A Conspiracy of Misleading Information About Fusion Power? (Yes)

Conspiracy theories are sometimes false, others are occasionally true, and it can take some digging or research, and critical thinking skills to figure out which is which.

I chose the words "misleading information" in the title carefully, which are well supported by evidence. The article by "New Energy Times" gets most of the facts right but they also refer to "lies" in addition to "misleading", and I'm not willing to call them "lies" at this point, but "misleading" definitely fits. Let's look at the New Energy Times article about the problem:

Evidence of the ITER Power Deception

This report summarizes the way that some ITER proponents have misled non-experts about the potential power output of the ITER experimental nuclear fusion reactor, once it becomes operational. The misrepresentation is not exclusive to ITER; it has been a systemic problem in the fusion community for decades. ITER is simply the largest and most recent fusion project.

Specifically, the proponents conflated the power gain ratio of the plasma (technically known as the fusion Q) with the power gain ratio of the device (technically known as the engineering Q). They took the value for Q-fusion and convinced non-experts that it was the value for Q-engineering. They did this not only by switching the Q-values but also by hiding the actual input power required for the reactor. This report also identifies people and organizations who have published false statements about the ITER design and function based on the information they were given by the ITER organization.

A decade ago, Neil Calder, a former ITER spokesman, taught attendees at his international communicators’ workshop how to promote ITER to the world:

False and misleading 2008 statement by Neil Calder, former head of ITER public communications (source)

So perhaps around 2025, we are told that ITER will get 500 MW out from 50MW in. Is this a lie? I wouldn't call it that, but it is misleading, because it's not clear which Q they are talking about. The scientists who work on the project know very well it refers to fusion Q which is, how much heat do you get out of the plasma, compared to how much heat you put into the plasma. But some articles don't explain that very well, and even if they try, they still don't give the "total" Q of the total energy out compared to the total energy in, in fact most of the articles I've read don't even give figures for the total energy in, you have to dig for that.

So what is the total Q? According to Sabine Hossenfelder, a respected scientist, one figure for the total energy in was cited as 400 MW. And she also points out that the 500 MW of heat is not the kind of usable electrical power we need, and it would be very optimistic to think we could get only 50% losses when we convert the 500MW out into electricity, so let's say the output will probably be less than 250 MW.

So according to Dr. Hossenfelder's figures, the reality is more like 400 MW total power in and less than 250 MW of usable electrical power out, so rough ballpark educated estimate is we would be lucky to get half the usable power out:

In Nuclear power plants for example, 500 MW of heat energy would typically result in only a third of that energy in electrical power, the other 2/3 being losses, so a more realistic estimate than Dr. Hossenfelder's is 1/3 of 500MW or 167 MW, considerably less than her 250 MW estimate.

Thermal Efficiency of Nuclear Power Plants

nuclear power plants usually have efficiency about 33%. In modern nuclear power plants the overall thermodynamic efficiency is about one-third (33%), so 3000 MWth of thermal power from the fission reaction is needed to generate 1000 MWe of electrical power.

So that's why claiming the output is 10 times greater than the input is so misleading, when the reality is that the usable electricity will likely be less than half of the total power in.

And she says this is not just true of ITER which uses magnetic confinement of the plasma to create fusion, but misleading information is also true of the other major fusion power technology which fires lasers at pellets, instead of using magnetic confinement. The "heat in" power to heat the pellets is based on laser output, but she says the lasers probably have an efficiency from 1% to 10% so the actual input is from 10 times to 100 times greater than the commonly cited figure used for Q (fusion). This is Hossenfelder's explanation:

How close is nuclear fusion power?

How close is nuclear fusion to break-even? If you trust the headlines we're getting close and the international project ITER is going to be the first to produce energy from fusion power. But not so fast. Scientists have, accidentally or deliberately, come to use a very misleading quantity to measure their progress. Unfortunately we're much farther away from generating fusion power than the headlines suggest.

Phillip Ball's article in the Guardian is here:

A lightbulb moment for nuclear fusion?

The one in Science Magazine is here:

More delays for ITER fusion project

The document from the European Parliament Assessment is here:

www.core.ac.uk...

Dr. Hossenfelder points out this problem goes back decades, when at time index 6:34 she shows this 1988 breakeven terminology use recommended by european parliment committee for scientific and technological options assessment:

By the way, Hossenfelder is not against fusion power, she's for it. She just wants the fusion people to stop misleading the public so we don't get the wrong idea about how close it is.

So do you feel like you've been misled? Did you believe the claims about getting 10 times more power out than in, and think we were getting close to commercial fusion power? Or did you realize how misleading that figure was?

In the proposed 2025 ITER experiment claiming Q=10, do you agree with Dr. Hossenfelder's estimate that the total electrical power out may only be about half the power in (Q-total of about 0.57)? I come up with 167 MW electrical power out, divided by 300-400 MW power in which is a Q-total range from 0.42 to 0.56, but Hossenfelder does say her 0.57 estimate is calculated using optimistic assumptions. Either way, those are far from the Q=10 we hear from the media!

Well. I'm no egg head but if the usual out put of nuclear power plant now is 33% and ITER output is 50% is this not better. If it's true.

That’s the whole point of all that , it isn’t true.
a reply to: crayzeed

Very cool and interesting analysis.
The typical power generating efficiencies of various technologies are:
Between 32% and 42% for coal fired
32% to 38% for natural gas (including LNG)
Hydro about 80% but varies greatly depending on a host of factors
Wind in the ballpark of 32% with solar bringing up the rear somewhere near 22%
But the bottom line is the cost of MWh generated in relation to the return from the consumer.
Also if we are truly good stewards of our industry then we must figure in cost to build, cost to operate (which will include fueling if applicable, maintenance and rebuild,) and eventual decommissioning as well as any regulatory costs.
Basically ROI over simplified

originally posted by: crayzeed
Well. I'm no egg head but if the usual out put of nuclear power plant now is 33% and ITER output is 50% is this not better. If it's true.

33% cited in the OP is electrical output as a percentage of thermal output, which is probably a ballpark figure for any power plant that generates heat and converts it to electricity, such as nuclear fusion. I don't see why the figure would be drastically different for other sources of heat, such as fusion. That I don't expect to be significally different with fusion, though it is possible to improve on the 33%, but as Hossenfelder says 50% would be very optimistic and I think is probably not achievable in a rel power plant.

Nuclear fission power plants definitely generate more electricity than the total amount of power required to operate them.

It's not clear that we are anywhere near being able to do that with nuclear fusion, despite the misleading claims of output 10 times greater than input; that's not the total picture, only a small piece of it.

originally posted by: amicusbrief
Very cool and interesting analysis.
The typical power generating efficiencies of various technologies are:
Between 32% and 42% for coal fired
32% to 38% for natural gas (including LNG)
Hydro about 80% but varies greatly depending on a host of factors
Wind in the ballpark of 32% with solar bringing up the rear somewhere near 22%
But the bottom line is the cost of MWh generated in relation to the return from the consumer.
Also if we are truly good stewards of our industry then we must figure in cost to build, cost to operate (which will include fueling if applicable, maintenance and rebuild,) and eventual decommissioning as well as any regulatory costs.
Basically ROI over simplified

Your figures sound about right but it may require more digging to learn exactly what's included in those figures.

The more important point as you suggest is the total economics, which is what should really drive the feasibility of the technology. Nuclear fission has some problems in that area with costs that aren't properly accounted for, like the cost of disposing of the waste in the US since no permanent disposal method has yet been established, so we still don't really know the overall cost. Another cost is the nuclear fission power inductry relies on governments to cover the cost of disasters like Fukushima because as we saw happen in Japan, such disasters will bankrupt the power company running the power plant and have large externalities such as loss of land use around the disaster, for centuries.

I was trying to focus on the misleading power claims in the OP, but what's not so widely advertised is that nuclear fusion will also produce nuclear waste. In the "near term" for let's say 100 years, the nuclear waste from fusion may actually be more hazardous than the nuclear waste from fission, but due to shorter half-lives, after maybe 100 years the fusion waste is less of a long-term threat than the waste from fission. These waste costs have not been handled well in the fission industry, so it is something to be concerned about when discussing fusion waste also.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

So, what you're saying is this is lust a LARP to distract us from going all in on LFTR tech, that is here now (or could be with a little help from deep government pockets to flesh out any minor details still needing attention).

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Saw that video by Sabine a few days ago and gave it an instant like. I've always liked her no-nonsense approach. I still stand by the prediction I've said for years, which is we will never get more energy out than we put in from fusion. Obviously it's possible in a star due to the immense gravity causing a fusion reaction, but fusion reactors have to recreate those immense pressures by consuming energy, and I'm very far from convinced that process will result in a total power gain.

a reply to: amicusbrief

Also if we are truly good stewards of our industry then we must figure in cost to build, cost to operate (which will include fueling if applicable, maintenance and rebuild,) and eventual decommissioning as well as any regulatory costs.
Basically ROI over simplified

If they ever do manage to make fusion viable, I highly doubt it's going to be the cheap and abundant energy we've been promised, not after the countless billions of dollars which have been dumped into over decades, and for the foreseeable future. If we had of instead spent that money on increasing the safety and effectiveness of proven fission technology the world would have essentially no energy problems right now.

originally posted by: crayzeed
Well. I'm no egg head but if the usual out put of nuclear power plant now is 33% and ITER output is 50% is this not better. If it's true.

Apples and oranges. The thermodynamic efficiency of 33% and 50% is telling us the percentage of secondary energy/output energy that is created from the primary heat source. That is (in a nutshell) how much electricity will I get if I heat up water to X degrees to run a turbine.

This is not the same as saying how much energy I get out if it compared to the energy I needed to use to run it. Nuclear fission (not fusion) power plants output more energy than it takes to run them, because the energy stored in the uranium,, plutonium, or thorium can be extracted efficiently. The energy created by using the fission (splitting) of atoms is less than the amount of energy needed to sustain that fission as a usable energy source.

However, Fusion power (the harnessing of the energy created by fusing atoms together) currently requires more energy put into the system than they get out of the system. The energy created by the the fusion of atoms (say hydrogen) using our current technology is less than the amount of energy needed to make that fusion happen and be sustained.


tl;dr version:
It tales less power to run a traditional nuclear power plant than the plant produces. But it currently takes more power to run a fusion reactor than the fusion reactor produces.

Here's my fusion background: From about 2001 through 2006 I devoted myself to designing a fusion system that would work. The idea was to use colliding beam fusion, supplemented with electron cooling. Colliding beam fusion had been thought of long ago, but it is well known that small angle scattering will lead to particle losses too high to make fusion overcome the Carnot cycle limits on achieving usable power. However, by superimposing electron beams on the ion beams, one can correct for the small angle scattering. This too was known. The problem is that the large electron beam currents needed are considered to be unstable. I believe the reason for the instability can be fixed, however. Unfortunately, I could never find funding for my idea, and so after about seven years of trying to find funding I returned to other theoretical pursuits. My goal over four years ago was to find an aetherial derivation for the Lorentz Force Equation and then see if I could come up with a cheaper fusion design. But then I took a peak at gravity and I've been immersed in aetherial matters for the past four plus years. I do wish to return to fusion before too much longer, but I have a few aetherial loose ends I'm trying to wrap up first.

Commenting on your title, I don't think the issue you raise is necessarily a conspiracy, nor is it specific to fusion. Rather, it is the sad state of science in general. Almost everyone exaggerates and is a victim of believing in the status quo, and I think those are the central problems. In my 20's I decoded a successful professor's secret to success: assume you can improve five inputs each by a factor of two, and then the final proposal will result in a factor of 32 improvement over the present state of the art! But of course, the problem is that none of those factors of 2 were possible at the time of the proposal. People would begrudgingly say maybe - after all, a factor of two might be possible, and funding would flow, because a factor of 32 was indeed impressive!

Another example of exaggeration was when many of us were employed at the SSC, which was planned to be the worlds largest accelerator, the knives were out by jealous "small scientists" to take down the project, believing that the money would be better spent with them. An article appeared in SCIENCE magazine shortly after the SSC demise where the author (as I recall, it was the editor-in-chief of the magazine) said something along the lines of "what small scientist would get a $50K grant and then demand $500K!!!". Ah, yes. Those saintly and honest "small" scientists would NEVER do THAT! No Way! Their far superior morals would stop them. However, the claim was off. The SSC only had asked for an increase from $4B to $10B. Which was a factor of 2.5, not 10. I wrote in to SCIENCE to try to get a letter published saying that the "small scientists" routinely get $40K grants and then ask for $100K, trying to expose the political exaggeration. However, SCIENCE would not publish my letter. So the exaggeration disease had clearly affected the SCIENCE editorial staff as well as that successful professor mentioned above.

An offshoot of fusion science is work on plasma accelerators, and a few items can illuminate some problematic issues. I was more deeply familiar with plasma accelerators, than with controlled plasma fusion, so I have more specific knowledge about that. In one instance I calculated the amount of power inside of a theorized device and found it would have vaporized in something like a microsecond as I recall. When I showed the calculation to the team, they agreed I had not made an error. In another instance I calculated the background that will be generated at the detector if you use a "plasma accelerators" and it swamps any signal by many orders of magnitude, again as I recall. The hard scatterings scale inversely with energy. Transforming to the center of mass frame shows that the beam/plasma collisions are at much lower energy than the beam/beam collisions, and hence will occur much more often. The plasma will exist through the whole accelerator, the collision region is very small. So you get far more beam-plasma hard collisions than you do beam-beam collisions. (I have forgotten the density of the plasma used and the density of the oncoming beam at the collision point but I do recall the end result of the calculation - orders of magnitude more background than signal would appear in the detector.) Transforming back to the lab frame you see all of the collision products from the beam/plasma collisions are moving highly relativistically. If you try to shield it, you'll get a spray of secondary particles, although many will still be in the beampipe also. You can't bend it out of the way without large synchrotron radiation. So you could never really use a plasma accelerator for HEP, as all that spray would swamp the detectors. Another gem out of the plasma accelerator practitioners was the idea of "photon accelerators". Now of course you can't "accelerate" a photon, so this went even beyond exaggeration into an outright falsehood. When you dug into the paper, you saw that they were sensationalizing a mere frequency upshift from light scattering within the plasma in order to grab headlines.

continued on next post

Unfortunately, all this exaggeration and falsehood comes at a cost. When the SSC was struggling, articles were published saying that if we'd just wait we could do HEP far cheaper with plasma accelerators. It likely wasn't the reason for project cancellation, but all the exaggerations have been most unhelpful. And it seems (I am no longer up to date) that the plasma accelerator exaggerations continue on. Not long ago I saw a post here on ATS saying something about "why not try something new! plasma accelerators - the new kids on the block". But to claim newness now is quite an exaggeration. After over 30 years, the idea is no longer new.

Getting back to the more general critique, from what I can tell, the game is to "stretch the truth" as far as one can. And ignore any downsides as being something to keep working on later. This enables big promises to be made now, and keep the funding coming in. Then, you plan on future "strategic breakthroughs" to eventually fill in for what's been exaggerated and ignored.

Now I don't know that tokomaks have an existential flaw similar to the background production out of plasma accelerators, and I don't know enough about it to firmly comment there. I do know we've been 20 years away for 50 years, and so there is some exaggeration there, and I now frequently see five year predictions come and go. And I don't often see much about the problem of all those neutrons interacting with walls and superconductors, so I don't know how much of a problem that will eventually be in a tokomak, but it would seem to be of some concern.

There aren't really any useful brakes on the process of exaggerating to get funding when, in the end, no device is built to actually test things in a real world situation. Yes, a plasma was shown to be able to accelerate some particles. But not in any way useful as an accelerator to do HEP experiments on. Similarly, yes, fusion reactions take place in tokomaks. But tokamaks aren't at all close to achieving the desired end goal. These situations enable an environment where proposals can always hold up the noble goal (cheaper accelerators on the one hand, cheaper energy on the other) while the program never actually has to make the things that really achieve the end goal, only progress toward the goal is needed. Exaggerations are allowed and even welcome because the goal itself is so noble.

But, as said at the outset, I wouldn't go so far as to say it is a conspiracy. It is more along the lines of blind optimism coupled with group think. The practitioners may indeed believe the problems will be overcome "some day" and that the work being done now is the best that can be done.

However, the problem comes in because these efforts aren't operating in a vacuum. Within fusion, there are alternatives. The mirror program was shut down. Colliding beam fusion (such as ECOFusion) gets no support. The stretching of the truth for those presently with power and getting the money leads to stopping research into alternative areas that might lead to better outcomes. It is a real problem.

Most of the problem is “what is the fusion reactor’s purpose”??

ITER will never put energy on the grid. The purpose is to demonstrate nuclear fusion energy creation. DEMO is the next step after ITER. That reactor will have have the components to generate electricity.

Until then, both sides are playing lose and fast with terminology. Forget Q! You need to look at the Beta value which is the ratio of how well the fusion process is occurring in the reactor. A beta of 1, is the the magic value. Lockheed said that their fusion generator should have a beta value above 1!!

The easiest method to get energy out of your fusion reactor is to wrap the whole thing in a FLiBe blanket. It is a known (and proven tech use n fission reactors). One can centerfuge the lithium to collect tritium. And there are a bunch of naysayers on that topic alone!! The reactor gets irradiated and will have to be replaced (Commonwealth’s fusion reactor is modular for that reason) but the half life is something like 20 years. That is the trade off; nuclear waste for useful energy.

The smartest idea that I have seen is to use the fusion process to create medical isotopes along the way. That funds your reactor and we haven’t even talked about electricity!!

Me: Use supercritical CO2 turbines instead of steam. You can suck the CO2 from the atmosphere with all the electricity that you are generating!

One more time: you need to store the excess energy (flow batteries, heat like melting silicon bricks, or chemical storage including hydrogen) and you need to have efficient power transmission lines (keep your eyes open for room temperature superconductors) then we should see several different fusion reactors appear as well.

Until then it is just postering with quasi technical lingo to support your cause!!

Fusion will change everything! But we have just begun to explore plasma and the fusion process.

The future awaits!!