corrections on the ITER organization’s Web site.

I wrote to Bigot again on June 17, 2018, and encouraged him to make further corrections. To my knowledge, he did not made further corrections and continued to make prominent misleading claims about the goal and planned result of ITER.

On July 28, 2020, Bigot and his team published a press release with a blatant false claim about ITER’s expected power output.

EUROfusion
On Oct. 11, 2017, I notified Petra Nieckchen, the head of media relations for EUROfusion, that three Web pages on the organization’s Web site contained false claims about ITER. Nieckchen wrote back to me but was not willing to make corrections yet. She wanted to wait until her organization redesigned their Web site.

I wrote to Nieckchen again on Nov. 21, 2017, and made sure she understood that she and Tony Donné, the EUROfusion programme manager, were making false science claims. I advised them to act promptly. I sent copies of my letter to the scientific leaders who compose the EUROfusion Consortium. Two days later, EUROfusion made complete and precise corrections.

Five months later, in April 2018, EUROfusion redesigned its Web site and, in doing so, removed all of the pages it had corrected in November 2017. EUROfusion also removed its entire ITER Web page, leaving no trace of its accurate descriptions of the expected power output of ITER.

Donné is also a part-time professor at Eindhoven University of Technology, as are Roger Jaspers and Niek Lopes Cardozo, the two founders of FuseNet. (See below)

World Nuclear Association
I contacted Agneta Rising, the director-general of the World Nuclear Association, on Oct. 13, 2017, and informed her that her organization was making a false claim about ITER. One of her staff members said they would attend to the matter in the following week. They didn’t.

On Nov. 8, 2017, after Rising’s staff had made no corrections, I sent another e-mail to Rising and informed her that the ITER organization had made some corrections to its Web site. Rising thanked me for the information and made no corrections.

On Nov. 28, 2017, I sent another e-mail to Rising, and I suggested corrective text. Her staff made corrections to the WNA Web site the next day, including a disclosure of the required input power for the reactor.

On Dec. 11, 2017, I published a report listing, among other items, the Nov. 29, 2017, correction by WNA. Nine days later, on Dec. 20, 2107, WNA removed the sentence containing the required input power requirement for ITER. This was my first indicator that the fusion community was going to suppress the actual amount of power required to operate the ITER reactor, which I had revealed.

Removal of the 300 MW electrical input value resulted in a misleading statement by WNA. On Dec. 20, 2017, I explained this to Rising and said that, if she was not going to inform readers of the required input power requirement for the reactor, then she must inform readers that she is giving values of only the plasma thermal output and plasma thermal input. Her staff fixed the WNA Web site within 48 hours. The change log is here, in the World Nuclear Association section.

ITER Russian Federation Domestic Agency
I wrote to Anatoly V. Krasilnikov, the director of the ITER Russian Federation domestic agency for the first time on Dec. 17, 2017. I told him about the false and misleading claims on his organization’s Web site. He didn’t reply to me by e-mail. But he did fix one of the problems. I wrote to him again about the remaining problems. A few months later, he made one correction but allowed other false claims to remain. I wrote to him again. A few months later, he removed another one of the false claims and replaced it with a new one. This went on for three years. Eventually, he removed all of his prior inaccurate claims and, in their place, copied and pasted the “net energy” claim from the ITER organization’s Web site. I wrote to Krasilnikov again and asked whether he would like to correct his new false claim. In response, he added the ITER organization’s false definition for the false claim. I wrote to him again on Sept. 15, 2020. According to Archive.org, sometime between Sept. 19, 2021, and Oct. 25, 2021, the Russian ITER domestic agency removed all of its English pages. The change log is here, in the Russia section.

ITER India Domestic Agency
On Dec. 17, 2017, I wrote to Shishir P. Deshpande, the ITER India project director, about false and misleading claims on his organization’s Web site. He wrote back to me the next day: “Thank you for your message. We will take appropriate action.” On Jan. 31, 2018, he wrote back to me: “The information on the ITER-India website has been updated.” It was corrected. Completely. And it remained so. The change log is here, in the India section.

ITER Korea Domestic Agency
I first wrote to Kijung Jung, the director of the ITER Korea domestic agency, on Dec. 17, 2017, about two of his Web pages with false and misleading claims. I wrote to him a total of five times. He wrote back once and made incremental corrections to the ITER Korea Web site each time. Eventually, he arrived at claims that were mostly accurate and transparent for a public audience on one page and claims that were “only” misleading on the other page. The change log is here, in the Korea section.

European Commission
On Feb. 16, 2018, I wrote to Jean-Claude Juncker, at the time the president of the European Commission, about the two false and misleading claims about ITER on a European Commission Web site. On March 1, 2018, Telmo Baltazar, a senior political adviser for Juncker, wrote back and said that Maroš Šefcovic, the vice-president responsible for Energy Union, would address the issues. On April 6, 2018, the European Commission updated its fusion Web page with partially corrected statements. However, the commission continued to publish the misleading claim that the ITER reactor was designed to produce “500 million Watts of fusion power” without explaining the hidden meaning of the phrase “fusion power.”

In May 2020, l learned that the commission removed its misleading claim that “ITER will be the first experiment to generate up to 500 million watts (MW) of fusion power.” The commission replaced the claim with one that is accurate and transparent: The goal of ITER is “to prove the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion as a future energy source.”

I found one other current document on the commission’s site that contained a false ITER claim, and following my suggestion, the commission corrected the text on August 14, 2020.

Although the European Commission, to my knowledge, has corrected all of its current Web pages and documents with claims about ITER, the commission was one of the few organizations that initially argued with me. In three years, I exchanged about 30 letters with a variety of officials in the commission. The language in many of the earlier letters was technical, nuanced and misleading. The  letters seemed to be ghostwritten by ITER stakeholders in the science community. The most current status and change log is here.

Many older European Commission documents contain false or misleading ITER claims. Initially, I brought these to the attention of the European Commission, but since these pages are more archival in nature, neither the commission nor I have pursued corrections on such documents. They are listed here in the European Commission section.

Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire
On June 17, 2018, I wrote to Jean-Christophe Niel, the director-general of the Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire, about a false ITER claim on its Web site. He did not write back, but 10 days later, he made the correction, although he missed the distinction between external power consumed by the heating systems and injected power delivered by the heating systems. The change log is here, in the Energy Organizations section.

U.K. Atomic Energy Authority and Culham Centre for Fusion Energy
On June 17, 2018, I wrote to Nick Holloway, the media manager for the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, about false and misleading claims on the CCFE Web site. Three days later, he wrote back to me and made a correction. His correction was insufficient, and I wrote back to him. After an additional three days, he wrote back and made the necessary correction.

In 2020, CCFE published on its Web site a new page with a false claim. I wrote to Holloway on Jan. 22, 2020. Two weeks later, he wrote back to me and made the necessary correction. The change log is here, in the United Kingdom section.

International Energy Agency
On June 17, 2018, I wrote to Fatih Birol, executive director of International Energy Agency, about false ITER claims on his organization’s Web site. He did not write back, but he stripped the page of the false claim and later removed the page entirely. The change log is here, in the Energy Organizations section.

European Parliament
On June 17, 2018, I wrote to Anthony Teasdale, the director-general of the European Parliamentary Research Service, about a briefing prepared for members of the European Parliament titled “How the EU Budget Is Spent.” It contained false claims about JET and ITER. Teasdale made two rounds of incremental and incomplete corrections. When I encouraged him to make full corrections, he consulted with Laban Coblentz, the spokesman for the ITER Organization, and in his response to me, Teasdale cited Coblentz’ explanation for why the text was sufficient.

Coblentz convinced Teasdale to keep the misleading claims. One was that the overall JET reactor (not just the plasma) produced 16 MW of thermal power from only 24 MW of thermal power. This claim omitted the 700 MW of electrical power that was used by the reactor. The claim also relied on the hidden double meaning of the phrase “fusion power.” The other claim was that, for ITER, the overall reactor is designed to produce 500 MW of output thermal power from only 50 MW injected thermal power. This claim omitted the 300 MW of overall electrical power that will be needed by the reactor. I suspended further attempts to advise the European Parliament. The change log is here, in the European Parliament section.

FuseNet
The correction at FuseNet, the European fusion education association, was one of the most important ITER corrections because the organization directly influences students. As I have reported elsewhere, the newest generation of young fusion scientists has grown up thinking that ITER will need only 50 MW to operate and that JET needed only 24 MW to operate. Students include those at Stanford and Princeton, and even include Ian Chapman, now the director of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, a former student of the previous director, Steve Cowley.

FuseNet had been providing students false information about ITER’s purpose and output for eight years. My initial contact was with Roger Jaspers, the chairman of FuseNet, on June 17, 2018. It took six months and three letters from me to get Jaspers to make the first corrections on two of the three pages with false claims. It took another six letters, and the attention of the FuseNet Board of Governors and FuseNet Academic Council, to convince Jaspers to make the final correction which happened in January 2019. The change log is here, in the FuseNet Association section.

Jaspers is also an associate professor at Eindhoven University of Technology (as is Tony Donné, the head of EUROfusion). FuseNet was founded by Jaspers and another Eindhoven professor, Niek Lopes Cardozo. Cardozo was the founding chair of the board, from 2010 to 2014 and is no longer listed as board member. Jaspers was the chair of the board from 2015 to 2019 and is no longer listed as board member.

Atkins Company
On Sept. 25, 2018, I wrote to Richard Lyall, the nuclear major projects director for the Atkins company. Atkins is responsible for building part of the ITER infrastructure and was awarded a €150 million contract from Fusion for Energy. I advised Lyall of the false and misleading claims about JET and ITER on his company’s Web site. He did not write back, but a month later, Lyall removed both claims. The change log is here, in the Industry section.

Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
The Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has also made false claims about ITER and its own, now-decommissioned TFTR reactor. John Greenwald, a science writer for the PPPL public relations office, as evident by what he wrote, had been misled by the fusion scientists at PPPL. I began communicating with him on Oct. 13, 2017. After several e-mails and one phone call, he learned how to describe the expected power output from ITER correctly. The change log is here, in the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory section.

ITER U.S. Domestic Agency – ORNL
U.S. ITER activities are coordinated through the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). On Nov. 26, 2018, I wrote to Ned Sauthoff, the director at the time of the U.S. ITER Project Office. I advised Sauthoff about a document called “Questions and Answers About Fusion Energy and ITER,” which wrongly described the planned output of ITER. Sauthoff removed the document and originating Web page. I also wrote to Sauthoff about his “ITER Brochure,” which had a misleading claim. He made a minimal and incomplete correction.

On April 17, 2020, I wrote to Kathy McCarthy, the new director of the U.S. ITER Project. I told her about the false claims on the “Oak Ridge Site Office Projects” Web page. She corrected them 11 days later. She was not, however, willing to modify the “500 MW of fusion power” claim, which assumes the reader knows the difference between plasma power output and reactor power output. Other ORNL pages also rely on the “fusion power” phrase to create a false impression about ITER. The change log is here, in the USA section.

ITER European Domestic Agency
I began writing to Johannes Schwemmer, the director of the ITER European domestic agency, and his staff in June 2018, pointing out several false and misleading claims on the agency’s Web site. After several letters back and forth, Schwemmer corrected one Web page, but only partially. When we explained to Schwemmer that his refusal to correct the other false and misleading claims implied that he was knowingly publishing misleading claims, he complained that he felt unfairly judged, and he stopped communicating.

In early 2020, Schwemmer’s organization redesigned its Web site. In doing so, it removed the pages with the problematic claims. However, the organization created a new page with three new, blatant false claims. On July 20, 2020, after we discovered the new false claims, we wrote to Beatrix Vierkorn-Rudolph, the chair of the governing board of Fusion for Energy. We provided suggestions for accurate corrections. But we received no response from Vierkorn-Rudolph, and we did not see any corrections.

A month later, on Aug. 27, 2020, I wrote to Kadri Simson, the European Commissioner responsible for the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Energy, and advised her of the problem. One week later, Schwemmer made the necessary corrections.

On June 13, 2022, the governing board of the European ITER domestic agency removed Johannes Schwemmer as its director, effective June 16, 2022.

ITER China Domestic Agency
I was not able to identify any false or misleading power claims on this domestic agency’s Web site.

ITER Japan Domestic Agency
I was not able to identify any false or misleading power claims on this domestic agency’s Web site.

ITER Organization (Barabaschi Regime)
On Oct. 10, 2021, I began publishing a series of investigations revealing that the tritium required for tomorrow’s fusion power plants does not exist. After that, I published further investigations revealing that the enriched lithium needed to breed tritium does not exist. On Oct. 29, 2022, I wrote to Bigot’s successor, Pietro Barabaschi. I encouraged him to publish accurate and transparent claims about the reactor. His organization made several corrections about it’s former “net energy” claims and also removed the banner “UNLIMITED ENERGY” and replaced it with “FUSION ENERGY.”

48. European Commission Leads the Way with Accurate ITER Promises

Sep 192020
 

Return to ITER Power Facts Main Page

Sept. 19, 2020
By Steven B. Krivit

Recent letters that New Energy Times has received from the European Commission, on behalf of Commissioner Kadri Simson, indicate that the commission is taking a leading role in the accurate and transparent communication of the promises for and the expected outcomes of the ITER fusion reactor.

On June 15, 2020, we sent our analytical report “The Dark Side of ITER,” to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. The report showed lapses of scientific integrity by a number of people who were involved in promoting the ITER project.

Notable among them was Bernard Bigot, the director-general of the international headquarters of the ITER project. Bigot’s organization corrected some false claims on its Web site two years ago in response to our Oct. 6, 2017, and March 28, 2018, news reports. However, misleading claims on the ITER organization’s Web site remain.

In contrast, two major organizations have recently corrected their previously false claims about the ITER fusion reactor, under construction now in southern France. The European Commission was one of them. Benatas Mazeika, the head of the European Commission unit for nuclear energy, safety and ITER, wrote to us on July 1, 2020, on behalf of President von der Leyen.

Soon after, the commission corrected what may have been the remaining false claims about the ITER reactor on the European Commission’s Web site.

The commission is also responsible for the European ITER domestic agency known as Fusion for Energy. Earlier this year, Fusion for Energy, under the leadership of its director Johannes Schwemmer, published new false claims about ITER. Schwemmer previously advised New Energy Times that he was unwilling to continue discussing the claims about ITER on his organization’s Web site. After being advised by New Energy Times, the Fusion for Energy governing board, which has recently reappointed Schwemmer for a second term, did not respond and did not correct the recent false claims.

Therefore, on Aug. 27, 2020, we wrote to Kadri Simson, the European Commissioner responsible for the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Energy. Simson has oversight responsibility for the Fusion for Energy agency. One week later, Schwemmer made the necessary corrections. Two days later, Mazeika wrote to New Energy Times on behalf of Simson.

Mazeika, addressing the long-standing problematic language used by fusion organizations to promote the ITER project, said that the commission is now actively working with other fusion organizations to develop common language that describes the ITER project accurately.

New Energy Times began contacting the commission about its previous false and misleading ITER claims in 2018. That was during the presidency of Jean-Claude Juncker. Although his office responded several times to our letters, the commission made little progress under his presidency.

For three decades, and more often in the last decade, fusion organizations have developed and used common language to describe the ITER project. But that common language was ambiguous and misleading, causing nearly every person who was not a fusion expert to disseminate false expectations, promises, and hope about the fusion reactor project. Our log shows more than 200 such instances.

Since October 2017, in response to news publications and letters from New Energy Times, most major fusion organizations worldwide have made significant or full corrections to their ITER power claims.

 

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