Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

The grant of £48M will fund the UKAEA Culham in Abingdon’s fusion research programme for a period of four years.

UKAEA Culham is one of the world’s leading centres for fusion research, where scientists and engineers reproduce conditions in the sun and stars in a bid to create a new source of energy that is safe and environmentally benign.

Prof Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith, director of UKAEA Culham, said: “It is essential that we have a wide range of energy options to meet the needs of our 21st century world with less reliance on fossil fuels.

“Fusion has a key role to play alongside renewable sources of energy. The UK government and EPSRC have recognised this and this grant is a great vote of confidence in the UK’s own contribution to establishing fusion power.”

In a fusion reaction, energy is produced when light atoms are fused together to form heavier atoms. This process takes place in the Sun and stars.

To utilise fusion reactions as an energy source it is necessary to heat a gaseous fuel to temperatures in excess of 100 million degrees – several times hotter than the centre of the Sun. At these temperatures, the gas becomes a plasma.

Under these conditions, the plasma particles, deuterium and tritium, fuse together to form helium and high speed neutrons, releasing significant amounts of energy.

A commercial power station will use the energy carried by the neutrons to heat a blanket surrounding the plasma. This would be used to generate electricity.

The plasma must be kept away from material surfaces to avoid it being cooled and contaminated; magnetic fields are used for this purpose.

The most promising magnetic confinement systems are toroidal (doughnut shaped) and the most advanced is called the Tokamak. JET is the largest Tokamak in the world.

The fuels used are virtually inexhaustible. Deuterium and tritium are both isotopes of hydrogen.

Deuterium is extracted from water and in a fusion power station tritium would be generated from the neutrons reacting with the light metal, lithium, which is found all over the world.

One kilogram of fusion fuel produces the same amount of energy as 10,000,000 kilograms of fossil fuel.

The research programme is designed to provide vital data for the construction of the world’s first commercial fusion power station, known as ITER – possibly in France or Japan – and safeguard the UK’s position as a leading player in the technology area.

ITER should provide a full scientific demonstration of the feasibility of fusion in power plant-like conditions. It would then be followed by a demonstration fusion power station.

The choice of a site for ITER should be made in 2004. Bids from France and Japan to host the 4.5 billion Euro project are currently under consideration.

Energy demands will increase even more dramatically over the next 50 years as the developing world comes to expect the same standard of living as the industrialised countries.

The Kyoto protocol focused the world’s attention to the dangers of global warming from the unrestrained use of fossil fuels. Along with renewable sources nuclear fusion will be an important long-term energy source.

Fusion will provide safe and environmentally friendly energy with the advantages of: -

• No atmospheric pollution: the fusion reaction produces helium which is an inert gas; no greenhouse gas is produced

• Abundant fuels

• No long-lived radioactive waste

• An inherently safe system: even the worst conceivable accident would not require evacuation of the surrounding population