Two UK companies leading efforts to reproduce the way the sun makes energy are both on the way to hitting significant milestones in their attempts to commercialise nuclear fusion by the 2030s.
On 25 March, Oxfordshire-based Tokamak Energy made its first plasma, the state hydrogen reaches when heated to very high temperatures, after a £25 million upgrade to its tokamak, the machines used to create fusion reactions. Meanwhile, rival firm First Light Fusion, also in Oxfordshire, has entered the final days of assembling a new 22-metre-long “gun” for use in what it calls “projectile fusion”.
The two companies are among trying to crack the challenge of getting more energy out of a fusion reactor than goes in – and commercialise the technology fast enough to provide a steady source of low-carbon power to tackle climate change.
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Most fusion research, from JET in the UK to the ITER project being built in southern France, is undertaken with billions of pounds worth of public funding through countries’ joint efforts.
David Kingham at Tokamak Energy says nuclear fusion businesses typically have a different focus to that of these public efforts. “The private sector brings this focus on innovation and rapid development of prototypes and devices,” he says. “Government laboratories tend to be very keen on the science and scientific understanding of the plasmas. It sets a different pace of things.”
Both Tokamak Energy and First Light Fusion have ambitious targets to have a first fusion power station running in the 2030s. By comparison, the UK government’s goal is to have one by 2040, while one spun off from ITER isn’t planned until the second half of the century – too late to contribute to current efforts to halt global warming.
Tokamak Energy’s upgraded spherical tokamak includes a new device to better handle the heat from making a plasma. The upgrade also allows the copper magnets that control the plasma to be cooled with liquid nitrogen, meaning more current can be run to generate a stronger magnetic field. That will be crucial to jump from the 15 million °C plasma the firm has achieved so far, to the 100 million °C one it hopes to create later this year.
Nick Hawker at First Light Fusion is taking a very different tack. The firm is using a new method it hopes will be an affordable way to solve inertial confinement fusion, which generates huge pressure to compress hydrogen fuel and start fusion.
For the past two years, the company has operated a machine launching projectiles flying 20 kilometres a second at a target using electromagnetic force. Its new device, housed in an armoured bunker dubbed the Citadel, is a 25-tonne “big gun” that uses gunpowder and hydrogen gas to launch larger but slower projectiles at about 6.5 kilometres per second.
It remains unclear whether inertial confinement fusion will ever work. The National Ignition Facility in California, a huge laser and the world’s biggest experiment of this kind, has struggled since it was completed in 2009, being beset by . First Light Fusion’s gun cost about £1 million, while the National Ignition Facility cost the equivalent of several billion pounds although it delivers far higher power. As Hawker says: “We definitely have a cheaper way. The question is – can we make it work?”
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