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Saturday 12 June 2021
By Steven B. Krivit

Friday, E&E News, under the headline “Biden Fires Fire from DOE Merger Plans,” reported that President Joe Biden said “no” to recent pressure from the US merger lobby.

E&E News reported that “fusion energy advocates in Congress and in private industry are protesting the Department of Energy’s lack of support for a pilot reactor this decade.”

Biden’s Department of Energy budget request for fiscal year 2022, E&E News reported, “has no funds to begin work on a pilot reactor project proposed by two committees of American scientists and fusion contractors as a critical step to keep the United States in competition with European projects and Chinese, supporters of the efforts said.

Times have changed. Decades ago, America’s leading fusion scientists told Congress that the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) was the way, the only way. My documentary film, “ITER, The Grand Illusion: A Forensic Investigation of Power Claims,” contains all the gory details.

Now, four and a half years after first revealing that America’s leading fusion scientists tricked Congress into spending public money on ITER, America’s leading fusion scientists insist that ITER is not the way – for them.

E&E News spoke with Andrew Holland, President and CEO of the Fusion Industry Association, a three-year-old public relations organization that represents the many private companies looking to make a profit from the merger. Holland complained that the federal government was not committing enough public money to the idea of ​​a national public-private fusion pilot plant.

“There just isn’t enough money to do the work that needs to be done to get a pilot smelter plant,” Holland said.

The insistence of the American fusion lobby that ITER is no longer the way is more than mere hypocrisy.

The first paragraph of a report in Physics today summed up the proposal of leading US fusion scientists: “If fusion is to help decarbonize power generation by mid-century, the US must start building a pilot fusion power plant at network scale long before a self-sustaining fusion reaction was the first. achieved. “

Perhaps a more relevant response to the proposal was this succinct comment from a person identified as DM Bell, who wrote: “By this reasoning, the United States should also build a public-private flying pig project long before. that the flying pigs are not affected. “

Bell’s point was not only witty, but also fair. When Robert Goldston, the sixth director of Princeton Plasma Physics Laborator, pleaded for public support in an article he posted on the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists website, I asked him how he expected someone is taking the pilot plant proposal seriously. Towards the end of our public conversation, Goldston wrote, “This new idea is to put electricity on the grid and gain a learning by doing experience earlier. “

I replied to Goldston:

You have no experimental evidence that a fusion reactor can produce energy from fusion at a rate greater than the heating power injected (scientific break-even / scientific feasibility).

You have no experimental evidence that a fusion reactor can produce energy from fusion at the same rate that it consumes electricity (technical break-even point).

The most documented and credible fusion reactor design, ITER, if functioning properly, will reach technical equilibrium around 2045. This still will not produce enough thermal energy from fusion to deliver a net watt. electricity.

Yet you imagine that now, after 70 years of trial and error, you can skip the middle steps and go straight to designing a reactor that would produce clean electricity to put on the grid. And you imagine you can do it by more “learning by doing” Edisonian trial and error.

Cartoon by Sidney Harris