Major Flaw Found in “ITER” – nuclear fusion reactor

In their paper “Elephant in the room: overlooked plasma-destroying reaction with cross section 1012 times that for fusion necessitates redesign of International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor ITER,”* three physicists from California Science and Engineering Corp., Irvine, CA, claim that ITER designers were unaware that the ignored fusion-preventing atomic reaction known as “charge transfer” or “CT,” had a trillion times higher cross section (probability) than that for fusion, hence it will prevent the ignition of ITER, as it did in all 160-odd tokamaks within the past 50 years.  CT’s cross section measurement in UK1 of a billion barn became known only after ITER was designed; fusion cross section is a 1/1000 of a barn.  There no mention of CT in ITER design2.

EXISTENCE OF ‘CRITICAL ENERGY’.  Existence of CT gives rise to the hitherto – unknown critical energy below which reactors are inoperable; and above which – free from CT destruction – plasma is easily formed and fusion takes place, as proven in colliding beam fusion devices operating at 500,000 electron-volt with confinement of 24 seconds3,4 as opposed to microsecond below critical energy.  In their paper “Fundamental physics oversight of ‘critical energy in ITER and proposed remedy,”5 critical energy is shown to be 200,000 electron- volts.  The paper was presented to Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee of US DOE (11/11/14) and at March 2015 Meetings of the American Physical Society.

While CT-caused damage can be overcome by ultra-high-vacuum pumps, ITER is being built without the pumps on an inaccurate notion that the vacuum will be established by itself.6

ITER’s PROTOTYPE DID NOT PRODUCE THERMONUCLEAR FUSION POWER.  Precursor of ITER was US DOE’s Thermonuclear Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) of 1994 which was announced7 as an electric power plant that had “produced a World Record of 6.2 million watts of controlled fusion power (CFP)” using deuterium (D) and tritium (T) fuel.  Final “Review of TFTR results” was published in 1995.8. “Comments on Review of TFTR results,”9 submitted by the authors to the same journal, states that:

(a) TFTR was not a power producer but a power sink; 3 times more power was injected into it than produced.  (b) TFTR was not fuelled with D and T, but with carbon which cannot produce fusion.  (c) None of the TFTR reports claims the existence of any experimental evidence for production of thermonuclear power; presented is only the result of a calculation which denies the existence of CT.

To render ITER functional (1) it must operate above critical energy; (2) neutral fuel be replaced with charged and (3) ultra-high vacuum pumps must be included.

Four scientific journals refused to publish papers5,8 without peer review “on policy grounds;” NATURE, SCIENCE, Physical Review X and Physics of Plasmas.

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