[ My CounterPunch focused on the radioactivity involved in
fusion—that it is not “clean” despite what the press release of
the Department of Energy asserted.]
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FUSION ENERGY: THE NUCLEAR WEAPONS CONNECTION  
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Karl Grossman
December 23, 2022
CounterPunch
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_ My CounterPunch focused on the radioactivity involved in
fusion—that it is not “clean” despite what the press release of
the Department of Energy asserted. _

Nuclear fusion display at the Weiss Energy Hall, kpfellows, CC
BY-NC-SA 2.0.

 

In 1980, in my book _Cover Up: What You _Are Not _Supposed to Know
About Nuclear Power _published that year, I wrote: “What about
fusion? This has been held out by the nuclear establishment as a
somewhat cleaner form of nuclear power—as the hydrogen bomb, a
fusion device, is somewhat cleaner in fall-out than an atomic bomb.
Somewhat.”

“Fusion is theoretically supposed to get its power from fusing
nuclei together,” I continued. “This would be the opposite of
fission, which blasts the nuclei apart. But to start the process,
extremely high temperatures are required—100 million degrees
Centigrade, more than six times the estimated temperature of the
sun’s interior.”

“Although Dwight Eisenhower, when he was President, suggested that
the AEC keep the public ‘confused about fission and fusion,’
fusion is a dirty, radioactive process, too.

The theory is to fuse deuterium and tritium atoms. Large amounts of
tritium would be used. Tritium is highly radioactive…”

(I provided in a footnote the source of Eisenhower’s declaration in
what had been classified Atomic Energy Commission documents made
public at Congressional hearings that year focusing on the U.S.
government’s responsibility for cancers caused by the testing of
nuclear weapons. It was a 1953 memo from Gordon Dean, chairman of the
AEC, stating after speaking to Eisenhower: “The President says,
‘keep them confused about fission and fusion.’” Another of many
examples of what we were and have not been supposed to know about
nuclear power.)

Last week on _CounterPunch _I wrote about the great hoopla—largely
unquestioned by media— with the announcement by the U.S. Department
of Energy of a “major scientific breakthrough” in the development
of fusion energy. “This is a landmark achievement,” declared
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. Her department’s press release
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about the experiment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in
California said it “produced more energy from fusion than the laser
energy used to drive it” and will “provide invaluable insights
into the prospects of clean fusion energy.”

On _CounterPunch _I focused on an article by Dr. Daniel Jassby, for 25
years principal research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab
working on fusion energy research and development, and his conclusion
in his 2017 article
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in the _Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, _that fusion power “is
something to be shunned.” It was headed “Fusion reactor: Not what
they’re cracked up to be.”

“Unlike what happens” when fusion occurs on the sun, “which uses
ordinary hydrogen at enormous density and temperature,” he wrote, on
Earth “fusion reactors that burn neutron-rich isotopes have
byproducts that are anything but harmless,” he wrote. The key
radioactive substance in the fusion process on Earth would be tritium,
a radioactive variant of hydrogen. Thus there would be “four
regrettable problems”—“radiation damage to structures;
radioactive waste; the need for biological shielding; and the
potential for the production of weapons-grade plutonium 239—thus
adding to the threat of nuclear weapons proliferation, not lessening
it, as fusion proponents would have it,” he continued.

Jassby is still around and speaking out about fusion. As he told
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GRID magazine this May, “Fusion power absolutely cannot contribute
to solving the climate crisis,” refuting the claim it could. The
GRID article was headed. “Nuclear fusion companies are selling the
sun, and venture capital is buying.”

My _CounterPunch _focused on the radioactivity involved in
fusion—that it is not “clean” despite what the press release of
the Department of Energy asserted.

Here is more on the nuclear weapons connection.

Dr. M.V. Ramana, a professor and also the Simons Chair in Disarmament,
Global and Human Security at the School of Public Policy and Global
Affairs [[link removed]] at the University of British Columbia,
authored an article
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that ran last week on _Science The Wire_ titled “Clean Energy or
Weapons? What the ‘Breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion Really Means.”

He wrote that the “chief purpose” of the National Ignition
Facility at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory where the fusion experiment
was conducted “is not generating electricity or even finding a way
to do so. NIF was set up as part of the Science Based Stockpile
Stewardship Program, which was the ransom paid to the U.S. nuclear
weapons laboratories for forgoing the right to test after the United
States signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.”

Ramana noted the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s webpage
has “proudly” proclaimed
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“NIF’s high energy density and inertial confinement fusion
experiments, coupled with the increasingly sophisticated simulations
available from some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers,
increase our understanding of weapon physics, including the properties
and survivability of weapons-relevant materials”.

“NIF, then,” said Ramana, “is a way to continue investment into
modernizing nuclear weapons, albeit without explosive tests, and
dressing it up as a means to produce ‘clean’ energy.”

Also, Ramana went on: “NIF might even help with developing new kinds
of nuclear weapons.

Ramana said: “The tremendous media attention paid to NIF and
ignition amounts to a distraction—and a dangerous one at that. As
the history of nuclear fusion since the 1950s shows, this complicated
technology is not going to produce cheap and reliable electricity to
light bulbs or power computers anytime in the foreseeable future. But
nuclear fusion falls even shorter when we consider climate change, and
the need to cut carbon emissions drastically and rapidly.”

“In the meanwhile,” Ramana continued, “nuclear fusion
experiments like those at NIF will further the risk posed by the
nuclear arsenal of the U.S., and, indirectly, the arsenals of the
eight other countries known to possess nuclear weapons. The world has
been lucky so far to avoid nuclear war. But this luck will not hold up
forever. We need nuclear weapons abolition, but programs like NIF
offer nuclear weapons modernization, which is just a means to assure
destruction forever
[[link removed]].”

Ramana is co-editor of the book _Prisoners of the Nuclear Dream. _

Dr. Gordon Edwards, president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear
Responsibility, in a letter last week to Canadian Pugwash, wrote that
in “my opinion, the most important thing about the fusion
‘breakthrough’” is “the misrepresentation of the nature of the
research as energy related rather than weapons related—disguising
the fact of the fundamentally military rather than civilian rationale
and applicability of the entire fusion
Ignition Facility located at the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory, a long-standing weapons lab.”

Indeed, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has through the decades
been all about fusion—and the hydrogen bomb. It is where under its
director, nuclear physicist Edward Teller, the hydrogen bomb—Teller
called it the “super”—was developed.

“The Energy Department’s fusion breakthrough: It’s not really
about generating electricity,” was the headline last week in the
_Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. _Wrote
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John Mecklin, its editor-in-chief “Because of how the Energy
Department presented the breakthrough in a news conference headlined
by Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, news coverage has largely
glossed over its implications for monitoring the country’s nuclear
weapons stockpile.”

The nuclear cover-up continues.

Folks interested in my book _Cover Up: What You _Are Not _Supposed
to Know About Nuclear Power _can get a free download of the entire
book—courtesy of the publisher—by going to my
website, [link removed] [[link removed]], and
clicking on the Books button. The part about fusion, from 42 years
ago, is on Pages 251-252.

_KARL GROSSMAN, professor of journalism at State University of New
York/College at Old Westbury, and is the author of the book, The
Wrong Stuff: The Space’s Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet
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and the Beyond Nuclear handbook, The U.S. Space Force and the dangers
of nuclear power and nuclear war in space
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Grossman is an associate of the media watch group Fairness and
Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). He is a contributor to Hopeless:
Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion
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* nuclear fusion
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* nuclear weapons
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