Professor Sir Ian Chapman, the Chief Executive Officer of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, is a leader in the field of fusion energy. Together with his co-editors, Professor Sir Steven Cowley and Professor Howard Wilson, Ian has guest edited a new Philosophical Transactions A theme issue entitled ‘Delivering Fusion Energy – The Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP)’. In this blog post, Ian outlines the progress made in fusion science so far, and the motivation for this recent theme issue.
Precisely twenty years ago today I began working on fusion energy. I was attracted by the huge promise of fusion to address climate change – a source of power which could provide abundant, low-carbon, baseload energy, including high grade heat. I have found that, despite being sustained by that tremendously motivating goal, delivering fusion power requires real resilience! It is not easy, as is the case for most noble endeavours. One of the forefathers of fusion, Lev Artsimovich, once said that “fusion will be ready when society needs it”. Today there is renewed optimism that fusion can deliver on its promise.
In part this is due to the enormous steps forward that the community has made in the past few years. This year, the JET device achieved 69MJ of fusion energy. Whilst the fusion reaction was only sustained for 5s due to the limitation of the copper coils used in JET, the experiments matched predictions made in advance which gives confidence for next-step devices. At the same time, researchers in China demonstrated a 1000s long fusion fuel using super-conducting magnets, clearly showing the sustainment of a fusion reaction. In the US, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory demonstrated fusion ignition, whereby more energy from fusion was released than the laser energy absorbed to drive fusion. And finally, we showed a novel way of exhausting heat from a fusion device which opens up a pathway to more compact fusion powerplants.
As well as this tremendous technical progress, there is also increasing appetite for investment in fusion as well as a number of initiatives globally aiming to deliver fusion prototype powerplants. One of these programmes is the Spherical Tokamak for Fusion Energy, which for the past five years has been spearheaded by my organisation, the UK Atomic Energy Authority. The programme now involves over 1600 people, who together have invested over two-million hours of work, involving 500 different companies and already producing many patents for different parts of the design. This is a serious and sophisticated design effort and shows a programme moving towards delivery. In preparation for that next phase, we have also identified a site for STEP and established a new company – UK Industrial Fusion Solutions – to take forward the programme from now.
Twenty years later I feel the same enthusiasm for delivering fusion, and the STEP programme is an embodiment of the shift towards real delivery projects now happening around the world in fusion. This Philosophical Transactions A theme issue is a compendium of the output of the first five years of design work, and whilst substantial challenges remain, just the act of executing a delivery programme brings us closer to fusion power. I’m half-way through my career and I am excited that fusion as a power source can become a reality in the second half.
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