ITER the criminal history of todays physics

I read this Krivit post yesterday and almost posted it here. My former next door neighbor who is a physicist working on ITER and I always argued about ITER. He was shocked I could actually understand physics and engineering details, of course not at his level since it is not my job. His comment was always "if they just gave us x% of the US military budget, we would have it by now" x was like 30%. His career involved flying back and forth between Princeton and San Diego. I am not dissing him, I still consider him a friend. That is his career. We talked honestly about this being his goal in life, to get this working. He is older than me (I am 56) so one needs to retire.

Quote from Wyttenbach

The argument of a former ITER project boss was simple: Lets spend them 1'000'000'000 and afterwards nobody will stop us to avoid loosing face.

From Krivit's article:

"I [Krivit] later looked at a third-party quote of Holtkamp from a former ITER engineer published in a New Yorker article written by Raffi Khatchadourian. Based on my direct experience with Holtkamp, I am convinced that what the engineer told Khatchadourian was accurate:

[Holktamp] once said, "If you spend as much money as you can, after the first billion, no one is going to stop us." So he spent and spent and spent, one former ITER engineer told me."

I suppose it's like this: We've already put over a billion dollars into this. We can't stop now, or else it will be an admittance of failure, that our billion dollars of tax payer money produced nothing of practical value to society!

Another disturbing quote from Krivit's article was this:

"Calder said that, even though a lot of politicians don't like continuing support of CERN, they have no choice. He said the uproar from scientists would make it nearly impossible for elected officials to stop funding CERN. It appears the same factors apply here and now to the ITER project."

This reminds me the prescient farewell address of president Dwight D Eisenhower in early 1961:

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present -- and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

Quote from Wyttenbach

ITER is just a self service club of interested building and engineering companies.

The Green Party in Germany .. opposes the allocation of German DM(eu) to fusion.

Sylvia Kotting-Uhl, Member of the Bundestag pointed out

"

5.3 billion euros will be spent on nuclear research, with a lion's share for fusion.

For everything else - networks, storage, energy efficiency, energy saving and energy turnaround -

there is only a total of 5.9 billion euros.

They have aked for independent assessment of ITER but its difficult to get independent.

ITER is a money train for lots of nuclear and plasma physicists in research

With the decline of uranium reactors ITER is the biggest game in town ..

So it is hard to get independent opinion .

but the Greens commissioned Michael Dittmar.. Swiss nuclear researcher to do one....

https://ensser.org/wp-content/…r-project-2019-part-1.pdf

Dittmarr concludes with two interpretations of the ITER situation.

Either

(1) The hard work of the nuclear fusion scientists from all around the planet, funded during
the last 20 years with at least some 20 billion Euros, has experimentally proven beyond doubt
that the Tokamak technology will not be the way to liberate fusion energy

for the productionof electric energy;

or
(2) The claimed scientific understanding of nuclear fusion and its realisation for electric
energy production using Tokamaks during the past decades was totally flawed and we finally
have learned that it will always take 50 years before electric energy can be produced from the
nuclear fusion processes on our planet

There is no third criminality option ... but there is always ..

ever-present human self-interest

The Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur (PACA) region contributed 0.467 billion eu

and got back 1.4 billion in service and contracts... that was in 2014

Sauvan: " there's clearly an information deficit on what ITER is really about."

https://www.iter.org/newsline/-/1894

"

.

Quote from Wyttenbach

The argument of a former ITER project boss was simple: Lets spend them 1'000'000'000 and afterwards nobody will stop us to avoid loosing face.

ITER is just a self service club of interested building and engineering companies. ITER at the and will not answer any new or old question of physics.

Almost unbelievable...

My grandmother always told me: "... Ehrlichkeit währt am längsten ..." or in English: "Honesty is the best policy"

So I guess they will try to keep on going with this scheme forever or until decision makers are retired or dead.

Anyway a big loss in resources and trust! Sad!

They are probably already looking for a scapegoat?

I think Krivit overstates his case somewhat. It has always been clear to me that ITER was defining input and output carefully to make it look good. This is an experiment, after all, not a practical device. What the people at ITER are saying is somewhat similar to comparing input electrolysis power to output heat in a cold fusion device. The cold fusion number is interesting but it has no technological or practical significance because:

We don't count the power going into the measurement instruments. I think this is similar to the ITER situation.

We don't count the energy needed to form the Pd-D in the week before the device turns on. Again, this resembles ITER, on a different time scale.

Power levels are far too low for anything like a thermoelectric device.

The temperatures are so low Carnot efficiency is close to zero.

An actual, practical device would need to be far better and different in countless ways. The same goes for ITER.

I think there are bigger problems with ITER. The biggest one is that there is no method of generating electricity from the output, and no way to sustain the reaction for long periods without destroying the reactor. The radiation is so intense it would destroy any kind of boiler. The neutron absorbing blanket would not work. That is what I have heard.

On the subject of plasma fusion versus conventional fission, see:

https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/KrakowskiRlessonslea.pdf

Krivit's angle is that he has the scoop that no one else has..

but many knowledgeable nuclear experts doubt the claims of ITER

without going so far a to paint it as a scam

eg Daniel Jassby ..Princeton ..

https://thebulletin.org/2017/0…-theyre-cracked-up-to-be/

the former director of CERN has an ambivalent attitude

"The cost of wind and solar power has decreased faster than anyone could have dreamt. Meanwhile ITER

has gone way over budget, partly because of the way that the project was set up and because it’s the first

of a kind, but probably also because fusion reactors will be intrinsically more expensive that we thought a decade ago.

". I think we need to finish ITER and establish once and for all whether fusion really is a viable option '

http://scgp.stonybrook.edu/archives/24923

Achieving fusion Q ~10 for 10 minutes with ITER will happen long after 2050 IMHO..

but apparently it has already been achieved by Mizuno

I just approved a new house for

myself if someone else pays to build.

I will pay for the lot in Alaska.

Lots of interesting Science there.

https://www.adn.com/section/alaska-news/science/

More ITER hype.. via Krivit

"The excitement is palpable,....

Q= 10 by 2035... ..The hype is palpable..?

"

Progress to make fusion a reality has been immense.

The ‘triple product’ of density, temperature and confinement time

grew exponentially between the 1950s and early 2000s, by a factor of 1,000,000 (one million).

With yet another small increase in triple product, by a factor of 2 or higher, the reactor will produce net energy.

The large international ITER tokamak, under construction in France,

is designed to start operations in 2025,

and it will produce net power by 2035.

Specifically, it will produce 500 MW of fusion power,

amounting to 10x the power injected in the plasma to keep it hot."

https://www.powerengineeringin…s-enter-race-for-the-sun/

I read a 2011 roadmap which showed ITER with Q>10 starting ..2020...????

Quote from Wyttenbach

The 50MW that go into the plasma need an awful amount of energy to be produced. So 50MW is not the input energy it is just the tiny part that can be used for plasma heating. Some other energy is used to cool the coils.

I get that, but as I said, it seems a little unfair. This is a large scale physics experiment. To account for all of the energy misses the point of the physics. Take a cold fusion experiments with 5 W of electrochemical input and 6 W of heat output. That's 1 W excess. Suppose it takes 50 W for the power supply, and 200 W for the computers. Would you say there is no excess heat because total input starting at the mains plug is 250 W? That is not a fair evaluation. It is also technically inaccurate because even when you look at it that way, there is still 1 W of excess heat. If you could put the whole experiment into a large, super-precise calorimeter, you would see 250 W input, 251 W output. If you could put the entire ITER machine into a giant calorimeter, it would show excess as well. As a percent of input it would be lower than they claim when they only account for the 50 MW that makes it into the reactor, but there would still be overall excess.

Quote from Wyttenbach

I do not know which idiot invented the term clean fusion energy ...

Al Gore?

Quote from Wyttenbach

I do not know which idiot invented the term clean fusion energy .

Another inventive term is GREEN POWER..

ITER fusion is green..because the fuel does not contain carbon!!!!

https://www.researchgate.net/p…on/308376939_ITER_physics

although the neutrons are drawn red the color is in fact deep ultraviolet..