Media: a debate to nowhere

By Richard North - December 18, 2022

Arguably, a vibrant debate in the media over important issues is a good thing – an essential tenet of what is laughingly called our democracy. But sometimes the debate isn’t worth having and, where we find numerous commentators all contributing to the same issue, this is more a matter of people shouting past each other. There is no debate, as such, going on.

A graphic example of this is the recent coverage over the so-called “breakthrough” on nuclear fusion, where we have seen multiple breathless pieces heralding the dawn of a new era of limitless, cheap energy.

Even today, this is still going on with a laborious piece by Matthew Syed in the Sunday Times headed: “Fusion is a light in the darkness – it’s time to supercharge its pursuit”, as he tells us: “Faced with dwindling returns on our energy, the case is now clear for going all-in on clean nuclear”.

Like so many pieces on this subject, we see an overlay of technical illiteracy combining with a puerile optimism to produce a superficially credible piece which, on closer scrutiny, simply doesn’t stand up.

Only towards the end of his piece does Syed acknowledge that there remain “challenges”. The “net gain” announced last week, he concedes, was in relation to energy expended in the reaction, not the energy required to get to that stage. What he doesn’t tell you, though, is that the energy produced from the now famous experiment was less than one thousandth of the energy actually used to create the reaction.

Nor does he tell us that the method used to produce the reaction – firing hundreds of powerful lasers at a tiny capsule containing a mixture of deuterium and tritium – is so cumbersome that it took a week to charge up the lasers needed to start the reaction.

Yet, for this system to have even the slightest chance of producing a continuous flow of energy, a way would have to be found of firing equivalent laser bursts multiple times every second.

For a reaction to become self-sustaining, the money (currently about €22 billion) is on a completely different approach, typified by the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), which relies on confining hot plasma in a powerful magnetic field in a device known as a tokamak.

But, in the nature of international scientific cooperation, this project – which requires a huge facility to be constructed in Saint-Paul-lès-Durance in Provence, France – is more than a decade late and billions over budget. Final estimates are expected to rise to as high as €60 billion, making ITER the most expensive science experiment of all time, as well as the most complicated engineering project in human history.

Originally supposed to achieve fusion by 2023, there is no target date set. Even if the facility was wildly successful in its aims, there is no prospect of it producing scalable results within 20 years.

The next development would have to be the design and construction of a pilot plant to combine all the different technologies and engineering concepts that would enable electricity to be reliably delivered. One can easily imagine this taking a further 20 years before the template for a commercial design could be agreed.

While Syed allows himself to admit that there are “formidable barriers” to constructing a reactor capable of putting juice into the grid, he doesn’t even try to describe those barriers, much less attempt a timescale for their resolution, or estimate either development or commercial construction costs.

Instead, he resorts to the sort of polemic that we found familiar when trying to analyse the failures of the military in the Iraqi and Afghanistan campaigns, where “armchair generals” became the standard jibe to apply to critics. In this case, Syed resorts to the term “armchair cynics”, who he says mustn’t be allowed to hold us back.

Instead, he declares, “we should look to the courage and ingenuity of our scientists and inventors, as well as transforming our education system to nurture more of them”.

He then calls in aid Robert Stephenson, pioneer of the Rocket – a technology, he says that many claimed was impossible. This inventor is cited as saying: “The locomotive is not the invention of one man but of a nation of mechanical engineers”. It is a quote, says Syed that should be pinned to the door of 10 Downing Street.

From an unlikely source, therefore, it is refreshing to see a dose of realism, not least because that source is the Observer in piece written by Robin McKie, the paper’s science and environment editor.

McKie tells us that for almost half a century he has been reporting on scientific issues. And no decade, he says, has been complete without two or three announcements by scientists claiming their work would soon allow science to recreate the processes that drive the sun. The end result would be the generation of clean, cheap nuclear fusion that would transform our lives.

This writer then notes that such announcements have been rare recently, so it gave him “a warm glow” to realise that standards may be returning to normal, with the announcement by the US National Ignition Facility that they had produced excess energy from their experimental reaction.

Far from being a “breakthrough”, though, all McKie will concede is that the result is a “milestone event” but not even a major one. Like us, though he noted the excessive optimism as the US government and swathes of the world’s media indulged in a widespread hyping jamboree over the laboratory’s accomplishment.

Of course, McKie – working for the Observer – has his own agenda, and is keen to see an alternative to fossil fuels as an energy source to slow down climate change, but he is realistic enough to accept that fusion will not arrive in time to save the planet from climate change.

Electricity plants powered by renewable sources or nuclear fission, he says, offer the only short-term alternatives to those that burn fossil fuels. Thus, he avers, we need to pin our hopes on these power sources.

As for fusion, he accepts that is may earn its place later in the century – assuming that the “formidable” technical problems could be solved, but he warns that “it would be highly irresponsible” to rely on an energy source that will take at least a further two decades to materialise – at best.

We thus have experienced a huge churn over what turns out to be a relatively modest development which is unlikely to deliver any bankable results for at least 20 years and, most likely many more – if ever.

Yet, while we are immersed in a major energy crisis in the here and now, I have yet to see any publicity in the British press of another delay in the commissioning of the troubled EDF nuclear reactor in Flamanville, Manche, France on the Cotentin Peninsula.

Although construction started on 4 December 2007 and power generation was expected to start in 2012, with an initial estimated cost of €3.3 billion, fuel loading is now not expected to start until the “second quarter of 2023” instead of late 2022. Meanwhile the cost has increased by another €500 million, bringing the overall cost to €13.2 billion.

Even if this new timetable is achieved, EDF will then have to comply with a demand by France’s nuclear watchdog to replace the reactor’s vessel closure head by the end of 2024. This would entail a first mandatory stoppage only some months after its start.

This has major implications for the UK nuclear programme as the Flamanville reactors are based on the European Pressurised Water Reactor (EPWR) technology, which are also to be used by the UK’s Hinkley Point and Sizewell C plants.

I wrote about this at some length in August last year, when Hinkley Point C was expected to start generating electricity in June 2026, having been given the go-ahead by the British Government in January 2008 at an estimated cost of £23 billion.

Since then, it has been reported that the timetable has slipped to June 2027, while the cost is estimated at £25-26 billion in 2015 prices. However, two weeks ago, the Telegraph did report that the plant might not start operating until 2036 – more than a decade after its initial deadline in 2025.

That is the reality of major nuclear power projects, where delays and cost over-runs have become the norm. But almost nothing of this seems to have impacted on the media which is trilling over the imminent arrival or unproven fusion technology.

There is something seriously infantile about the way the media is handling such issues, where the fantasy of the future swamps news of the prosaic present, as the hacks entertain themselves at our expense.