Response From Pietro Barabaschi, Director-General of ITER

May 022023
 

May 2, 2023

Dear Mr. Krivit,

Thank you for your message. As I have noted already previously since I became ITER-DG in October 2022, I fully agree with you when you say that accuracy is important in scientific communication. This can be particularly challenging when communicating complex science and engineering in a simplified way to public audiences, including to journalists. At ITER, we are making it a priority to improve this accuracy.

Regarding the article you cite by the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC),  the original interview was conducted in May 2022, in the form of a podcast; and the print article that came out in March 2023 excerpted some elements from that podcast, adding to the inaccuracies on several points:

  1. It is frequently said that ITER and other fusion devices will recreate the fusion power that exists at the centre of the sun and stars. That is not strictly accurate: while ITER will seek to operate at very high temperatures (~150 million decrees, i.e. even hotter than in the sun’s core) , it will not be able to recreate the extreme density conditions (present in the sun due to its gravitational force) that enable proton-proton fusion at the sun’s core. Rather, fusion scientists and engineers seek to mimic the sun by using other atoms which are “easier” to fuse: in the case of ITER, the goal is to fuse deuterium (D) and tritium (T), two isotopes of hydrogen, using magnetic confinement of plasma at high temperatures but at densities which are achievable. Additionally, DT reactions will yield to a power density which is more amenable for power generation.
  2. The ten-fold return on energy that is part of the ITER design – often referred to as Q>=10 – refers explicitly to the ratio of thermal energy output from the fusion reaction, contrasted to the thermal energy used to heat the plasma. This “ten-fold return”, which hence applies to the plasma part of ITER, is frequently misinterpreted, and since I joined we are working on additional measures to ensure clarity in our public communication. We also need to emphasize repeatedly that ITER, as an experimental device, will not produce electricity.
  3. When we assert that fusion will not produce long-lived radioactive waste, we should be careful to characterize that as a goal, not a certainty; because we are still working to develop the materials that can sustain the extraordinary neutron flux that will impact the first wall (plasma-facing wall) of a tokamak.
  4. When we speak about fusion power plants producing continuous energy, that is also a goal, especially for tokamaks. ITER’s design envisions 400-second pulses, and a steady-state Q of 5, but this goal has yet to be realized. Stellarator designs are better at achieving steady-state output, but are more difficult to build than tokamaks.
  5. Lastly, I confirm that you are correct that ITER will install tritium-breeding blankets on only a small fraction of the tokamak walls. The goal for future tokamaks will be a closed fuel cycle (one tritium atom produced for one tritium atom consumed in the plasma), but this is not the goal of ITER. ITER is designed to breed tritium only on a small demonstration scale.

We will communicate these points to our ABC contacts for their consideration. We will also continue to work with our ITER team, especially with those who communicate with public audiences and journalists, to achieve greater accuracy.

The technical challenges that remain for magnetic confinement fusion to be feasible are well-known within the fusion community. Many experts are working to solve those challenges, both at ITER and in fusion projects around the world. If we can overcome those challenges, fusion energy will contribute for the future of our society.

There is no need to oversell that promise, nor to minimize the challenges that we are all committed to solve.

With kind regards,

Pietro

May 2, 2023

Dear Dr. Barabaschi,

Thank you for your letter. Your five bullet points go a long way toward communicating the objectives of the ITER project accurately. As one of your organization’s most prolific critics, I applaud your effort.

I have only one minor quibble. The goal for future tokamaks is not to produce one tritium atom for each tritium atom consumed in the plasma. That would be a tritium breeding ratio (TBR) of 1.0. Full-scale tritium breeding is not part of the ITER, but communicating this technical aspect more precisely to the public would be useful.

A fusion reactor must produce tritium at a higher rate than it consumes tritium in order to compensate for inefficiencies and downtime – that is, to be self-sufficient. Fischer et al. determined that a TBR of at least 1.05 is needed for the EU DEMO reactor to attain self-sufficiency.

However, Abdou et al. explained that an “analysis of current worldwide first wall/blanket concepts shows that achievable TBR for the most detailed blanket system designs available is no more than 1.15.” This is an extremely thin margin – so thin that these authors (one is an ITER Organization scientist) wrote that “a primary conclusion is that the physics and technology state-of-the-art will not enable [the EU] DEMO and future power plants to satisfy these principal requirements.”

I wish you success with your project.

Steven

Open Letter to Pietro Barabaschi, Director-General of ITER

Apr 152023
 

By Steven B. Krivit
April 15, 2023

Dear Dr. Barabaschi,

One of my readers brought to my attention a recent news article published by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation about ITER.

The news article contains several significant inaccuracies. I bring these to your attention because I know that you are committed to the integrity of the public scientific communications about ITER.

The article features a single source: Tom Wauters, a plasma physicist who works at ITER. However, I would not want to blame Wauters for the inaccuracies because I have repeatedly seen other high-level staff members of the ITER organization communicating significant inaccuracies to the news media.

For example, two years ago, Joëlle Elbez-Uzan, the former head of safety and the environment at ITER, told reporter Celia Izoard that the ITER reactor will be “the first net energy production in the entire history of fusion by creating an amplification of a factor of 10: i.e., 50 megawatts at the input and 500 megawatts at the output.”

Elbez-Uzan learned from the reporter that she had completely misunderstood the primary objective of the project.

Then there were the many incorrect power statements ITER Chief Scientist Tim Luce provided, like this one: “We plan to produce 500 megawatts with 50 megawatts of consumption.” Luce, too, didn’t know even a close value of the expected 500 MW electric power consumption that will be required of ITER to start the fusion reaction and the 440 MW of electricity required to sustain it.

Then there was the matter of the recurring incorrect power statements by Mark Henderson, a former ITER physicist. Henderson had worked on the ITER project for about a decade, leaving the organization a few weeks after speaking with investigative radio journalist Grant Hill, who was the first to point out Henderson’s inconsistencies.

Based on Wauter’s statements, I see there is still a residual problem of information quality in your organization: incorrect information that has been repeated for many years, even decades, information that is false or misleading about the goals and design of the ITER project.

Limitless Energy

ABC quoted Wauters directly: “The advantages of this technique — even though it’s very complicated to achieve — is that you can have almost limitless energy.”

As you know from our previous discussions, half of the required deuterium-tritium fuel combination does not exist as a natural resource on Earth, so we can no longer legitimately make the claim of “limitless energy.”

10-Fold Energy Gain

ABC wrote that “ITER’s goal is a 10-fold return on the energy that goes in.”

This requires a correction, unambiguously explaining that the performance of ITER will be assessed by comparing the thermal power output of the plasma with the thermal power input into the plasma.

Tritium Breeding

Here is the ABC section on tritium breeding:

But the team at ITER hopes to use the fusion reactor itself to create more tritium as a kind of by-product of the reaction. This is known as “tritium-breeding” and involves bombarding lithium on the inner wall of the tokamak with neutrons in the plasma to create more tritium.

“The idea is to have at least one tritium produced for one tritium consumed in the plasma to have a closed fuel cycle,” Dr. Wauters says. “It should be possible, but there is a difference between doing these things on paper and actually doing it.”

There’s a bit riding on this. If they can’t find out how to replace the tritium they use, then it’s likely game over for the dream of fusion power anytime soon.

“There is indeed a risk,” Dr. Wauters says. “I’m quite confident that at some point we will manage it and that it’ll be ITER that does it.”

But ITER is not designed to breed at least one tritium atom for each tritium atom it consumes. The ITER reactor will have 440 modules that cover its inner wall. Based on the ITER design, a maximum of four of these modules at any given time will contain replaceable tritium breeding test blanket modules. A reactor with a full tritium breeding blanket will require tritium breeding modules covering the entire inner wall. Thus, in ITER, only one percent of the surface area will be capable of breeding tritium.

Accordingly, ITER will not breed and consume tritium at a 1:1 ratio. At best, it will be a 1:100 ratio.

Will Laban Coblentz be informing the Australian Broadcasting Corporation of these facts?

Will you be informing your staff of these facts?

Thank you,
Steven

Josh Mitteldorf Sheds Light on the Mindboggling Complexity of Many-Body Interactions

Apr 082023
 

April 8, 2023

This article was written by Josh Mitteldorf and originally published on April 1, 2023. It is reprinted here with his permission. Mitteldorf earned his BS in physics at Harvard University and his Ph.D. in theoretical astrophysics at the University of Pennsylvania.

When Isaac Newton discovered the equations that govern motion of the planets through the heavens, he was able to solve them with pencil and paper much faster than the planets themselves were moving. Thus he was able to make useful predictions. Solving the equation — even when it involves oodles of numerical computations by hand and pad after pad of yellow paper, it’s still a whole lot easier and faster than actually doing the experiment and making the measurement.

From the Twentieth Century, we have better theories than Newton had. The two most fundamental theories of physics are Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity. We are tantalized to think they must be better than Newton. because for some simple cases, we can solve the equations and we get better agreement with experiment than we get using Newton’s equations. We think they are fantastically accurate. Maybe they are the Ultimate Reality.

But here’s the cosmic joke. Both Schrodinger’s Equation of Quantum Mechanics and Einstein’s Field Equation can only be solved for the very simplest cases.

We can solve Schrodinger’s Equation for two particles by hand, for three particles with a supercomputer. But anything more than three particles is so fantastically complicated that the equation can only be solved approximately — all that wonderful accuracy gone to waste. We have an exact solution for the hydrogen molecule (2 electrons), but for anything as complicated as a single molecule of water (10 electrons) we have only approximations and quantum heuristics.

We can solve Einstein’s Equations for situations that are perfectly symmetric. A sphere is easy. A spinning sphere is really, really difficult.

But any realistic situation in astronomy becomes so complicated that we don’t even have an algorithm that would let a computer go to work on the problem. Big Bang cosmology is based on the Cosmological Principle, which says that the universe is the same everywhere. We make that assumption not because the evidence for it is solid, but because we can’t solve Einsten’s Equations for realistic distributions of matter.

Since Newton, we physicists have taken it for granted that mathematical theory provides a quick and elegant way to understand something — much easier than doing each particular experiment and measuring the outcome.

The best theories that we have aren’t like that. A computer the size of the universe couldn’t solve the equations faster than the universe is generating the answers.

To Einstein and Schrodinger, God said, “You want a theory of everything? You want to understand how the Universe unfolds — OK, here’s the trick that I use. Here’s the soul of my magic. Here in these equations is the way I generate the future from the present. Have at it!”

Technical note: To solve an equation can mean two different things.

  • An analytic solution is an equation that you can derive using symbols. For example, the solution for an object moving in a uniform gravitational field without friction is a parabola, and you can get the equation for the parabola from the equations of motion.
  • A numerical solution is often possible when no analytic solution exists. For example, computers can accurately trace the course of a space probe by advancing in tiny increments, one millisecond at a time. By making the time increment progressively shorter, it’s possible to get more and more accuracy by using more and more computing power.

The equations of QM and of GR both have analytic solutions in the simplest cases. For slightly more complicated cases, they both have numerical solutions suitable for today’s computers. For situations that are yet a little more complicated, the numerical algorithms become intractable. This is to say that to solve (for example) the Schrodinger equation for the ground state of a water molecule would require a computer larger than the entire universe.

When we have a general-purpose quantum computer, this statement will become obsolete.

U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E Funds Low-Energy Nuclear Reaction Research

Mar 012023
 

U.S. Department of Energy Funds $10 Million to Study Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions
Top Universities Resuming LENR Research to Search For Potential New Energy Source

On Feb. 17, 2023, the U.S. Department of Energy issued the following press release and extended project descriptions:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced $10 million in funding for eight projects working to determine whether low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR) could be the basis for a potentially transformative carbon-free energy source. The teams selected today—from universities, a national laboratory, and small business—aim to break the stalemate of research in this space.“ARPA-E is all about funding high-risk, high-reward energy technologies,” said ARPA-E Director Evelyn N. Wang. “The teams announced today are set out to answer the question ‘does this area show promise, and if so, how? Or can we conclusively show that it does not?’ While others have shied away from this space, ARPA-E wants to break through the knowledge impasse and deepen our understanding.”The following teams have been selected to receive funding as part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) LENR Exploratory Topic:

  • Stanford University (Redwood City, CA) will explore a technical solution based on LENR-active nanoparticles and gaseous deuterium. (Award amount: $1,500,000)
    Extended description: Stanford University will explore a technical solution based on LENR-active nanoparticles and gaseous deuterium. The team seeks to alleviate critical impediments to test the hypothesis that LENR-active sites in metal nanoparticles can be created through exposure to deuterium gas.
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA) will develop an experimental platform that thoroughly and reproducibly tests claims of nuclear anomalies in gas-loaded metal-hydrogen systems.? (Award amount: $2,000,000)
    Extended description: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) proposes a hypothesis-driven experimental campaign to examine prominent claims of low energy nuclear reactions (LENR) with nuclear and material diagnostics, focusing on unambiguous indicators of nuclear reactions such as emitted neutrons and nuclear ash with unnatural isotopic ratios. The team will develop an experimental platform that thoroughly and reproducibly test claims of nuclear anomalies in gas-loaded metal-hydrogen systems.
  • Amphionic (Dexter, MI) will focus on exploring if LENR are produced in potential wells existing between two nanoscale surfaces by controlling metal nanoparticle (NP) geometry, separation, composition, and deuterium loading. (Award amount: $295,924)
    Extended description: Cathode structure and surface morphology are thought to be essential for LENR reaction rate. Amphionic proposes to optimize cathode design to form Pd-polymeric composites within which the Pd nanoparticle size and shape are varied, and the interfacial separation and geometry are controlled. Experiments will focus on exploring if LENR are produced in potential wells existing between two nanoscale surfaces by controlling metal nanoparticle (NP) geometry, separation, composition, and deuterium loading.
  • Energetics Technology Center (Indian Head, MD) will use electrochemical co-deposition of a deuterated palladium metal compound on a metal substrate conformed onto a plastic scintillator to establish and sustain LENR. (Award amount: $1,500,000
    Extended description: Energetics Technology Center will build upon past successes with co-deposition experiments using palladium, lithium, and heavy water together to create an environment in which LENR can occur. These electrolysis experiments decrease the distance from the cathode (location of LENR) to an electronic detector capable of detecting nuclear reaction products to give these experiments the best chance at reliably detecting nuclear
    reactions, if they are present.
  • Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley, CA) will draw from knowledge based on previous work using higher energy ion beams as an external excitation source for LENR on metal hydrides electrochemically loaded with deuterium. The team proposes to systematically vary materials and conditions, while monitoring nuclear event rates with a suite of diagnostics. (Award amount: $1,500,000)
    Extended description: LBNL team proposes to probe for LENR at external excitation energies below 500 eV, systematically varying materials and conditions while monitoring nuclear event rates with a suite of diagnostics. The team will draw from knowledge based on previous work using higher energy ion beams as an external excitation source for LENR on metal hydrides electrochemically loaded with deuterium.
  • Texas Tech University (Lubbock, TX) will focus on advanced materials fabrication, characterization, and analysis, along with advanced detection of nuclear products as a resource for teams within the LENR Exploratory Topic. (Award amount: $1,150,000)
    Extended description: Texas Tech University will develop accurate materials fabrication, characterization, and analysis to attempt to resolve the physical understanding of Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR). Texas Tech will also provide advanced detection of nuclear reaction products as a resource for ARPA-E LENR Exploratory Topic teams.
  • University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI) will use a gas cycling experiment that passes deuterium gas through a chamber filled with palladium nanocrystalline samples. Variables will include temperature, nanocrystalline size, and laser wavelength. (Award amount: $1,108,412)
    Extended description: The University of Michigan proposes to systematically evaluate claims of excess heat generation during deuteration and correlate it to nuclear and chemical reaction products. The team plans to combine scintillation-based neutron and gamma ray detectors, mass spectrometers, a calorimeter capable of performing microwatt-resolution measurements of heat generation, and ab-initio computational approaches.
    The proposed research will experimentally and theoretically explore the origin and mechanisms of excess heat generation and LENR.
  • University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI) will provide capability to measure hypothetical neutron, gamma, and ion emissions from LENR experiments. Modern instrumentation will be coupled with best practices in data acquisition, analysis, and understanding of backgrounds to interpret collected data and evaluate the proposed signal. (Award amount: $902,213)

 

ITER Organization Denies Projections of 2030 for First Plasma

Jan 062023
 

By Steven B. Krivit
January 6, 2023

The ITER organization denies news reports that First Plasma will be delayed another five years, until 2030.

First Plasma has been a key milestone of the ITER project since its inception. It marks the moment when most of the construction on the ITER reactor is complete and experiments with test fuels — hydrogen and deuterium — can begin.

The French newspaper Les Echos reported the delay on Nov. 24, 2022. New Energy Times, based on information from ITER organization staff members who were not authorized to speak on the record, reported one year ago that the first experiments likely would occur in 2031.

Official Denial

New Energy Times asked Laban Coblentz, the head of communication for the ITER organization, whether the Les Echoes story was accurate.

“Statements like the one in Les Echoes,” Coblentz wrote, “or others talking about a ‘five-year delay to First Plasma,’ are neither official nor accurate and are somewhat misleading.”

Delay Factors

Factors for the delay include dimensional nonconformities in parts of the reactor sectors and design flaws in radiological shielding devices, as New Energy Times reported on Feb. 21, 2022. The ITER organization also identifies delays caused by Covid-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In 2021, two French nuclear safety authorities, Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire and Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire, told Bernard Bigot, the former ITER organization director-general, about the safety issues and defects. Bigot did not want to delay the schedule. He insisted that construction on the reactor should move forward and that the reactor sectors could be repaired inside the reactor chamber. The regulators did not agree. They told Bigot that he must not lower the sectors into the reactor chamber unless he can guarantee that the installed sectors can later be separated and removed. Bigot instructed his staff to lower the first sector into the pit.

On Nov. 21, 2022, Pietro Barabaschi, Bigot’s successor, in concurrence with the regulator’s guidance, said that the first sector will now be removed and repaired.

“Dealing with it in the pit on the module that has already been assembled would be enormously difficult. This means we have to lift out the installed module and disassemble it in order to proceed with the repairs,” Barabaschi said.

Roadmap

New Energy Times has not seen a more detailed ITER roadmap than the one published in 2012, and we continue to rely on this — adjusted for delays — as the most authoritative sequence of planned events. Click here to see the full roadmap as it was published in 2012.

The test-fuel experiments are slated to run for seven years, until scientists feel confident enough to add radioactive tritium to the fuel mixture. During this time, required components to the inner wall of the reactor will be added to allow the use of deuterium-tritium fuel.

After two years of running preliminary experiments with deuterium-tritium fuel, the team hopes to increase the input power and thus achieve the reactor’s maximum thermal power output performance of 500 megawatts and duration of 500 seconds. The reactor is expected to consume about 440 megawatts of electricity.

Full-power deuterium-tritium operation would therefore take place around 2040, which is 20 years before global production of tritium is expected to terminate.

Tracking the Delays

When the ITER project was approved by its international partners in 2007, the organization estimated that ITER would begin operating by 2017.

By 2012, official documents showed First Plasma pushed back to 2020.

In 2016, the ITER organization formally acknowledged that First Plasma was pushed back to 2025.

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