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.
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.
Head of U.K. Fusion Walks Back Claims For Planned $22 Billion Reactor was last modified: October 7th, 2022 by sbkrivit
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.
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.
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.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems founders (left-to-right): Martin Greenwald, Dan Brunner, Zach Hartwig, Brandon Sorbom, Robert Mumgaard, and Dennis Whyte.
I do not know any fusion scientist who has devoted years in graduate school and more years in research intending to mislead or defraud anybody. I assume fusion scientists all have the best of intentions.
They long ago recognized the shortsightedness of a civilization built on the tenuous foundation of finite fossil fuels. They understood the environmental consequences of burning those fuels.
They knew that the Utopian dream of controlled nuclear fusion on Earth was a long shot. One of the holy grails of science, fusion was a noble quest, and they wanted to try their best.
Yet, somewhere along the road to fusion, many of the fusion scientists — specifically those in the public spotlight — lost their way. They forgot what it means to be a scientist: show your data, explain your assumptions, define your terms.
Walk Before You Run
A baby cannot be expected to go directly from crawling to running without the intermediate accomplishment of walking. Likewise, experimental fusion reactors cannot be expected to go directly from their current state to the demonstration of reactor net power, not even for a second.
A required intermediate step is the plasma — the superheated fuel in which the fusion reactions take place — achieving net power. Plasma net power, if it ever happens, would occur when the particles in the fusion plasma produce more thermal power than is used to heat the fuel. However, plasma net power does not account for any of the electrical power required to operate a fusion reactor. When scientists compare the output to input, plasma net power accounts for only the heat that is injected into the reaction chamber. Plasma net power does not account for even the electrical power required to heat the fuel. It is certainly a prerequisite for a practical fusion reactor, but it is only the first of many prerequisites.
The SPARC reactor, designed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is designed to achieve only plasma net power. However, the MIT fusion scientists have sold SPARC as if it were designed for reactor net power. The term for this procedure is a bait-and-switch swindle.
Reactor net power occurs when the particles in the fusion plasma produce more power than is used to operate the reactor. Reactor net power accounts for all the electrical power required to operate a fusion reactor, including the electrical power required to heat the fuel. This is the second prerequisite for a practical fusion reactor.
The third prerequisite for a practical fusion reactor is that the value of the electrical energy that the reactor could sell must be at least as much as the cost to build and operate the reactor. All fusion scientists learn about these three prerequisites in school; they are taught by their formal names: scientific breakeven, engineering breakeven, and economic breakeven.
The best fusion power result so far took place in 1997. In that experiment, the reactor came 67% of the way to producing plasma net power (scientific breakeven). In terms of producing reactor net power, that experiment came only 1% of the way (engineering breakeven). Progress toward economic breakeven would be even further away. After economic breakeven, another quantum step would be required for a fusion reactor to become commercially relevant.
News releases abound with claims of new record temperatures and plasma durations achieved. These fusion research organizations would have us believe that commercial viability is close at hand. None of these claims has any bearing on power production; they are part of the fusion hype.
In 2015, Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works group created a media sensation claiming that it would be delivering a working prototype of a fusion reactor by 2020. I asked them at the time for the best power result that they had achieved in their experiments. They told me that they had no data to share. It’s now seven years later. They have no working prototype of a fusion reactor.
Three week ago, I asked Michl Binderbauer, the chief executive officer of Tri-Alpha Energy for the best power result TAE has achieved. He didn’t respond.
High-energy physicist L. J. Reinders, who is an author of two critical books about fusion, told me about a conversation he had with a friend of his, one of the senior scientists for another private fusion research company, Tokamak Energy Ltd. Reinders asked his friend, “Do you really think you will be putting energy onto the grid with your reactor?” His friend said, with a laugh, “It depends on what you mean by grid.” Fusion funding, scientists have found, requires spinning science.
No investor or member of the public cares about a fusion reactor that produces only plasma net power because that achievement would not be enough to produce one Watt of useful power. This is why fusion scientists have created the illusion that their next fusion machines are expected to produce reactor net power. This is what happened with the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor; this is what is happening with the MIT SPARC reactor design.
Out of Time, Out of Money
For 43 years, the MIT Nuclear Science and Engineering Department had relied on taxpayers’ money to pay for MIT’s experimental fusion reactors. Fusion had been perceived as a research activity of national importance but one that was so costly that only the federal government could financially underwrite it.
But by 2013, members of Congress were getting weary of the perennial unfulfilled promises of fusion and were doubting whether fusion was a good use of public funds. The MIT fusion department was running out of time and out of money. Congress warned the MIT scientists that the end was coming.
This was ironic, according to MIT engineering professor Dennis Whyte, who later became the director of the fusion department. In a TEDx lecture, he told the audience that he and his students had just designed a new fusion reactor that could produce 250 million Watts of electricity 24/7. The fuel, Whyte said, was the greatest lure of fusion energy.
“The fuel is so abundant because it is essentially hydrogen. It actually occurs naturally in seawater,” he said, “and it’s effectively unlimited to all people on Earth.”
Already Out of Fuel
A 250 megawatt fusion reactor producing electricity 24/7, running on “essentially hydrogen” from sea water, was an extraordinarily bold claim for an “energy source” that had never produced one usable Watt of power. But Whyte was far from alone in claiming that the fuel for nuclear fusion could come from sea water. Many of his peers in the fusion community regularly promulgated the false claim that the fuel for fusion was “abundant, virtually inexhaustible, and equally accessible to everyone, everywhere.”
A few months ago, we learned that such fuel claims were nonsense. We also learned that fusion scientists knew that tritium did not exist abundantly, virtually inexhaustibly, or equally accessible to anyone, anywhere, despite what the scientists had told us.
Instead, fusion scientists subscribed to a shared belief, imagining that cost-effective methods existed, or would be developed, to extract lithium from sea water. They imagined that a process existed by which natural lithium would be safely enriched in industrial quantities. They imagined that enrichment plants existed based on such a process. The belief system included an imagined process by which fusion reactors could breed tritium from enriched lithium faster than the reactors would consume and lose tritium.
Whyte must have known that tritium did not exist as a natural resource, but he may have reasonably assumed that other scientists in the fusion community had tangible solutions for the other required fuel miracles.
Whyte pleaded with the TEDx audience to educate themselves.
“Our lab is about to close,” he said. “The federal government is threatening to remove all of our funding, and it will, in fact, cut off this extremely promising area of research toward this energy source.”
Fusion has been perpetually promising.
MIT administrators were apparently impressed with Whyte’s enthusiasm, and on Nov. 19, 2014, MIT announced that Whyte had been appointed to head the fusion department. In the announcement, MIT even featured the TEDx talk in which Whyte described the “250 MW electric fusion reactor” that could “run 24/7” on “essentially hydrogen” from sea water.
The Inevitable
As Whyte feared, the inevitable came in 2016, when Congress finally told MIT that it was done. Whyte spoke to Rivka Galchen of The New Yorker about this moment.
“On September 30, 2016, MIT’s old experimental fusion device, which had been running for twenty-five years, was obliged to shut down by midnight. ‘This device graduated more than a hundred and fifty Ph.Ds,’ Dennis Whyte said wistfully.”
No reactor; no graduate students. No graduate students; no graduate school. Facing careers on the verge of irrelevance, MIT fusion professors and recent fusion graduates needed to sell fusion; they needed a financial infusion. And so it began.
A New SPARC
On June 16, 2017, the MIT news office published the first article about the SPARC reactor concept developed by Whyte and his students.
“[SPARC will be] the world’s first demonstration of net energy from a fusion experiment — making SPARC the first fusion device to make more power than it consumes.”
There it was, Whyte’s first and blatant bait-and-switch claim. From context and history, I knew that SPARC was not designed for reactor, or device, net power but only plasma net power.
However, I gave Whyte the benefit of the doubt. The following day, I asked him two simple questions: What is the expected input power, and what is the output power for the reactor? He replied the same day.
“Thanks for your interest, but the requested information is reserved for our private-sector sponsors,” Whyte wrote.
Whyte knew, by my questions, that I knew that SPARC was not designed to be the first fusion device to make more power than it consumes. A few days later, MIT removed the article entirely.
But the MIT fusion department had lost its federal funding. The university itself was unwilling to front the money to build SPARC and to keep its fusion department alive. Whyte needed cash. He also needed a less-noticeable way to create the false appearance that the SPARC reactor was designed to make more power than it would consume.
Capital Infusion
On Oct. 6, 2017, Commonwealth Fusion Systems LLC (CFS) was incorporated. According to the company, there were six co-founders: Dennis Whyte, Martin Greenwald, Zach Hartwig, Dan Brunner, Brandon Sorbom, and Robert Mumgaard.
Greenwald was the deputy director of the MIT fusion department, and Hartwig was a professor in the department. Brunner was a research scientist, Sorbom was a postdoctoral researcher, and Mumgaard was a postdoctoral fellow.
The first available Securities and Exchange Commission Form D filing, dated June 25, 2018, lists the following as officers and/or directors: Mumgaard, Brunner, Sorbom, Massimiliano Pieri, and Katie Rae.
Pieri works for Eni, an Italian energy company. When CFS was formed, Pieri was listed as the Vice President for Cooperation with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Eni was CFS’s first investor. Rae is the chief executive officer of The Engine, a venture capital firm founded by MIT.
Half a year later, on March 9, 2018, MIT announced its new collaboration with CFS. Eni and other investors had committed more than $30 million for MIT fusion research. Simultaneously, MIT’s vice president for research, Maria Zuber, who oversees research integrity for MIT, wrote an Op-Ed article in the Boston Globe promoting fusion and CFS. The plan to salvage the MIT fusion department was working.
One paragraph in the MIT press release made promises about the power SPARC would demonstrate:
SPARC is designed to produce about 100 MW of heat … . It will produce … 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.
The SPARC reactor couldn’t possibly power a small city because the planned 100 MW heat output was only the planned plasma power output. That 100 MW value didn’t account for any of the electrical input power. A full accounting of power in and power out wouldn’t leave enough for one light bulb. (I sent my power calculations to Whyte and Greenwald and asked them to identify any errors, but they did not respond.)
The phrase “ultimate technical milestone” was also an attempt to imply that SPARC was designed for reactor net power, as was the phrase “positive net energy from fusion.” The more honest claim would have been “positive net energy from a fusion plasma.”
Understandably, science journalists were unable to decipher the linguistic subterfuge in the press release. At Nature magazine, for example, science journalist Jeff Tollefson wrote that, with the SPARC reactor, the MIT/CFS team “hopes to develop a prototype reactor that can generate more energy than it consumes.”
New Tricks
On July 27, 2019, CFS issued a press release and began using new language. It said that, by 2025, SPARC will demonstrate net energy gain from fusion for the first time in history. The MIT/CFS team also began using the variations “net energy from fusion” and “net-energy fusion machine.” In all such instances, the team was talking only about plasma net power, never reactor net power, knowing full well that the public has always been expecting a fusion reactor with net power.
News outlets like Chemical & Engineering News interpreted the press release as it was intended. Melody M. Bomgardner wrote in C&EN that the SPARC reactor was designed to demonstrate net energy gain by 2025.
Jackpot!
In September 2020, the MIT/CFS team published a group of seven papers in a peer-reviewed journal. The team said the reactor might be able to produce a fusion plasma with not just twice the power injected to heat the fuel but, now, ten times the power. On paper, the reactor design had made a 500% improvement in two years.
Again, the press release worked as intended. Henry Fountain, writing for The New York Times, said that the SPARC reactor could “produce as much as 10 times the energy it consumes.”
And by the Fall of 2021, with such consistently and strategically placed false claims, CFS had attracted 72 investors and sold $1.8 billion of equity in the company. Mumgaard spoke with Nature magazine about SPARC:
MIT and CFS together are preparing to build what Mumgaard calls “the first fusion machine that makes net energy” — producing more energy than goes into it. Named SPARC, it is being constructed in Devens, Massachusetts. Mumgaard says it will be running by the end of 2025 and will be “commercially relevant” because it will generate around 100 MW of power.
Not only had MIT/CFS had deceived the New York Times, they also fooled Nature, ostensibly the world’s most authoritative general-science magazine. The con was in full swing, with many of the investors, like Safar Partners, issuing their own press releases saying that SPARC will be “the world’s first commercially relevant net energy fusion machine.”
Among the CFS investors was Footprint Coalition, which was thrilled that the fuel source was endless, as the company wrote in a press release:
All of this money is pouring in for one reason: fusion has the potential to create hundreds of megawatts of energy from a resource as common as a glass of seawater — and without any long-term radioactive waste.
According to Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, a prestigious law firm that specializes in business, securities, and intellectual property law, the 2021 CFS “Series B round was led by Tiger Global Management, with participation by new investors, including (in alphabetical order) Bill Gates; Coatue; DFJ Growth; Emerson Collective; Footprint Coalition; Google; JIMCO Technology Fund, part of JIMCO, the Jameel Family’s global investment arm; John Doerr; JS Capital; Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures; Senator Investment Group; a major university endowment; and a pension plan. Also participating were existing investors, including Breakthrough Energy Ventures; The Engine; Eni; Equinor Ventures; Fine Structure Ventures; Future Ventures; Hostplus; Khosla Ventures; Lowercarbon; Moore Strategic Ventures; Safar Partners; Schooner Capital; Soros Fund Management LLC; Starlight Ventures; Temasek; and others.”
Although we know from the SEC filing that there are at least 72 investors, we don’t know how many individuals are represented by those 72 investors. For example, we don’t know how many elderly retirees have had a portion of their pension plan invested in CFS on their behalf.
#132 MIT’s Road to Nuclear Fusion Is Paved With Good Intentions was last modified: January 22nd, 2023 by sbkrivit
Several months ago, New Energy Timesbroke the story that the fuel required to make energy from nuclear fusion does not exist. Fusion experts have now concurred.
“No need to worry,” some fusion experts now say; there will be a way to make the fuel when it’s needed for commercial reactors. However, other fusion experts have been more realistic about the problem.
Today, I report my conversation with Tanabe Tetsuo, the editor of the book Tritium:Fuel of Fusion Reactors. I also report my interaction with Andrew Holland, the spokesman for a collection of private companies working on fusion research.
Fusion Fuel Basics
For decades, fusion scientists have been saying that there is enough fuel in ocean water to provide fusion power to humanity for billions of years. This is true only for the deuterium fuel source, an isotope of hydrogen.
Nearly all fusion reactor designs — certainly the most scientifically credible — require a 50-50 mixture of deuterium and tritium. Tritium is another isotope of hydrogen. Normal hydrogen won’t work for fusion on Earth. Deuterium alone won’t work well enough. Neither will tritium by itself.
Fusion scientists only occasionally told the public that tritium did not exist in nature as a fuel source. When they did disclose this fact, they said that sufficient quantities of enriched lithium, from which tritium could, in theory, be made, were available. They are not. Moreover, there is no environmentally acceptable method, let alone facilities based on such a method, to enrich lithium with the required levels of the lithium-6 isotope.
The Secret Leaks Out
Thiéry Pierre, a plasma physicist and senior scientist at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, in Marseille, France, was the first scientist to tell me about the absence of fusion fuel. After I published my news stories about the missing tritium and enriched lithium, Tony Donné, the program manager for EUROfusion, was the first fusion scientist to confirm my analysis.
Donné is the program manager for EUROfusion. Donné’s organization is responsible for designing the EU DEMO reactor, Europe’s successor to ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor under construction in France.
In February 2022, Donné’s colleagues published a 32-article special issue of a peer-reviewed journal discussing the DEMO design. Not one article addressed the fact that there is no non-military supply of enriched lithium-6, and thus no source of fuel for the EU DEMO or commercial fusion reactors.
Robert Louis Hirsch, the former head of the Controlled Thermonuclear Research division of the Atomic Energy Commission, was the second fusion scientist to confirm my analysis.
Tanabe Tetsuo
In June, I contacted Professor Tanabe Tetsuo, the editor of the Springer book Tritium: Fuel of Fusion Reactors. Tetsuo’s book includes contributed chapters about many facets of tritium as a fuel for fusion reactors. He and his co-authors obviously understood that tritium was scarce and that the element would need to be manmade, by breeding it from enriched lithium. However, the book says nothing about where they expect to get enriched lithium. The only thing Tetsuo had written about lithium sources applied to natural lithium, not to enriched lithium.
“Natural lithium … is quite abundant in nature when recovery of lithium from the sea water is developed,” Tetsuo wrote.
He knew that a cost-effective method of recovering lithium from seawater did not exist yet. In 2020, journalist Bob Service, writing for Science, explained that such efforts have not proved cost-effective compared to mined lithium.
I asked Tetsuo about whether he or his co-authors discussed anywhere in the book the absence of an environmentally acceptable method of producing enriched lithium. He said no.
I pointed out that he had said several times in the book that its purpose was to focus on the practical aspects needed to realize a fusion reactor as an energy source, specifically, as the title indicates, relating to the fuel.
I then asked him whether he had realized that an environmentally acceptable method to enrich lithium for fusion reactors did not exist. He initially denied that lithium enrichment was an issue.
“Various techniques for enrichment of any isotopes are well-established,” Tetsuo wrote. “The question on environmental contamination by the enrichment is dependent on the technique, but in general, it is possible without environmental contamination.”
In my previous research, I had located work by Thomas Giegerich and five co-authors about the challenges with lithium enrichment. I pointed out several facts that Giegerich et al. had stated in a slide presentation and in a peer-reviewed paper:
No industrial-scale facility exists today that can meet the requirements for fusion power plants.
Only the toxic mercury-based methods produce enriched lithium at high rates.
Other enrichment methods have been tested in laboratories but have never reached high production values.
Unavailability of lithium enrichment facilities that could meet the requirements of reactors after ITER is a threat to the success of fusion.
After providing this information to Tanabe, I asked whether he could scientifically defend his statement that “various techniques for enrichment” of lithium without environmental contamination are well-established.
“You are right,” Tanabe wrote, “I did not intend to deny the importance of Li enrichment.”
Tanabe said that the reason environmentally benign methods of enriching lithium had not yet been developed was that the only purpose for lithium-6 so far had been for nuclear bombs. He wrote that lithium enrichment for fusion at “an industrial scale will require significant research and development.”
Andrew Holland
In January, Andrew Holland, the chief executive officer of the Washington, D.C.-based company Fusion Industry Association, gave a presentation to President Biden’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). FIA is not recognized as a tax exempt organization by the IRS, as listed in the Guidestar database, but its parent company, the American Security Project, is. Publicly available IRS filings show Holland in 2015 as a senior fellow employed by ASP and, by 2019, as secretary and chief operating officer of ASP. I knew that Holland was perpetuating the fusion fuel “sea water” claim.
Screen capture from Holland’s Fusion Industry Association Web site.
As Holland conveyed it, fusion was the panacea for all the world’s ills: “Fusion will light the darkness, provide the jobs and industrial base for the 21st century, and make for a more peaceful world.” Holland urged the council to encourage the federal government to give public money to private companies trying to commercialize fusion.
After Holland’s presentation, I spoke to the council and explained the problem.
One of the PCAST members who contacted me afterward was Eric Horvitz, the chief scientific officer for Microsoft Corp.
“Thanks for the info on deuterium at the last meeting,” Horvitz wrote. “What is your high-level interest, and what is your overall assessment about prospects for fusion as feasible? Can you send a compact summary on the latter?”
I sent him my compact summary: “There’s no fuel source. The game’s over.”
I later sent a document package to the PCAST administrator, and she included this in the distribution packet to the PCAST members. It is available on the White House Web site. In my package, I also included my transcription of Holland’s presentation and fusion-related follow-up questions and answers during the meeting.
The council was not without self-interest. Maria Zuber is one of the three co-chairs. Zuber is a geophysics professor and the vice president for research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been actively promoting, in press releases and news articles, the MIT collaboration with Commonwealth Fusion Systems since its inception. At MIT, Zuber is responsible for intellectual property, research integrity, and research relationships with the federal government. Katie Rae, an invited speaker to that PCAST meeting, is a director of Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Rae is also the CEO of The Engine, a venture capital firm founded by MIT.
Holland’s Response
After I gave my presentation to the council about the non-existent fuel, Holland sent a rebuttal to the council. It’s included in the public comment packet. (A copy of the letter is also at the bottom of this article.) Holland does not have specific expertise in science, let alone nuclear science. His expertise is in government affairs and politics. We can be reasonably sure, however, that, in formulating his response, he consulted the best and brightest among his fusion industry constituents.
In his rebuttal, Holland confirmed that the fuel for nuclear fusion does not exist, but he did not use those words. Instead, he declared that “the U.S. will have stable, reliable fuel sources for fusion energy.” Nothing in Holland’s rebuttal explained how U.S. scientists planned to create or find those fuel sources.”
One statement in Holland’s rebuttal says that, for tritium, “the primary U.S. supply comes from the DOE Savannah River National Lab.”
Thirty years ago, the Savannah River Site did provide tritium to the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, also a DOE laboratory, for its Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor. Scott Shaw, a public affairs officer for SRNL, told New Energy Times that the tritium produced at the Savannah River Site will not be available for commercial applications, that it’s only for the military’s nuclear weapons stockpile.
In his rebuttal, Holland also told the council that “lithium can be extracted from ocean water, where reserves are practically unlimited.” Holland concluded with a pitch to accelerate public funding for what are now primarily private fusion efforts:
A fusion-powered economy would fundamentally end such concerns about the geopolitics of energy. Fusion turns energy from a resource that is mined or extracted to one that is manufactured. A fusion-powered future will be one where the only constraint on energy supplies and availability is the cost and availability of a manufactured good.
Holland’s claim of geopolitical energy harmony requires a vivid imagination. Five countries have 98 percent of the world’s lithium reserves, so the lithium for Holland’s fusion future would have to come from sea water. But no cost-effective way to extract lithium from sea water has been invented, despite the immense and present demand for it for batteries. After the invention of an economical sea water extraction method, Holland’s fusion future requires seven enrichment and breeding physics miracles.
Bold Decadal Vision for Commercial Fusion Energy
As a follow-up, the White House and the Department of Energy conducted a meeting on March 17, 2022, called “Developing a Bold Decadal Vision for Commercial Fusion Energy” to promote fusion. (Agenda) (“Fact Sheet”) The organizers said that “many technical achievements” have occurred. They listed the following three results from recent fusion experiments.
JET Experiment
The organizers said that Joint European Torus (JET) in the UK “doubled its 24-year-old record with a five-second, high-power pulse, limited only by the experimental hardware and not the plasma stability.”
However, the organizers didn’t explain what the “high-power” 59 MJ measurement really meant; it was just a measurement of the energy of the particles produced in the reaction last year. It had nothing to do with the energy consumed by the reaction, let alone consumed by the overall reactor.
The only measurement that will ever provide direct bearing on the practical application of fusion is net energy (or net power) produced by a reactor. In the case of JET, the reactor consumed 3,500 MJ of electricity compared with the 59 MJ of thermal energy produced with the fusion particles. The reactor didn’t produce energy; it lost 3,441 MJ of energy, electricity that it drew from the grid. This means that, in the 2021 experiments, the JET reactor lost 98 percent of the energy it needed to run. And that’s the closest a fusion reactor has ever come to breaking even.
But there’s another problem with the 2021 JET results, as shown in the blue and red curves in the image below. Although these two new experiments (DTE2 42 MJ and DTE2 59 MJ) produced fusion particles with double the energy produced in 1997 (DTE1 22 MJ), the 2021 experiments showed a consistent decrease in power over the 5-second runs. This is not a good omen. Daniel Jassby, a retired plasma physicist from the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, provided more-extensive scientific examination on the new JET results in a May 2022 article.
2021 JET results (blue and red curves) compared with 1997 results (black curves)
National Ignition Facility
The organizers said that the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California “achieved an energy yield eight times higher than its previous record and reached the cusp of ignition, providing us a second fusion approach with similar physics performance as the tokamak.”
The organizers didn’t explain that, despite achieving ignition and despite running for an infinitesimal duration of one-billionth of a second, NIF — funded by U.S. taxpayers to the tune of $3.5 billion — consumed 400 MJ of energy, losing 99.7 percent of the energy it consumed.
China’s EAST Reactor
The organizers celebrated the fact that “China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) sustained fusion reactions for 17 minutes at 126 million degrees Fahrenheit – five times hotter than the sun.”
The organizers didn’t explain that, in these experiments, researchers used only 100% deuterium fuel, which no credible fusion scientists think will be possible as a source of fusion energy on Earth. Although a 17-minute pulse certainly was useful to test some characteristics of the EAST reactor, power production was not one of them.
Generational Transference
In 2012, the international fusion community, through the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency, took a major step to promote fusion to younger generations. The IAEA published Fusion Physics, an 1,100-page book, intended to be “a tutorial book for post-graduate students.”
In Chapter 1, the authors made a “Case for Fusion,” based on three requirements of a new energy source. One was fuel availability.
“[It] must lead to sustainable development of the entire world, so must be based on virtually inexhaustible resources, available globally without having to depend on resources from politically unstable regions,” the authors wrote.
Here’s what the IAEA authors wrote about the fuel:
It has to be bred from lithium, which is widely available in the Earth’s crust and also in the oceans. … The fuel is therefore virtually inexhaustible and is likely to last several tens of thousands of years. Secondly, fusion fuel is readily accessible from everywhere. This gives tremendous energy security to all nations and is to be contrasted with the politically inflammable uneven distribution of fossil fuels such as oil (6% of the nations own more than 66% of the oil wealth of the world).
Let’s compare those numbers with lithium reserves: 3% of the nations in the world own more than 98% of the lithium wealth in the world.
The authors of the IAEA tome said nothing about the necessity, let alone lack, of enriched lithium. They said nothing about an effective way to harvest lithium from sea water.
To finish things off, credit is due to the following fusion scientists who, in 2020, courageously explained that, even if enriched lithium was available, there is no known way to breed tritium fast enough:
Mohamed Abdou, University of California, Los Angeles
Marco Riva, University of California, Los Angeles
Alice Ying, University of California, Los Angeles
Christian Day, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
Alberto Loarte, ITER Organization
Baylor, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Paul Humrickhouse, Idaho National Laboratory
Thomas F. Fuerst, Idaho National Laboratory
Seungyon Cho, National Fusion Research Institute, Republic of Korea
(References and Sources)
Open Questions
In the past 70 years, who inside the fusion community knew that the fuel needed for commercial fusion reactors didn’t exist? What efforts did they make to inform their peers? Who inside the fusion community did not know? Why did they not know? How was a worldwide science effort, public and private, with billions of dollars invested, enmeshed in a multi-generational career track, founded and fostered in light of this fuel illusion?
Without Fuel, the Fusion Game Is Over (PCAST – President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology) was last modified: December 5th, 2023 by sbkrivit
