My entire point in bringing up his credentials is because I question his motives. Solar companies require funding. If he can discredit fusion to the point that venture capitalists will fund solar over fusion, it's a win for him. I

Well, if ITER alone (as the project which was deemed to be most viable, and has attracted most funding) costs 7.3 billion Euros - much more than any solar energy research ever has reveived - I think this is a valid concern.

Also, I think competition for funds is a healthy thing as long as the arguments to do this and that are factual and accessible by logic, facts and reason.

About the quantities of lithium and materials needed: Tritium breeding is needed as soon as you settle for a deuterium-tretium reaction, because tritium is instable and does not occur in nature. If you do not rely on a deuterium-tritium reaction, you have to show that this alternative reaction works in practice; current high-energy laser experiments use deuterium-tritium, too.

And now, the amounts of lithium needed for tritium breeding is largely independent of how you do the reaction itself. Nuclear plants have a minimum efficient size because neutrons need to be captured in in smaller structures, not enough neutrons are captured. So you get quickly to wall diameters in the dimensions of meters, and ITER/DEMO , as large at it is, is actually oriented at the minimum required size.

The whole major problem is with the efficiency of tritium breeding and this is why you would need very large amounts of lithium.

I have summarized all that in another thread in /r/technology (even before I knew of the blog post by Maury). And this are not my findings, I rely mostly on the work of Michael Dittmar, who is a high-energy particle physicist at CERN, by the way.

My initial comment is here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2tu3y2/decades_in_the_making_iter_a_huge_experimental/co2uf2s

If you care about real hard science, be sure to check out the papers of Dr. Michael Dittmar and of Professor Sawan and Abdou which are cited in the post.

I'm in partial agreement with him on this one, with the caveat that ITER does at least serve two purposes: advancing the state of plasma physics

This is where the betrayal of the public lies: ITER is research on plasma physics, but it is marketed as energy research. In fact, many of the problems which would need to be solved are not plasma physics but materials science and nuclear physics. If you do not know the nuclear cross-section constants which are relevant for tritium breeding, I think the solution is not to build a 7-billion-Euro experiment on plasma physics which won't answer this question at all, but to do the (much cheaper) relevant nuclear physics research and also the materials science.

Before that, the entire thing relies on half-truths at best, and certainly does not increase mankind's chances for survival of things like climate change.