Shut It Down

In The Bleeding Edge, we have the pleasure of focusing most of our attention on the positive and exciting developments in the world of high-tech and biotech.

These developments are accelerating the pace of advancement in ways that will improve our quality of life.

And naturally, these developments and insights give us direction as we look for compelling investment opportunities.

This month’s recommendation in Exponential Tech Investor, which came out today, is a perfect example of that.

But every once in a while, we’ll have a look at the failures and mistakes as well. After all, that’s a critical part of the learning process.

Bad ideas, bad tech, bad execution, bad management, bad actors, and sometimes just outright frauds.

In other words, things that just aren’t working.

The deeply disturbing events of Saturday – which in the best-case scenario were a complete failure of management – had me thinking about these things this past weekend…

The ITER nuclear fusion reactor is a great example of one of those failures.

Because it’s a good illustration of so much of what is wrong right now.

ITER Grows in All the Wrong Ways

ITER – short for the European-led International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor – is a multinational collaboration between China, Europe, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, and the U.S.

Source: ITER

Currently under construction about 70 kilometers northwest of Marseille, France, ITER is building a massive, 23,000-metric-ton tokamak fusion reactor.

This type of reactor requires absolutely huge, complex magnets to contain what will hopefully be a net energy-producing fusion reaction.

I remember when the project was announced almost 20 years ago. Its original budget of 5 billion euros for 10 years of development, with plans to have ITER operational by 2016, was a massive budget at that time.

But by 2010, when the construction of the facility shown in the picture above began, the cost estimate was increased to 15 billion euros.

By 2011, already experiencing construction delays, first plasma was pushed back from the original target of 2016 to 2019.

And by 2014, after already spending billions of euros, an independent report warned that the project was in “a malaise.” It recommended a management overhaul.

Two years later, the ITER Council pressed the reset button… and pushed out first plasma until 2025, a target that is almost a decade later than the original 2016 target.

34^th ITER Council (Source: ITER)

Estimated project costs had since exploded to 20 billion euros – four times the original forecast.

But this year, there had finally been some material progress with ITER…

Most notably, it was the manufacturing and delivery of the massive, toroidal field coils… which are built in sections and assembled to create the donut-shaped chamber typical of tokamak reactors capable of confining a fusion plasma hotter than the surface of the sun.

Source: SIMIC

These toroidal field coils are huge, powerful magnets measuring 17 by 9 meters and weighing about 320 tons. That’s about as heavy as an Airbus A350.

Earlier this summer, the last of the coils was delivered to ITER. These were the most complex pieces of the overall reactor to manufacture, and they therefore represented a major milestone.

ITER management and its member countries cheered the milestone, indicating that the overall project was 70% completed.

But there’s just one major problem…

The Quiet Part

ITER is nowhere near being finished.

And we discovered that the management of the project is far worse than originally thought.

In the 34^th ITER Council meeting, which was conducted a few weeks ago, we received news of the worst delays in the project’s history.

The tokamak fusion reactor will not achieve first operation until 2034, about a decade after the previous plan.

But it’s far worse than it appears.

First operation is just the point at which ITER will power up the reactor and begin to conduct experiments.

It will not be the point at which the fusion reactor will be capable of creating and maintaining a nuclear fusion reaction with a net energy output.

The first experiments for creating an actual deuterium-tritium-fueled fusion reaction are pushed back all the way out to 2039. That’s 15 years into the future.

Oh, and the delay is expected to cost an additional 5 billion euros, bringing the total up to 25 billion euros. But I don’t believe those numbers for a second. A 15-year delay will result in much higher overall costs.

I actually wrote the following on May 1 in Outer Limits – Cheap Limitless Clean Energy Over War…

Oh, and the project’s costs have ballooned to 20 billion euros, already four times the original plan.

And I can all but guarantee that the final number will be billions more.

I just didn’t think I’d be proven right that quickly.

I’m just going to say the quiet part out loud. I’m going to say what many scientists are thinking but are scared to say due to retribution…

Why bother?

ITER was conceived in 1985 and established in 2006, already embroiled in bureaucracy and big government think.

And the entire private nuclear fusion industry went in exactly the opposite direction.

The answer to limitless, cheap, clean energy isn’t 25-billion-euro nuclear fusion reactors that take decades to build.

The industry saw the future in a different light: A much faster path to first light.

Out Loud

Smaller, modular nuclear fusion reactors can be built in years rather than decades. And venture capital, private equity, and private investors have stepped up – and continue to step up – to fund that vision.

The solution is already here. So again, why bother? Why waste the taxpayer dollars, euros, yen, renminbi, rupee, won, and rubles? Why waste the scientific talent working on this largely irrelevant science experiment?

Why not focus our energies on nuclear fusion technology and projects that have very near future potential for first light, and a clear path towards commercialization?

My humble advice, shut ITER down.

Take a fraction of the funding that has already been allocated and invest in private companies and public research with a concrete path towards producing limitless, baseload clean energy.

Enough of this hypocritical nonsense from the World Economic Forum (WEF) and its partner organizations about achieving net zero. It is being used to justify government appropriation of farms and agricultural land from Dutch farmers, a need to implement social credit systems to control citizen behavior, a need to restrict annual travel to reduce carbon emissions, a need to reduce consumption of meat to reduce methane emissions…

While at the same time, burning copious amounts of fossil fuels and using untold amounts of toxic chemicals at unthinkable environmental costs to produce solar panels and wind turbines that end up in landfills after their limited use.

“They” want to decelerate us. They want us to limit our activities. They want to control our lifestyles. They want to limit our movement. They want us to take their experimental drugs.

We, the people, want to live free. We want the freedom to build, to create, to innovate, to integrate, to live in happiness amongst each other, and to develop limitless, clean energy for all as quickly as we can.

There are certainly powerful people and organizations that don’t want us to have limitless, cheap clean energy. If private industry is leading, it makes it much harder to engage in the kind of grift and corruption that benefit the elites that come from government largess. And there is a whole lot of industry that would be disrupted if we did. Some will try to stop that from happening.

But the tide has turned. The direction is clear. We have a path forward.

And you can be sure, I’ll be covering every company in the space that is working towards making this happen right here in The Bleeding Edge, and in my premium research services at Brownstone Research. Together, we will take part in paving the way forward.

It’s time to accelerate. It’s time for the people to take back control.

It’s time to fight, fight, fight!