UK dumps £2.5 billion into fusion pipe dream that's already cost millions The UK government has just allocated another £2.5 billion to an ambitious fusion energy project without any indication it's progressed much beyond the planning stages. The bundle of cash ($3.4 billion) will go towards the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) project planned for construction on the site of a former …
I know the joke is that fusion energy is *always* 10 or 20 years away from becoming reality, but that shouldn't stop us.
People once thought it was crazy to go to space or Mars, to collide atoms at immense speeds, to decode the human DNA, or indeed to mess around with atomic bombs.
We should explore, research and reach out for these new scientific frontiers.
Or as a famous person once said, we should do it not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
Indeed and tokamaks are probably the best bet. Laser inertial confinement is probably a dead end, at the moment they are doing well to get one reaction a day, they'd need at least 10 every second to make it viable.
Once the engineering of the tokamaks is sorted out they still have the significant problem of tritium supply. Tritium is very rare with only a few kilos being naturally generated per year. There is the neutron/lithium reaction but that has never been scaled up and requires an incredibly rare isotope of lithium so I hope someone somewhere is putting a similar amount of effort into new sources of tritium because without it (deuterium/tritium) fusion will be dead in the water. (Side point, while fusion is reasonably clean, the neutron/lithium reaction is a bit messy with lots of nasty radioactive waste).
Tritium can be generated in nuclear fission reactors but that is so expensive it would be cheaper to generate electricity by burning dollar bills.
There are fusion reactions other than deuterium/tritium but they all need even higher temperatures and pressures and the next easiest one is helium 3 which is very rare on earth (there may be a lot on the Moon however but currently that's not available).
Laser ignition's true purpose is validating fusion weapon calculations. Power use is secondary
Lithium6 isn't particulary rare - It makes up 7% of all lithium deposits. The problem is separating it - that's what delayed TMSR-LF1 for 2 years - The Chinese government ordered it be done in order to reduce tritium production during the test runs
Whilst I too am skeptical about laser based fusion it's only fair to point out the the NIF based fusion you are talking about with its one or two shots per day was designed as an atomic weapon research device and not a fusion reactor prototype. It has however proved that the physics of laser confinement fusion work. For a reactor prototype you need to look at someone like Proxima fusion which uses modern laser technology and direct drive so aiming at fast repetition.
Tritium breeding uses lithium-6 which is 7.6% of lithium so far from "incredibly rare" with there being about 2 million tons of if contained in currently know lithium reserves. Extracting it however is not so easy with the most efficient of the 3 main methods having bad environmental issues. If more lithium-6 is needed it will be done by refining the engineering in one of the other methods to make it cheaper.
It's also worth mentioning that deuterium/deuterium fusion produces tritium in half the reactions and helium3 in the other. The earth oceans contain roughly 4 * 10^13 tons of deuterium.
Will we have fusion plants in 10 years? Probably not, though Helion Energy and Zap Energy are hopefuls because their designs are small enough to run through a few prototypes so become engineering problems and not fundamental physics ones.
Yes, by "incredibly rare" I meant in it's refined form, as you state; separation is complicated, messy and expensive.
D-D needs temperatures of 400 to 500 million℃ while D-T runs around 150 to 200 million℃ so if they can't get D-T working there's absolutely no chance of getting the D-D reaction to work.
Maybe after we've had a few years of running D-T the D-D might be worth looking at for tritium production because it's not a lot of use for power generation, it requires far more energy to get going and produces far less energy than D-T.
Like rocketry, fusion is more of an engineering problem than a science one, the science is pretty well understood.
engineering problems and not fundamental physics ones
I don't think there have been any fundamental physics problems in fusion since 1st November, 1952. It's been engineering all the way since then.
Helion Energy and Zap Energy are hopefuls
Has anyone ever counted the number of startups who claim to have solved fusion (or indeed fission) reactors with a new design which just requires some VC funding? It sounds like an ideal new field for Elizabeth Holmes to work in, when she gets out.
All water-moderated reactors make tritium (usually tritiated water) and the annual discharge from _each_ one of the ~540 existing worldwide is significantly larger than what's at Fukushima
Which in turn is _dwarfed_ by what's produced via cosmic ray interactions in the upper atmosphere
Besides lithium, there are also deuterium and boron bombardment routes to tritium production. Both are non-trivial sources of tritium in fission reactors; CANDU reactors generate kilograms of tritium annually from their heavy water.
As for radioactive waste, deuterium-tritium fusion reactions produce about 100x the neutron flux of a pressurized water fission reactor. Design of fusion reactors intended to have long life times (like ITER) need careful attention to neutron activation in reactor materials. Ideally, all the resulting isotopes will have short life times.
Yes, I've learned quite a lot about remote servicing concepts seeing how ITER is planning to be maintained (without cooking the staff doing the maintaining).
Even with good low activation materials quite a lot of it will be radio-actively "toasty"*
*Water Extended Polyester is basically polyester casting resin "Bulked up" with water. It's 70% water, 30% plastic, a short time use temperature of 800c and the consistency of plaster of Paris. But the gamma rays....
> Or as a famous person once said, we should do it not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
Though, you have to admit, that sometimes things are hard because they're also futile.
I'm not knowledgeable enough to know whether this is the case for fusion energy or not, though I did work with and around a bunch of PhD ex-fusion researchers in the 1980s at one of the US National Science Foundation's supercomputer centers.1
Note I said ex-fusion researchers. . . the lot had all more or less drifted into supercomputing and computer science for one reason or another.
That alone should make you wonder.
Going to the Moon or Mars, colliding atoms, decoding DNA, or nuclear weapons were all engineering challenges, not scientific ones. . . and maybe fusion is, as well, though after as many decades as we've been futzing around with it makes me ask whether the approach is wrong and we need some new theoretic framework.
After all phlogiston was a leading scientific theory of combustion until Lavoisier et al came along and showed how the chemistry worked.
I'd love to be wrong here and wake up to a bright future of boundless energy before I, as 1960s-70s Los Angeles TV personality Seymour2 put it, "make that dread sojourn," but we shall see.
_____________________
1 No names mentioned to protect the "innocent," though if you've been around long enough and are familiar enough with the history of the NSF supercomputer centers, you'll figure it out.
2 Seymour
> Note I said ex-fusion researchers. . . the lot had all more or less drifted into supercomputing and computer science for one reason or another. That alone should make you wonder.
OTOH, if you pay attention to things like Jim Al-Khalili's "The Life Scientific" some scientists stay in one field for their entire career, whilst others move around, following their interests - they can even be following one specific thread that happens to appear in fascinating ways in multiple disciplines (and the creation of novel computer models is one such thread).
And then you noted that this was in the 1980s but don't tell us how old these people were. In the 60s, 70s and even the 80s people just starting out on their science careers simply had not had much exposure to computers, so they go off and study Physics, Chemistry - all the old standbys - and, if they stick with it, go on to research positions. But then they encounter these magical beasts and get sucked in. This can mean triggering ther Hacker Gene (in the youger ones) or they simply realised that, as time went by, they were having to spend more and more effort to improve the computational models used for their nuclear physics so why not just go and work on CompSci instead of banging their heads against the weird-ass mathematics that the upstart youngsters keep flinging at them.
> OTOH, if you pay attention to things like Jim Al-Khalili's "The Life Scientific" some scientists stay in one field for their entire career, whilst others move around, following their interests
That's certainly true.
I've had the privilege (and pure dumb luck) to rub shoulders with some of the best scientists around (including a couple of Nobel prize winners)1 and I know the range of their curiosity and intellect and how limited and incurious I am by comparison.
I'd just say, for whatever it's worth, that there are probably a lot more ex-fusion people in computer science than the other way around.
________________
1 Unfortunately, only a few molecules of fabric and none of their "smarts" rubbed off on me.
"Going to the Moon or Mars, colliding atoms, decoding DNA, or nuclear weapons were all engineering challenges, not scientific ones. . . and maybe fusion is, as well, though after as many decades as we've been futzing around with it makes me ask whether the approach is wrong and we need some new theoretic framework."
Putting this into perspective, the apollo program, to land someone on the moon cost around 300B USD, a little more investment was done on that, than there has been with fusion.
That was only what the US spent, not Russia.
Now with fusion, investment world wide is at around 7B/ yr. Investment over last few years has been increasing a bit, so that investment isn't representative of previous years. The total spent over the last 50 years World wide doesn't even come close to that which was invested by a single country in a few years to land on the moon.
It's not just that fusion is *hard*, there are also *fundamental* problems against it.
It doesn't just have to work. The declared goal is "clean and cheap" power. If it can't be both those things, then what's the point?
As has already been pointed out, the high neutron flux means that fusion can never be properly "clean" - although it could be argued to be "safe", at least compared to a fission reactor, in the sense that a runaway reaction is not going to happen.
But to be economically viable, both the capital cost and the fuel cost have to be eventually comparable to a conventional power station. That means that in the end it must be possible to build "affordable" stations - which I'll generously say is in the $1bn range. ITER is estimated to cost up to $65bn, without any power generation components, and even if it does actually fire up (which is still looking unlikely), it does nothing to advance the art of affordable power. It's not like building ITER will give you insights in how to build it 100 times cheaper, or that any of its fundamentally huge design and esoteric materials will benefit from economies of scale. But on top of this, the fuel it needs is mind-bogglingly expensive, and seems destined to remain that way indefinitely.
If human ingenuity can actually construct ITER then that's a great achievement. But if the only way we can make fusion work is to build at ITER scale, then it's never going to give cheap power, by any definition of the word.
I know the joke is that fusion energy is *always* 10 or 20 years away from becoming reality, but that shouldn't stop us.
Ten or twenty years shouldn't stop us, but ten or twenty years kicked repeatedly down the field for almost seventy years (Zeta was 1957) should give us pause for thought. The fusion world has been consistently terrible at making accurate progress estimates. Perhaps that's just lying to secure funding, but it's also possible that they don't really know what they are doing and that the funding could be better spent elsewhere.
Or as a famous person once said, we should do it not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
No, we should do it if it looks like a likely source of power. Splurging squillions on things just because we can't do them is ridiculously wasteful.
I'm not against fusion research, by the way, but right now it looks more like a century long boondoggle than something which will produce interesting science or useful engineering.
This will be like other UK projects. We’ll pour eye watering sums of money into it, get it close to working, and then abandon it.
Reaction Engines
Bloodhound
TSR2
APT
HS2 North (the bit what was actually needed)
Lorenzo Project
London Ringways
…and more besides. Just one more to add to the list.
> it will benefit the working man in the street
It genuinely could and should.
The UK has the fourth highest domestic energy costs in Europe as well as the highest industrial energy costs - it's generally at least double that of most countries!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crkep1vx3mro
And that affects pretty much everything, from the obvious things such as iron/aluminimum smelting, all the way down to restaurant ovens and office lighting. As such, getting cheap, clean and always-on energy would both boost the economy and directly put more money in the pocket of the working man in the street!
However, all the traditional ways of producing energy are either polluting (coal), expensive (gas), potentially intermittent (wind, solar, etc) or can politely just be described as very challenging (nuclear). Plus there's various political shennanigans, from stupidly expensive contracts to angry NIMBYs. So none of them are going to get us out of this hole.
We need something new. And fusion is currently the main candidate.
Admittedly, the old joke about fusion power always being twenty years away is still holding true, but as this article highlights, there is a trickle of breakthroughs and improvements coming through.
And the UK arguably needs to be at the forefront of these efforts, since we need it more than most!
"As such, getting cheap, clean and always-on energy would both boost the economy and directly put more money in the pocket of the working man in the street!"
While clean energy is a desirable the economy and our pockets requires the cheap and always on energy supply. And 'clean' is a fuzzy term over what we consider to be clean. Unfortunately that part adds complications and problems when trying to provide the other two. A good example is nuclear which still is after decades the answer for those who believe in MMCC Co2 theory but has been opposed outright until very recently when they hit the wall of reality.
"However, all the traditional ways of producing energy are either polluting (coal)"
Output can be filtered and depends if you believe in the MMCC co2 theory.
"expensive (gas)"
Except we banned fracking and with prices coming down the price doesnt thanks to the UK market being structured to make unreliable forms seem viable.
"potentially intermittent (wind, solar, etc)"
There is a massively huge and unforgivable mistake there (unforgivable because some people dont recognise this reality) it isnt potentially intermittent it is GUARANTEED TO BE intermittent. Better known as unreliable. That isnt to exclude its use ever for anything, only to acknowledge the established fact that you cannot rely on a constant output from it.
"We need something new. And fusion is currently the main candidate."
All we need is power. If we return to what we really need at the start of this comment it is cheap and always on with the desirability vs cost of some version of 'clean'. As you rightly point out it affects everything and so would be a benefit to the working man and economy (and everyone in the country in total).
>” Except we banned fracking and with prices coming down the price doesnt thanks to the UK market being structured to make unreliable forms seem viable.”
Fracking is largely a waste of time, due to the high energy costs, which are trending towards 1:1 (put in one barrel of oil to produce one barrel…)
In the UK once you crunch the numbers fracking is all about economic activity and wealth generation for a few, it is totally unable to produce the amount of product we consume for any significant amount of time. I seem to remember total UK frackable gas reserves were sufficient to supply 100 percent of UK demand for 2 years, in reality it was more like 5% for 10 years.
Yes, currently other than oil and gas, nuclear is our only viable fuel for guaranteed energy, shame once you look at world energy consumption, you will find there isn’t that much Uranium around…
"once you look at world energy consumption, you will find there isn’t that much Uranium around…"
But there's plenty of thorium - Monazite is the ore mined for rare earths and there's more thorium in it than all the other rare earths combined
An average rare earth mine produces about 5000 tons of thorium per year and promptly dumps it. It's the disposal of thorium which makes mines uneconomic and they have to extract it in order to get at the other rare earths
The Chinese have been buying up domestic thorium production for the last 25 years and stockpiling it in anticipation of their TMSR series being sucessful (there's no reason it won't be). That in turn has kept the mines in business - A thorium market at $150/kg turns them into thorium mines with a rare earth side gig - and THAT is how China has come to corner the world market in rare earths
Anyone who tells you there's no thorium doesn't understand how mining reserves and resources are defined. Neither of those exist if there's no market for them (There are no reserves of seawater or oxygen either). The reality is that we have at least 50,000 years supply just in existing and closed rare earth mines (based on current total (not just electrical) energy consumption) and more likely 2-3 million years worth
But there's plenty of thorium
There is plenty of thorium, but you don't put thorium into a reactor and get power out. You put thorium-232 into a reactor, bombard it with neutrons until it turns into protactinum-233, which hopefully decays into uranium-233 without picking up additional neutrons during its rather long (27-day) half-life, then do the fuel processing needed to extract uranium-233, and finally fuel a reactor with the U-233.
Shippingport needed 5 years to increase its U233 inventory by 1.4%. Thermal breeder thorium-uranium cycles are looking at breeding factor of 1.01 to 1.02, which means there's a doubling period of decades. In other words, it'd be a rather slow process to get the nuclear industry running on bred U233.
The good news is, most light water reactors can run on U233 and handle thorium-U233 fuel pellets. They might not make breakeven when it comes to generating fuel, but you don't need exotic new reactors to run on U233.
@Roland6
"Fracking is largely a waste of time, due to the high energy costs, which are trending towards 1:1 (put in one barrel of oil to produce one barrel…)"
Fantastic so there is no need for it to be blocked by law. Except they did because cheaper gas and ruins the green dream.
"In the UK once you crunch the numbers fracking is all about economic activity and wealth generation for a few"
So wealth generation, which can only happen if it is profitable. The profit in wind is constraints payments (turning it off).
"it is totally unable to produce the amount of product we consume for any significant amount of time"
Interesting claim but since fracking is going on in the world and we see the success I would say this is an argument to stop blocking it then. But still its stupid to cry about the price of gas but be unwilling to get cheap gas locally.
"I seem to remember total UK frackable gas reserves were sufficient to supply 100 percent of UK demand for 2 years, in reality it was more like 5% for 10 years."
Assume that is true, assume it is worth doing and so people do it. Hey look the price of gas comes down. Is that not a good thing?
"Yes, currently other than oil and gas, nuclear is our only viable fuel for guaranteed energy, shame once you look at world energy consumption, you will find there isn’t that much Uranium around…"
Around or looked for? But that then brings us back to coal, oil and gas if you wish to strike off nuclear. The point I have been making since Blair went gaagaa for turbines.
"expensive (gas)"
Addendum to this- https://order-order.com/2025/05/20/report-finds-uk-would-be-220-billion-better-off-without-net-zero-policies/
"Had the UK continued with gas-power systems since 2006 consumers would be approximately £220 billion better off in 2025 currency. The gas crisis on the other hand is only worth £75 billion…"
@AC
"They could cancel net zero policies to pay for the Brexit losses! Trebles all round!"
Which of course would be an admission of net zero being such a cost. But also that if we remained we would be locked into trying to reach net zero at the EU government level. I like it lets do that!!!
>” The UK has the fourth highest domestic energy costs in Europe”
Given the sums of money being thrown at fusion, it does look like we are aiming the top spot. As I don’t see the cost of building and operating a facility capable of generating the massive amounts of energy we need cheaply.
Also once fusion is viable, expect private business to step in and charge “market rates” for the product…
>” So none of them are going to get us out of this hole.
We need something new. And fusion is currently the main candidate.”
Fusion isn’t going to get us out of this hole; fusion is investing in a lottery ticket - we might get lucky, but the odds are we won’t. So in the real world we need to be looking elsewhere to help us get out of the hole rather than expecting the lottery to get us out.
The primary problem with nuclear (fission) is that just about everything is descended from Alvin Weinberg's Nautilus/Shippingport reactors, which in turn was based on the X10 plutonium reactor and powered by unwanted waste products of weaponsmaking (enriched uranium is the waste product)
The decisions made sense at the time. Nautilus was entirely self contained, 1950s naval engineers understood steam and boilers intimately and as a laboratory demonstrator it worked well
What didn't work well was taking the design and scaling it up, especially as engineering stresses on boilers scale with the cube of the power. That's why Weinberg worked on a "mark 2" industrial prototype - the MSRE
Without the need for massive pressure containment vessels and buildings the construction costs drop by at least 80% - and you can fabricate most of it in a factory vs handbuilding onsite. Operating costs also drop ~60% and because it produces 7-800C dry steam instead of 325C wet steam, your turbine maintenance costs drop dramatically. Reducing waste output volume by 99% is a nice side benefit but a 1GWe nuclear reactor already produces a surprisingly tiny amount of waste over a 60-year design lifespan - about the same as an Olympic swimming pool and less radioactive than the original fuel in 450-500 years. (Yes, the 20,000 years claim is kinda true. What's not mentioned is that the radioactivity is extremely low)
China's TMSR research series is likely to be what drives putting them in THE hot seat of 21st century hyperpower status (not superpower). There are 5-6 billion people who'll quite happily buy power plants from them and bear in mind that fully decarbonising isn't JUST replacing existing power generation (which renewables can do - barely) but generating 6-8 times more energy than that
I predict that by the end of the century we'll see LFTR Chinese designs being ubiquitous (among other things, that 7-800C means you can make LFTR reactors into a drop-in replacement for coal combustors, at 1/4 the size including the containment building) and fusion STILL being 20 years away
One of the challenges of molten salt reactors up till now was that they don’t have water in them. The hydrogen in water is the best moderator, and outperforms the carbon in graphite and deuterium in heavy water. All non water cooled reactors such as gas cooled, sodium cooled, lead cooled faced this disadvantage, often needing HALEU fuel which is higher cost than LEU.
But defect free Yttrium Hydride has now been synthesised and is being tested in the Transformational Challenge Reactor. This would allow non water cooled reactors to compete on fuel costs.
My personal favourite reactor is the type proposed by Rod Adams of Atomic Insights, the Nitrogen Gas Cooled direct cycle reactor where the nitrogen gas passes directly through a turbine without needing to pass the heat through a heat exchanger.
If we start with the attitude that we're never going to succeed then we never will.
Maybe not writing articles with the implied overtones of failure would help this outlook?
Who knows?
Especially when it's updated to add:
Bradley added that the funding also shouldn’t be classified as a new investment since it “is simply confirmation of the required funding that has always been in our original business case,” and is being doled out “because the STEP programme is delivering on budget and on schedule.” Bradley said there have been no financial overruns, and that STEP is still on track to begin construction in 2029.
So, it's a project that's on target and on budget (On budget like Heathrow Terminal 5 was; but we don't shout about that either...) that's simply being given access to the pre-allocated funds because it's met it's targets? This sounds like exactly the kind of project my tax should be spent on.
Good luck to them I say, for most of my life the UK has been a country that seems equally as full of naysayers as it is talented clever people. Maybe it's time they shut up and let the rest get on with it.
We always shout about failures, never the successes. Problem is, this means most people assume all we ever do is fail.
What an idiotic list. A weird, cherry-picked group of disparate projects, abandoned for various reasons, at various stages, dating back at least 80 years.
Reaction Engines was dropped because they didn't have a commercially viable product in the pipeline. That's why they couldn't attract further funding from industry.
Bloodhound was a private vanity project that ran out of cash when the big bills started to come in.
TSR2 was a failed 50s military procurement program that no-one thinks should have been continued.
APT took forever to build and get working, but it was completed. It just wasn't purchased because it wasn't better than the alternative in service at the time.
HS2N never got off the drawing board.
Lorenzo was a massive waste of government money; the archetype of government being unable to commission IT projects. But it never got even close to working.
And the London Ringways?! That doesn't meet even a single one of your criteria. It wasn't wildly expensive. It didn't 'fail' as such. It was largely cancelled because it turned out to be an appallingly awful idea.
Clearly you aren't interested in facts that conflict with your alt-right conspiracy nut nonsense.
APT took forever to build and get working, but it was completed. It just wasn't purchased because it wasn't better than the alternative in service at the time.
Remember that the APT project was completed under a prime minister who did not once use a train during her time in office. Total funding for the project (including one gas turbine APT-E and three electric APT-Ps) was around the costs of three of the first TGV trainsets. Of which the French government bought a hundred in it's initial order for the Paris-Lyons line. In other words, the APT team did miracles with very limited funding.
Agreeing with you, by the way, except for the for the reason for non purchase.
The ringways were a mixture of very good ideas(*) and very awful implementations
Cost cutting on Ring 1 lead to the elevated box and the adjacent housing NOT being purchased/demolished as originally planned, which is where the whole thing started unravelling.
The southern parts of the rings were going to be in trenches to reduce noise and optics, routed across mostly farmland. Unfortunately the massive socio-political cockups on the north side caused them to be abandoned, with the result that the North Circular is fairly usable whilst the South Circular wends its way through dozens of town centres and traffic snarls
(*) Some of the ideas weren't so good, but it was what happened when politicians got hold of things and undid all the stuff intended to ensure minimal disruption to communities that killed it. It wasn't quite on par with the racist policies of American planners deliberately routing freeways through black neighbourhoods but there was a lot of diversion away from a few wealthy sponsors which adversely affected thousands of prople in suburbia along with a political mindset of not giving a toss about working class Londoners
Amongst other things the entire area inside ring one (roughly the inner london ring road) was going to be a "no private vehicles" zone - the first of its kind in the world - and the HEAVY investment in public transport to complement the rings was also curtailed. The reason the M25 is so notorious for congestion is because it's carrying traffic that was intended to be carried on THREE separate motorways (and there was also an intent to turn the A25 into a motorway completely bypassing London for traffic across southern England)
Reaction engines derived from a stupid idea (HOTOL) in the first place.
Bloodhound was a pointless waste of effort from the start, verging on a scam for funding.
You're right about the APT, but most of the technology developed for it was used elsewhere. Pendolinos have hydrokinetic brakes, for example.
Reaction engines derived from a stupid idea (HOTOL) in the first place.
Agreed. Single-stage-to-orbit vehicles like Skylon are extremely sensitive to the mass that's carried to orbit, and SABRE attempted to save weight in an area that adds little to the orbited mass: oxidizer.
Oxidizers are dense, so you can store a lot of oxidizer mass in a small, relatively low pressure, relatively low mass tank. (Compare the US shuttle's external tank's hydrogen tank to its oxygen tank.) Further, pretty much all the oxidizer goes out the tailpipe by the time you reach orbit, so an SSTO isn't lugging a lot of dead oxidizer mass with it.
SABRE attempted to lower that oxidizer mass but required additional mass be carried to orbit:
1. An elongated, aerodynamic, lifting form with less mass efficiency for its volume than a chunky SSTO like, say, Kankoh Maru
2. More heat shielding for extended hypersonic airbreathing flight
3. Less mass-efficient engines; hydrogen-oxygen rockets can approach 100:1 and kerosene-oxygen rockets are operating at 184:1, while SABRE managed about 14:1
Further, SABRE would impose higher gravity and drag losses during ascent because it required more time messing around in the atmosphere. It would therefore need more delta-V (fuel to change velocity) than a purely rocket SSTO with higher acceleration.
SABRE has a very high specific impulse, but it achieved that by not carrying oxidizer for part of the flight. In the end, that's not a great place to save mass.
Skylon was a sexy beast and SABRE had a lot of cool engineering (literally), but they were trying to solve the wrong SSTO problems.
Why didn't they go to the UK's own Tokamak Energy, who have already developed superconducting magnets that are ready for commercial deployment?
Your link doesn't say anything about HTS magnets ready for commercial deployment, just that they are trying to raise £125m to develop them. As people have been trying to do for well over thirty years, and coming up against the same fundamental problem every time: HTSCs have lousy critical currents in LN2 so you need to run them in LHe, at which point you might as well use niobium based conductors which are better in almost every way. For a start, the Lorenz forces means that SCs need to be strong, and HTSC are weedy ceramics.
Apart from energy from the sun, of course.
The first reaction a fusion company tries is Deuterium and Tritium. Tritium has a half-life of 12 years, meaning there's none in nature. You have to produce it from Lithium. An isotope of lithium. Isn't lithium difficult to buy?
Then all the beginner reactions, including he3, produce fast neutrons - about an order of magnitude faster than the neutrons produced when you split Uranium. Its tough to produce electricity from these. Its tough to step these things damaging your building!
A possible future fusion reaction is Hydrogen + Boron, producing 3 He nucleii - since they're charged you can probably directly get your electricity from them. Also its fission?
There is 0 chance of a fusion being used in a power generator over the next generation.
So this is a bribe, or the promise of a bribe.
Corrupt politics.
Just looked up the price: £6.27/kg (was about double that last year). So convert that to tritium and then pretend for a moment 100% conversion to electricity then the retail price of that electricity is £16.5 million. We could drop that conversion efficiency to 0.1% and the price of lithium would not have any significant impact. Fusion has a huge list of hard problems but sourcing lithium is not one of them.
There is a publication from IAEA called "IAEA World Fusion Outlook 2024".
It lists all the public and private organizations experimenting with plasmas and trying to build power plants. There is even one company promising power by 2028.
(I was hoping it would list all the possible reactions under consideration but it doesn't. There is one but it's like $100 or something.)
It's a fascinating read. Most of the commercial information is marketing bumpf, but you can see a lot of scientific bumpf in the national descriptions too.
I would say there are a lot of organizations and a lot of billions of dollars going into this so-called "fake" technology. I suspect it may actually be real.
I would say there are a lot of organizations and a lot of billions of dollars going into this so-called "fake" technology. I suspect it may actually be real.
There are a lot of organizations and a lot of billions of dollars going into AI, and that definitely isn't real.
"Isn't lithium difficult to buy?"
No. It's one of the most common elements on the planet. There is loads of production, most of which goes to batteries. This is a trivial amount on that scale, making it entirely feasible to outbid battery manufacturers.
There's lithium and there's lithium. The lithium/neutron reaction needs pure lithium-7 which is a small fraction of naturally occurring lithium and separation is complicated, messy and expensive. Currently if you can find any, lithium-7 is around $10,000 per kilo. You'd need tonnes of the stuff.
The stuff in batteries is the natural mixture of Li-6 & Li-7 so it's really cheap.
But not, as pointed out, the energy required in total, by a factor of a hundred and fifty or so. And I suspect that it ignored the practicality of collecting that energy efficiently so that something could be done with it.
Which is a shame. I'd like a Mr Fusion in my garden shed.
You have just (inadvertently?) pointed out the problem here: this money is all going into the STEP machine but not a single word about the proper housing for the device: I want to see the plans for the shed it is going into. You can't expect proper British innovation unless the sides are shingled and no two planks match, none of this pre-planed butt joints nonsense.
And what about the jam jar of random screws? Above the door or tucked in a cobwebby corner? These things are important (puts "Land of Hope and Glory" onto Victrola and stands at attention).
"Land of Hope and Glory" onto Victrola and stands at attention.
[] Thine equal laws, by Freedom gained
[] Have ruled thee well and long;
[] By Freedom gained, by Truth maintained
[] Thine Empire shall be strong
Sorry Elgar, I cannot say any of those boxes could be ticked.
Two and half billion quid could actually make a real difference to people's lives if it were wisely invested in any number of areas.
Two and a half billion would reduce the number of disabled people about to suffer painful deaths due to lack of care provision due to £5 billion of cuts to an already wafer thin support system
Though that's likely a plus from Kendall and reeves worldview....if it kills many disabled people well that's a reduction in the cost base and Kendall can say with a straight face that it was going to happen anyway and it was necessary or perhaps she just goes all aktion T4 after they shove through assisted dying and "reduces suffering" by killing the disabled off en masse....hell her rhetoric and that of her dwp bosses keeps sounding more and more nazi like every week...."disabled people cost you £xxxx" "there is another way" etc....
"Collecting the energy" in the type of fusion they're targeting will be via boiling water to make steam - the same at best ~60% efficient way we collect the energy from a coal or natural gas power plant. Though with the added fun of the heat being delivered via fast moving neutrons which eat away at all the parts they're exposed to, meaning regular downtime will be required to replace them and the parts being replaced will be low grade radioactive and have to be disposed of accordingly.
There are others out there targeting "direct energy capture" which bypasses the neutrons, steam and radiation (plus uses easier to source materials to fuse!) but the downside (there's always a downside) is that it requires temperatures ~3x higher than the neutron/steam type of fusion. That downside may make it seem fanciful given our struggles to reach even the lowest fusion temperatures, but at least one company thinks they can do it. Plus there's some reason for optimism that since even making the lowest temperature fusion work for power production would require truly CONTROLLING the plasma rather than just containing it, assuming we can figure that out we may improve our plasma temperatures by an order of magnitude or more.
That's a weird, propaganda-like quibble. It's like comparing the amount of energy needed to start a car with the power produced in the first second the engine is running. The problem with experimental fusion reactors is that they don't run for very long. If that problem is solved, along with the NIF managing to produce net power, then it doesn't really matter how much energy (within reason) it takes to start the reactor.
What you say is true for tokamak style fusion that uses plasma as once ignited it can be sustained, but laser induced fusion needs to power the lasers again and again for each and every pellet. It is more comparable to the power needed for spark plugs, except that there are 192 spark plugs and they require over a megawatt each.
It's a really bizarre piece. The criticism is that a project that has just gained funding to move from planning to construction has only done planning so far.
We could perhaps debate whether the UK should be funding fusion research or leaving it to other countries at this time, but that isn't what's been done here. FWIW, funding at this scale - £2.5bn over 7+ years - is not even a rounding error on the UK's current budget of ~£1.25 trillion.
Considering the time and expense we've gone to so far despite not yet achieving commercially viable fusion, it is a given that once achieved it will be hugely complex and expensive to build the first fusion power plants. So complex that even if every single detail of how it was achieved was made public there would be a handful of countries or organizations on the planet capable of replicating it.
The real work after it is done will be in refining it to simplify it and scale it down in size and cost. Even if it was first achieved by a private company they would make a lot more money by licensing their IP and letting others further develop it. I could see it ending up something like commercial patent pools, so that first company is the founder of the pool, other companies that make refinements that are accepted as part of the "standard" as it were get added, and they all get a cut based on the power produced.
I think it would be inevitable that like say the MPEG patent pool you'd eventually see an effort toward an "open source" version that works around the patents or waits until the foundational ones expire. Since fusion doesn't open the door to WMDs the way fission reactors do, and most of the world agrees that climate change is a problem we need to take seriously, I think it is a given there will be great interest in nations cooperating in an "open source" fashion to do some of that "refinement" work.
The response of different countries to such an entreaty would likely follow typical patterns. Our current administration would likely insist on going it alone, and we'd end up with the usual sort of public/private partnership you see in the US - public money be used for development, private ownership and capture of the profits once complete. We'd probably have the highest cost for fusion power in the world as a result.
Other nations would probably also follow their typical path - China would widely deploy it internally outpacing the entire rest of the world. They'd make it available at bargain prices to poor nations but with some strings attached ala belt and road! The EU is the most likely place we could see the "open source" type cooperation, and Brexit Britain will beg to be let in the door.
The laser based system has not achieved sustainable fusion and never will. The National Ignition Facility is funded because it provides data for thermonuclear weapon development.
For each firing there is a small metal sphere filled with deuterium/tritium which is blasted by the laser system. Those fuel spheres are hand-made and require careful positioning. On top of that, those super-powerful lasers operate one-shot at a time (a few picoseconds per pulse) and dump so much energy into the steering mirrors and other optical gubbins that it takes hours for them to be ready for the next pulse.
Now, will the magnetic systems produce useful amounts of energy? Possibly, but it is increasingly unlikely that it will be in my lifetime
There's a good (if old now) Brian Cox documentary on the hunt for fusion. At the end he asks all the experts he's talked to how long they think it will be before we get commercial fusion. There's a variety of answers (some now in the past), but the one that stuck with me was:
"There is a 50% chance of it working 20 years after you seriously fund the science".
Probably true.
I’m not anti science by any margin, it’s a lot of money but nowhere near enough to make any meaningful impact on the search for fusion.
I think investing that amount with someone like Copenhagen Atomics would yield a higher probably of getting some returns on the money.
Ps: No affiliation whatsoever with the company, just mentioned them as they are Europe based.
I see no problem investing in fusion - flying was a pipe dream for millennia too. This kind of research is exactly what public money should fund.
But let’s not pretend ambition is enough. If the project runs on public-sector wages and a civil service mindset, I wouldn’t be surprised if half the staff end up on Russian or Chinese payroll. You can’t build the future with temp contracts and risk-averse middle managers. That’s how you turn £2.5 billion into PowerPoint presentations.
... and always remember that the R101 airship (the one that was going to fly to India but only barely made it across the Channel before crashing in France) was built on public sector wages with Civil Service management.
Meanwhile its twin (R100) was built by a private company Vickers), made a very successful transatlantic flight to Canada and back before being scrapped soon after the R101 disaster, and at least partly because its success embarrassed those who'd mismanaged R101 so badly.
If you want to know more, read "His Majesty's Airship" to get the dirt on R101 and Neville Shute's "Sliderule" to see how a successful airship should be designed and built.
Let someone else pay to develop it and then nick the schematics.
But hey, Brexit Britain is a Borisian utopia, Top Nation, awash with cash, fully funded NHS, no poor people, free green energy, endless pristine water in our rivers and reservoirs to spare, modern sewage systems, world class education, wealthy universities, air con in every home, and all the trains run on time. So why not spunk a few billion on energy from fission, GM unicorns and statues of our glorious politicians in gold.
First of all, it’s only $2.5 billion — a modest investment compared to the scale of government spending. Second, if successful, the potential rewards of nuclear fusion could transform humanity. We cannot afford to become a nation that simply watches from the sidelines. We must continue to pursue bold, ambitious projects that reflect the kind of future we still believe in.
Nuclear energy has been “successful”, however, it’s not lived up to the 1050s hype…
I expect fusion to be similar.
Plus we can expect Westminster politicians, full of their particular party’s’ economic beliefs to look the gift horse in the mouth and stitch up UK taxpayers and businesses.
But I do agree, we should be investing and believe by doing so we increase our chances of having a better future.
It hasn't lived up to the hype because industry took a laboratory demonstrator powered by weaponsmaking unwanted waste products(*) and scaled it up to dangerous sizes whilst still staying dependent on the flow of that weaponsmaking waste
Militaries quickly realised that this setup gave them a figleaf to justify the separation plants and "strongly discouraged" any kind of developments that might run on unenriched uranium or thorium because widspread adoption would have exposed uranium separation facilities to having their "dual use" treaty exemptions removed
(*) 3% Enriched uranium is the unwanted waste product. Depleted uranium is the feedstock for making weapons-grade plutonium. Protestors ranting on about spent nuclear fuel being used for weapons manufacture miss the point that 90% of the uranium that went into the separation plant went out into the bomb programs and nobody has ever managed to separate weapons isotopes from spent fuel at the kinds of purities needed to make weapons - plus spent fuel is dangerous to be around whilst depleted uranium and weapons plutonium are bearely radioactive
FWIW, Copehagen Atomics are pursuing a thorium reactor path that the Chinese have already proven is unecessarily complex, expensive and potentially extremely dangerous compared to adding a few more kg of thorium into the primary loop and letting it stew. At $150/kg for thorium, this is way cheaper than trying to externally process proactinium and u233 (By comparison: 3% enriched uranium is around the same price as gold or platinum whilst natural uranium is about the same price as thorium). I doubt we'll see any dual blanket commercial reactors because single mix is proven cost-effective and cost effectiveness is what actually matters
What all these articles fail to explain is that positive energy isn’t the only goal because the input energy is typically electric but he output is heat. To convert that heat to electricity is only about .35% efficient under the Carnot cycle so to achieve net ELECTRICITY output you need 3 times as much heat as parity.
That’s a long way off.
I do wish the YK would invest in molten salt Thorium technology, the Chinese have already got a working model and the Indians aren’t far behind.
The US has given up on science so innovation won’t come to the west from there
"you need 3 times as much heat as parity."
If you're using molten salt reactors, then they're safe enough to operate close to urban centres (no explosions, no fires and any spilled material freezes solid almost instantly), which in turn means you can become a light and HEAT plant (This was Edison's original "heat and light" business plan - district heating in addition to electricity production)
That's important because the energy requirements for heating using electricity are quite high and using what would otherwise be dumped reduces the total annualised generation requirement quite a bit (if hot enough, district heating can also drive refrigeration and building AC systems using the electrolux cycle. Not a bad party trick for "waste" energy)
I am just an engineer, not a physicist.
The Bleeding Obvious solution is to copy proven fission reactor designs such as the Siemens Konvoi. They ran for decades without problems and very high availability.
We also have Uranium in Saxonia, in Czechia and in Bulgaria. The commies built their nukes from Saxonian Uranium; GDR was 4th on the list of biggest uranium producers.
So, to conclude: Euro sheeple need some more suffering until the political will to do the right thing materializes.
In this very badly researched and highly skewed opinion piece we read
"... We may be making advances toward fusion energy, but £2.5 billion is a big ask for a country buried in debt..."
I calculate that the UK spent roughly £40 billion last year on energy.
And apparently its population spent a little more than that on fashion and accessories.
So maybe not such a big ask.
£2.5bn into fusion via computational materials science development would be massively better than what Ed wants to do with his carbon capture machines. We go peat/dung/charcoal < Natural gas < Nuclear (large plants & SMR when we get them working) < Fusion (when we get those working). Somewhere between Nuclear & Fusion, energy becomes cheap enough to make hydrogen cheaply and that allows using hydrogen for transportation (and not stored in rare earth media). If we want to get to a post-scarcity future without controlled CO2 generation we are doing to need to leverage computational materials science to make the meta materials and model the system designs to get us to fusion. Why not make a little investment now? Oh, and that French scint was/is looking like a better solution. Can't remember the name.
During this time, ITER is progressing, but UK refused to join the effort. Because going alone is the British way ?
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