Sept. 2, 2018 — By Steven B. Krivit

Complete Series

The European Commission has corrected two false and misleading statements about the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) on the European Commission nuclear fusion Web site.

These are the two original statements:

“The international scientific community is now building ITER to show that fusion energy is possible at an industrial scale.”

“ITER will be the first experiment to produce significant quantities of fusion energy, considerably more than required to operate the machine.”

On Feb. 16, 2018, New Energy Times wrote to Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, about the two statements, saying that ITER won’t produce power at an industrial scale because its net power output will be about zero. ITER won’t produce considerably more power than required to operate the machine. With its thermal output compared to its electrical input, ITER will make only 1.6 times more power. ITER won’t demonstrate the feasibility of nuclear fusion power because that low level of heat output wouldn’t be enough to be converted to net electrical power.

On March 1, 2018, Telmo Baltazar, a senior political adviser for Juncker, wrote back and said that Maroš Šefcovic, the vice-president responsible for Energy Union, would address the issues. On April 6, 2018, the European Commission updated it Web page with the corrected statements:

“The international scientific community is now building ITER which will demonstrate the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion on Earth as a sustainable energy source.”

“ITER will be the first experiment to generate up to 500 million watts (MW) of fusion power.”

The first correction removes the “industrial scale” claim and replaces it with an ambiguous claim that could be broadly interpreted. The second correction removes the “considerably more [power] than required to operate the machine” claim and replaces it with the “500 MW fusion power” claim.

Although the second claim is not false, it is still misleading. Most members of the public will not realize that “fusion power” in this context does not mean what they think it means. There is a double meaning that fusion organizations, including the ITER organization and EUROfusion, do not explain well and do not define in their glossaries. The European Commission revision is technically valid only because of this double meaning.

The European Commission faces the same dilemma as other organizations that have had direct or indirect association with the ITER project. If it is transparent with the European public that ITER’s “500 MW of fusion power” is not enough to make 1 Watt of net electrical power, European taxpayers may realize they’ve been deceived.