U.K. Energy Bureau Doesn’t Know Input Power for Planned Reactor

Oct 192022
 
Artistic rendering of proposed Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production

Artistic rendering of proposed Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) “100 MW electric” fusion reactor.

Oct. 19, 2022

The U.K. Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has claimed a net electrical output for a planned fusion reactor but there is no evidence that BEIS knows the planned input power.

This is the basic calculation for any energy production system: Output power rate minus input power rate equals net power rate.

The chief press officer for BEIS is Safi O’Shea, but the person who responded to our emails refused to give a name. Here is the e-mail conversation between Steven B. Krivit and the BEIS news desk.

Krivit: “What is the rate of electrical power that the STEP reactor is designed to put onto the grid?”

BEIS News Desk: “STEP is a prototype, fully integrated?fusion energy plant capable of supplying electricity to the grid. It will demonstrate the capability to generate 100 MW of electricity and provide the pathway to commercial plants for the future.”

Krivit: “What is the rate of electrical power that the STEP reactor is designed to draw from the grid?”

BEIS News Desk: “We are currently in the concept design phase of the STEP programme, so it’s too early to be completely sure of power needs.”

Without knowledge of the input power rate, BEIS cannot accurately claim that STEP will demonstrate the capability to generate 100 MW of electricity.

Related:
Head of U.K. Fusion Walks Back Claims For Planned $22 Billion Reactor (Oct. 22, 2022)
False Fusion Claims by Ian Chapman, Head of U.K. Fusion  (Nov. 7, 2020)
UK plans first nuclear fusion power plant  (Feb. 21, 2010)

 

The Shocking Video That Explains the Hidden Flaw of Nuclear Fusion

Oct 132022
 

By Steven B. Krivit
October 13, 2022

Ryan Hughes has produced an eight-minute video explaining that the required fuel for nuclear fusion doesn’t exist.

Hughes is a doctoral researcher at the Institute for Advanced Automotive Propulsion Systems in Bath, England.

Hughes has been fascinated with nuclear fusion and is enthusiastic about new breakthroughs in fusion research. Here are his opening comments from the video:

Nuclear fusion is often seen as the Holy Grail of clean energy, with the possibility to produce endless power to the world. However, there is a problem with nuclear fusion that doesn’t seem to be discussed as often. In fact, some people even seem to be trying to keep it a secret. This issue is so big [that] it could mean all of the time and money spent on current nuclear fusion research is wasted. As someone who wants fusion to work, [I believe that] it seems better to be transparent and work collectively to solve these challenges rather than pretending they don’t exist.

Steven Krivit, the editor of New Energy Times, broke the news about the fusion fuel problem in 2021 and, three months later, explained to President Biden’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology that the fuel required for commercial nuclear fusion doesn’t exist.

In addition to providing a video-based explainer, Hughes goes further in his video than Krivit on the matter of beryllium and explains why it’s necessary. Beryllium is more toxic than asbestos or hexavalent chromium; however, it seems to be the only material that will work in a fusion reactor, along with enriched lithium, to breed sufficient quantities of tritium.

How Did We Get Here?

How did the world develop such grand expectations about fusion without a source for the required fuel? Watch this video produced by Krivit:

One of the fusion experts is Ian Chapman, the chief executive officer of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority. Several years ago, Chapman told a public audience at the Royal Institution that, to get fuel for a fusion reactor, “we would breed it ourselves, so it would be self-sufficient, so you wouldn’t have to worry about the cost.”

This is wishful thinking. According to a peer-reviewed scientific paper Krivit cited in his article “Without Fuel, the Fusion Game Is Over,” there is no known science or technology to enable fusion reactors to be tritium self-sufficient.

Chapman also told the audience that the UKAEA’s Joint European Torus (JET) fusion reactor produced 16 MW of energy, which he said was a “reasonable amout of energy” but not enough to put on the commercial grid.

Chapman did not seem to understand that, to produce 16 MW of thermal power, the JET reactor consumed 700 MW of electrical power from the grid. Chapman told the audience that “the big problem is that that 16 MW was generated having put 25 MW into the machine.”

Chapman made the same type of mistake when telling the audience about the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER): “Instead of putting in 25 and getting out 16, in the next-step device, we’ll put in 50 and get out 500.”

ITER will actually need 500 MW of electricity to start and at least 400 MW to run. If the input electrical power value is normalized to the output thermal power value so apples are compared with apples, ITER would consume more power than it produces.

 

 

Head of U.K. Fusion Walks Back Claims For Planned $22 Billion Reactor

Oct 072022
 

By Steven B. Krivit
October 7, 2022

Ian Chapman, Chief Executive of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority

Ian Chapman, Chief Executive of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority

On Monday, the BBC reported that a planned U.K. fusion power plant would prove the commercial viability of fusion. Yesterday, it ran a second story. The BBC told readers that there was no guarantee that the $22 billion fusion power plant would work.

Monday

On Monday, Oct. 3, BBC journalists Tony Roe and Alex Smith reported that a site had been selected for U.K.’s “first prototype commercial nuclear fusion reactor.” The BBC reported that, according to the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), the fusion power plant would be operational by the early 2040s.

That’s an extraordinary claim considering that no fusion reactor has ever produced enough power to heat a cup of tea, if any such reactor were designed to convert its output to electricity.

The closest any fusion reactor has come to net power production was 25 years ago at the Joint European Torus (JET) in the U.K. With a 700 million Watt electricity input, JET produced a 24 million Watt thermal output from fusion. That experiment took place on Oct. 31, 1997.

Last year, fusion scientists ran new experiments in JET, but it didn’t fare as well, it only reached 10 MW. JET, the most successful fusion reactor in the world, has come only 1% of the way toward breaking even.

Nevertheless, on Monday, Jacob Rees Mogg, the U.K. Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, told the BBC what the fusion power plant will do.

“The plant will be the first of its kind, built by 2040 and capable of putting energy on the grid,” Mogg said. “In doing so, it will prove the commercial viability of fusion energy to the world.”

Ben Bradley, Tory MP for Mansfield and Nottinghamshire County Council leader, told the BBC that he was convinced that U.K. scientists had proven that fusion works.

“We’re going to power the nation again and I can’t wait,” Bradley said. “It’s new technology, we’ve proven that it works and north Nottinghamshire is going to be the hub of research, innovation, commercialising that and selling it to the world.”

Wednesday

On Wednesday, Oct. 6, two other BBC journalists, Rachel Royce & Will Jefford, wrote about the same planned fusion reactor but walked back those extraordinary claims.

“The body behind a £20 billion fusion power station set for the Nottinghamshire countryside says there is ‘no guarantee’ it will work,” the BBC wrote.

In fact, the BBC hadn’t mentioned the £20 billion price tag in the first news story, so that part of the headline also provided new, important information.

Royce and Jefford wrote that “specialists” said there were “challenges” to overcome before the technology is able to power homes.” The writers did not identify those specialists or discuss the “challenges.”

New Energy Times has identified many such specialists and challenges with thermonuclear fusion. We have specifically focused on the power claims and the fuel claims. We also maintain a list of scientists who have published concerns about the challenges of fusion.

In Wednesday’s story, the BBC spoke with Ian Chapman, the Chief Executive Officer of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority. The response from Chapman suggests that the BBC writers had presented him with a list of the challenges it had received from specialists.

Here is Chapman’s response to the BBC:

We have done it as experiments in the lab and we’ve shown that we can make fusion happen and we can control it, but we’ve never done it at the scale where it produces electricity and actually powers your home. This will be the first of its kind and I don’t know that everything will work. For sure we have challenges that we have to overcome and that is the point of the next phase of the programme. There is no guarantee that this will work – this is cutting edge technology.

Chapman has had a long history of making false and exaggerated claims about fusion.

The BBC went back to Bradley and, based on his new responses, told him that specialists had expressed concerns. The BBC summarized Bradley’s new perspective: “Even though the prototype plant may never be completely functional, the project is set to bring thousands of jobs to the area.” They also quoted him directly.

“For us in Nottinghamshire, if it works that’s incredible, but either way we’re going to draw in billions of pounds of investment into this area,” Bradley said. “That is important for jobs, for local opportunities for people here. This part of the world used to power the county and it can do it again.”

Challenges

Aside from never having proven that fusion can produce even a single Watt of useful power, it has other challenges. One is that the tritium fuel for commercial nuclear fusion reactors doesn’t exist. Another is that the enriched lithium-6 needed to make the tritium is not available. Another is that there is no known technology to enrich sufficient quantities of lithium-6 without dumping mercury into the environment. Another is that there is no known way to breed sufficient rates of tritium from lithium-6 to keep a fusion reactor going. Another is that all known materials that might line the inside of a commercial fusion reactor will be destroyed by the fusion neutrons.

Perhaps Chapman didn’t fully explain these challenges to Bradley. Or to the U.K. government when he sold the legislators on funding the concept.

 

 

From Our Archives: Letter from Lewis Larsen “LENRs are Better Than Fusion”

Oct 052022
 
Lewis G. Larsen (Photo: S.B. Krivit)

Lewis G. Larsen (Photo: S.B. Krivit)

(Reprinted from Oct. 7, 2008)

By Lewis G. Larsen

In our recent preprint, “A Primer for Electro-Weak Induced Low Energy Nuclear Reactions,” we summarized our theoretical work at a less mathematically detailed and more conceptually oriented level. Sometimes, important physics concepts can be obscured by the formalism of complex mathematics that is required to describe rigorously the physical phenomena. This new paper provides a basic conceptual overview of our theory of Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions for a broader range of readers. We hope to entice some of them to take the time necessary to delve into the mathematical details of the collective electroweak physics that are contained in our six underlying papers.

As we have stated many times before, none of our theoretical work on LENRs includes new microscopic physics. What is new about our work is that, for the first time, we extend many-body collective effects to existing electroweak theory within the overall framework of the Standard Model. In seven technical publications, we have developed a foundational theory of LENRs that weaves together all the previously disparate threads of varied experimental evidence into a coherent whole. We have done that using rigorous, established, well-accepted physics.

The Widom-Larsen theory of LENRs provides a foundational understanding of a certain body of anomalous experimental data that has been inexplicable for a hundred years.

We like to think of weak-interaction LENRs as extending the legacy of Enrico Fermi’s seminal mid-1930s work on beta decay, as well as making good on the failed promise of strong interaction nuclear fission—that is, providing a clean, safe, inexpensive source of nuclear energy. In the aftermath of World War II, Fermi’s beloved weak interactions were somewhat neglected by science. They became lost in the turmoil about nuclear weapons and the horrors of nuclear war.

In contrast to the “hot” research areas of fission and fusion, weak interactions became a scientific curiosity: holding theoretical interest with no apparent practical applications. After all, every physicist and chemist simply “knows” that radioactive beta decay rates are mainly low-energy reactions and, being random, cannot be controlled. Such weak interaction processes were universally regarded as useless for power generation applications. In addition, no one had seriously considered the possibility of creating neutrons directly from protons or deuterons through the weak interaction. Researchers just didn’t see any reasonable way to get weak interaction rates high enough to be useful. Well, our theory of LENRs and hundreds of credible experiments now suggest otherwise.

According to our theory, LENRs do not involve any kind of Coulomb barrier-penetrating fusion, deuterium-deuterium or otherwise. In our opinion, they never did. We will not mince words on this: The “cold fusion” community was dead wrong on that theoretical point. However, “cold fusion” experimentalists were dead right about many of their experimental observations. They were correct about LENRs potentially being an important nuclear process that eventually might be harnessed to provide a new type of primary energy source: clean, truly “green” nuclear power.

Scattered around the world, these mostly unsung researchers labored experimentally for 19 years (most of them with little funding), exploring the many complex avenues and treacherous backwaters of the vast LENR parameter space. During that time, they kept the flame alive by doggedly collecting experimental data until a large enough body of knowledge had accumulated for someone to be able to develop a comprehensive theory of the phenomena. The accumulation of all that varied experimental data on LENRs, while little-published in peer-reviewed journals, was crucial to the development of our theory.

The “cold fusion” community can be proud of many of its reported experimental results. When people work on the cutting edge of science, sometimes knowing what doesn’t work experimentally is just as important as understanding what does work; failures can be every bit as instructive as successes. Most of all, good experimental data are crucial for the development of any successful theory; theory and experiment are inextricably and indissolubly linked.

A revolutionary scientific paradigm shift has been brewing slowly over the past 19 years. The world of mainstream science is finally waking up to the possibility that previously neglected weak interactions might provide another new source of nuclear energy. In fact, given their unique characteristics, weak-interaction LENRs could prove to be a vastly cleaner, “greener,” less expensive power generation technology than strong-interaction fission or fusion. In our 2006 European Physical Journal C paper, we showed an example of a LENR-based lithium reaction that generated roughly as much energy as fusion reactions, but without the release of any dangerous energetic neutrons or “hard” gamma radiation. LENRs are better than fusion. That is revolutionary. LENRs gore many long-standing sacred cows and threaten myriad vested scientific and commercial interests.

The “cold fusion” community was not uniquely persecuted by mainstream science. That community was the first major wave of shock troops in the forefront of a scientific revolution involving the weak interaction. As in many military engagements in real-world revolutions, the first troops to hit the beach usually take the biggest casualties because they have the least information about the battlefield and are the easiest targets. This has happened time after time in the history of science, especially in the case of major paradigm shifts. Thomas Kuhn chronicled this in his famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Revolutions, scientific or otherwise, are rarely bloodless. LENRs are no exception to that rule.

We believe that our collective many-body theory finally has put LENRs on a firm theoretical footing by carefully anchoring them in the solid bedrock of electroweak theory and the Standard Model. The field now needs to attract many more entrants from mainstream science for LENRs to flower fully and reach their scientific and commercial potential.

Lewis Larsen
President and CEO
Lattice Energy LLC

Lewis G. Larsen, 72, died on October 25, 2019

 

U.S. Department of Energy Announces Up to $10 Million to Study Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions

Sep 152022
 

Sept. 13, 2022

Text from the DOE Press Release

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced up to $10 million in funding to establish clear practices to determine whether low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR) could be the basis for a potentially transformative carbon-free energy source. The funding is part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) LENR Exploratory Topic, which aims to break the stalemate of research in this space.

“ARPA-E is all about risk and exploring where others cannot go, which is why we’ve set out with this LENR Exploratory Topic to conclusively answer the question ‘should this field move forward, or does it not show promise?’” said ARPA-E Acting Director and Deputy Director for Technology Dr. Jenny Gerbi. “We look forward to seeing the intrepid teams that come forward to approach this field of study with new perspectives and state-of-the-art scientific and technical capabilities.”

LENR Exploratory Topic awardees will pursue hypotheses-driven approaches toward producing publishable evidence of LENR in top-tier scientific journals by testing/confirming specific hypotheses (rather than focusing only on replication), identifying and verifying control of experimental variables and triggers, supporting more comprehensive diagnostics and analysis, and improving access to broader expertise and capabilities on research teams.

Source

Text from the Earlier DOE Announcement of Proposed Funding Opportunity

The Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA–E) is considering issuing a new Exploratory Topic under Funding Opportunity Announcements (FOAs) DE-FOA-0002784 and DE-FOA-0002785 to solicit applications for financial assistance in pursuit of hypotheses-driven approaches toward realizing diagnostic evidence of Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR) that are convincing to the wider scientific community. A goal of this Exploratory Topic will be to establish clear practices to rigorously answer the question, “should this field move forward given that LENR could be a potentially transformative carbon-free energy source, or does it conclusively not show promise?”

ARPA-E acknowledges the complex, controversial history of LENR beginning with the announcement by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons in 1989 that they had achieved deuterium-deuterium (D-D) “cold fusion” in an electrochemical cell.[1] DOE reviews in 1989 and 2004 both concluded that the body of evidence to date did not support the claim of D-D fusion, but that research proposals on deuterated heavy metals should be evaluated under the standard peer-review process. This has not happened, in part because LENR was largely dismissed by the scientific research community by 1990.[2] Nevertheless, many groups from around the world continued to conduct varied LENR experiments on minimal budgets and to report evidence of excess heat and nuclear reactions (including neutrons, tritium, 3He, 4He, transmutation products, and isotopic shifts) in hundreds of reports/papers.[3] However, repeatability of the key evidence over multiple trials of seemingly the same experiment remains elusive to this day.[4] This may be due to limitations in experimental or diagnostic techniques, lack of awareness and/or control of the key triggers and independent variables of LENR experiments, or other reasons. Furthermore, results were typically not reported with the level of scientific rigor required by top-tier research journals. As a result, LENR as a field remains in a stalemate where lack of adequate funding inhibits the rigorous results that would engender additional funding and more rigorous studies.

For these reasons, ARPA-E has over the past 2+ years revisited the history of LENR as a field, studied the literature, released a general RFI[5] on nonconventional fusion approaches (that received many LENR-related responses), and held a LENR workshop.[6] The workshop was attended by 100+ people, including long-time and newer LENR researchers, non-LENR researchers from adjacent research disciplines, and other interested stakeholders. Institutions represented at the workshop included government laboratories/FFRDCs, top research universities, and private companies. The information gathered and received by ARPA-E, including from reputable experts at prestigious U.S. academic institutions, laboratories, and private corporations, supports the decision to proceed with the announcement of this Teaming Partner List.

As described in more detail below, the purpose of this announcement is to facilitate multi-disciplinary teaming, especially among but not limited to LENR researchers and nuclear diagnostic experts. ARPA-E believes that such teaming will improve the chances of advancing the field of LENR. The FOA will provide specific program goals, technical metrics, and selection criteria. The FOA terms will be controlling. For the purposes of the Teaming Partner List, the following summarizes current planning for the FOA:

Based on its claimed characteristics, LENR may be an ideal form of nuclear energy with potentially low capital cost, high specific power and energy, and little-to-no radioactive byproducts. If LENR can be irrefutably demonstrated and scaled, it could potentially become a disruptive technology with myriad energy, defense, transportation, and space applications, all with strong implications for U.S. technological leadership. For energy applications, LENR could potentially contribute to decarbonizing sectors such as industrial heat and transportation (~50% of U.S. and global CO2-equivalent emissions).

This forthcoming ARPA-E Exploratory Topic program aims to build on recent progress in the field,[7] with strong emphases on testing/confirming specific hypotheses (rather than focusing only on replication), identification and verifiable control of experimental variables and triggers, more comprehensive diagnostics and analysis, access to broader expertise and capabilities on research teams, and an insistence on peer review and publication in top-tier journals. To accomplish this goal, ARPA-E is looking for diverse interdisciplinary teams to obtain convincing empirical evidence of nuclear reactions in an LENR experiment through two possible categories:

A) LENR Experiments: The goal of this potential category would be to conduct LENR experiments through careful selection of specific, testable hypotheses that can be supported or retired upon the collection of correlated, multi-messenger nuclear diagnostics. Proposed LENR experiments would have a well-articulated connection to prior published LENR evidence. Principal Investigators would be expected to have a strong publication record of experimental work in leading journals, and at least one seasoned LENR practitioner (e.g., someone who has conducted and published results on LENR experiments) should be included on the team. Organizations and project teams interested in this potential category would either directly incorporate specialist capabilities described below or anticipate collaborating with one or more Capability Teams.

B) Capability Teams: The goal of this potential category would be to provide specialist support to LENR experiments, including but not limited to nuclear diagnostic detectors and capabilities, materials fabrication, elemental/isotopic sample analysis, statistical analysis, experimental design and related modeling, and calorimetry (note, however, that calorimetry would likely not be acceptable as a sole or primary diagnostic).

As a general matter, ARPA–E strongly encourages outstanding scientists and engineers from different organization, scientific disciplines, and technology sectors to participate in this Exploratory Topic. Multidisciplinary and cross-sector collaboration spanning organizational boundaries enables and accelerates the achievement of scientific and technological outcomes that were previously viewed as extremely difficult, if not impossible.

A Teaming Partner List is being compiled to facilitate the formation of new project teams. ARPA-E intends to make the Teaming Partner List available on ARPA–E eXCHANGE (https://ARPA–E-foa.energy.gov), ARPA–E’s online application portal, starting in July 2022. Once posted, The Teaming Partner List will be updated periodically, until the close of the Full Application period, to reflect the addition of new Teaming Partners who have provided their information.

Any organization that would like to be included on the Teaming Partner list should complete all required fields in the following link: https://ARPA–E-foa.energy.gov/Applicantprofile.aspx. Required information includes: Organization Name; Contact Name; Contact Address; Contact Email; Contact Phone; Organization Type; and brief description of your Background, Interest, and Capabilities.

By submitting a response to this Announcement, respondents consent to the publication of the above-referenced information By facilitating and publishing this Teaming Partner List, ARPA-E is not endorsing, sponsoring, or otherwise evaluating the qualifications of the individuals and organizations that are self-identifying themselves for placement on this Teaming Partner List. ARPA-E reserves the right to remove any inappropriate responses to this Announcement (including lack of sufficient relevance to, or experience with, the technical topic of the Announcement). ARPA–E will not pay for the provision of any information, nor will it compensate any respondents for the development of such information. Responses submitted via email or other means will not be considered.

This Announcement does not constitute a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA). No FOA exists at this time. Applicants must refer to the final Exploratory Topic, expected to be issued in August 2022 under the FOAs noted at the beginning of this Teaming Partner List, for instructions on submitting an application, the desired technical metrics, and for the terms and conditions of funding.

[1] M. Fleischmann and S. Pons, “Electrochemically induced nuclear fusion of deuterium,” J. Electroanal. Chem. Int. Electrochem. 261, 201 (1989); https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-0728(89)80006-3.

[2] For historical accounts of LENR, see, e.g. J. R. Huizenga, Cold Fusion: The Scientific Fiasco of the Century (University of Rochester Press, Rochester, NY, 1993); E. Storms, The Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (World Scientific, Singapore, 2007); S. B. Krivit, Hacking the Atom (Pacific Oaks Press, San Rafael, CA, 2016); and S. B. Krivit, Fusion Fiasco (Pacific Oaks Press, San Rafael, CA, 2016).

[3] See, e.g., https://lenr-canr.org and the bibliographies of the books by Storms and Krivit in footnote 2.

[4] See, e.g., the books by Huizenga and Krivit in footnote 2 for critical discussions of LENR evidence.

[5] https://arpa-e-foa.energy.gov/Default.aspx?Search=nonconventional%20fusion&SearchType=.

[6] https://arpa-e.energy.gov/events/low-energy-nuclear-reactions-workshop.

[7] See C.P. Berlinguette et. al., “Revisiting the cold case of cold fusion,” Nature 570, 45 (2019) and references therein, and presentations at the ARPA-E LENR Workshop: https://arpa-e.energy.gov/events/low-energy-nuclear-reactions-workshop.

Source

About New Energy Times and Steven B. Krivit

See also 2014 DOE ARPA-E LENR funding

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