Major Flaw Found in "ITER" - 36-Nation $14 Billion Nuclear Fusion Reactor Now in 5th Year of Construction in France - reported at American Physical Society Meeting, May 15

IRVINE, Calif., May 15, 2015 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- 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 seconds^3,4 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 papers^5,8 without peer review "on policy grounds;" NATURE, SCIENCE, Physical Review X and Physics of Plasmas.

Dept. of Energy did not negate the existence of major flaws, but it refused technical discussions.

Both papers are co-authored by Bogdan Maglich, Tim Hester and Dan W. Scott.

*Abstract presented at 2015 Meeting of Northwest Section of American Physical Society and can be found at: www.world-scientific-education.net

BACKGROUND

Dr. Maglich invented self-colliding beam "aneutronic" fusion reactor and built four functional models 1 m in diameter; "Migma IV" fuelled with non-radioactive deuterium, ran at ion temperature 10 billion deg.  Maglich discovered omega boson and invented first Film-Less spark chamber at University of California, Berkeley.  At CERN he invented Missing-Mass spectrometer with which his Swiss-French team discovered 7 new bosons.  At Brookhaven National Lab, Maglich invented Antiproton Annihilation spectrometer.  For US Army, he invented fast–neutron atometer for remote detection of landmines and IEDs.  For US Air Force, his team designed, with Bechtel, a satellite–borne aneutronic fusion power plant.  He worked closely with Nobel laureates Luis Alvarez, Glenn Seaborg, Werner Heisenberg (see: http://www.heisenbergmaglichletters.net), and Vladimir Zworykin, "Father of TV."  In the wake of Chernobyl, Maglich chaired US-Soviet conference on safety of Soviet reactors.  Maglich was honored by US Presidents JFK and Ford and President of Switzerland for his work in peaceful nuclear research.

Dr. Tim Hester, after obtaining Ph.D. at UC Riverside, was Experimental Nuclear Physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory before joining California Science & Engineering as senior scientist

Dr. Dan W. Scott, deceased in 2014, made major contribution to these studies.  After having obtained Ph.D. at MIT, he was Professor and Dean at the University of Texas Dallas.

References

1. Gilbody HB: ion-atom collision measurements relevant to fusion plasmas.  XIX Int. Conf. on the physics and electronic and atomic collisions; Whistler, AIP Press (New York) pp. 19-38 (1995).
2. Principal physics developments evaluated in the ITER design review.  Atomic Energy Agency, Nucl. Fusion 49 065012 (2009).
3. Salameh Al et al: Experiment with stored 0.7-MeV ions: Observation of stability properties of a nonthermal plasma; Phys. Rev. Lett. 54, 769 (1985).
4. Aneutronic energy; Maglich BC, Norwood J. ed., NIM A 271 1-288 (1988); Inst. Advanced Study Princeton Symposium, (North-Holland Physics Publishing Division).
5. Fundamental physics oversight of critical ion energy in International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) and proposed remedy.  Maglich, BC, Scott, DW, Hester, T.
6. Strachan J.D. for the TFTR group, Discussion of Comment by Maglich and Chang.  PPPL Report updated; not numbered, private communication (June 1995).
7. World Record Set in Fusion Energy, Princeton University Plasma Physics Laboratory, February 1994 at: www.world-scientific-education.net.
8. K.M. McGuire et al, Review of deuterium-tritium results from Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor, Physics of Plasmas  2, 2176 (1995).
9. Comments on Review of deuterium-tritium results from Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR),.  BC Maglich, DW Scott, T Hester, Submitted to Physics of Plasmas April 16, 2015.  Located at: www.world-scientific-education.net.

Contact:

Tim Hester
(949) 474-5002

SOURCE Bogdan Maglich, Tim Hester and Dan W. Scott