Brit boffins teach fusion plasma some manners with 3D magnetic field Scientists at the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) claim they have taken a significant step toward making fusion energy possible by applying a 3D magnetic field to counteract instabilities in a spherical tokamak plasma for the first time. Working on the Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak (MAST) Upgrade experiment at Culham in …
was also designated as the UK government's first "AI Growth Zone" earlier this year.
Preferential treatment for privileged and rich, sanctioned by the state like that should be illegal.
If growth zone is good for growth, they it should be accessible to all. If it is not good for all, but the privileged few, then I can smell the stench of brown envelopes.
Clowns.
Well, promises and strategies are cheap, let's see how many of the promised billions in UK DC investments actually happen. If I were a decision maker at a hyperscaler then I'd want some modest footprint in-country plus I'd generously offer vague assurances that there's lots more investment available out round the back, purely to guarantee me political influence. But I'd be pretty reluctant to actually build a huge amount in the UK because our unit costs for infrastructure are double those of any sane country, and our industrial energy costs likewise.
"Foreign investment" isn’t what most people imagine. When a tax-dodging multinational boasts about “investing £50 billion in the UK,” it doesn’t mean a gift - it means they expect to extract at least £100 billion back. That return doesn’t appear out of thin air: it’s created by British workers, land, and resources. Only after that value has been siphoned off - and often routed through offshore entities - can we even start talking about tax revenue or “benefits to the economy.”
It’s essentially a leveraged PR exercise: promise billions, gain political capital, secure subsidies, cheap land, and infrastructure guarantees - then deliver a fraction of the headline figure while extracting long-term rents. The UK calls it “foreign investment”; the investors call it “colonisation with better branding.”
"The UK calls it “foreign investment”; the investors call it “colonisation with better branding.”"
Perhaps that's a bit sensationalist - the stock of UK inward FDI in 2023 was £2.1 trillion, that's the sum of everything them foreign businesses own of UK assets. The stock of UK outbound FDI in 2023 was £1.9 trillion that's what UK businesses own of foreign assets.
So, ignoring private investments and the smaller stuff that doesn't qualify as FDI, broadly speaking the UK has about as much invested overseas as overseas has invested here.
That’s the part you’re missing - FDI isn’t free money, it’s a high-interest loan that doesn’t show up on the government’s balance sheet. The “investor” shoulders the risk, yes, but also locks in the right to extract profit for decades. It’s a short-term capital injection followed by a long-term drain.
When a local business invests, the money circulates - wages, suppliers, taxes - staying in the economy. When a foreign conglomerate does it, the profits are repatriated, subsidies are pocketed, and the net effect is capital flight dressed up as growth.
Foreign conglomerates still employ people in Britain, pay tax in Britain, and use British suppliers.
It makes very little difference to your sandwich shop whether the sandwiches are being eaten by Microsoft employees or British Sugar employees, and Microsoft will be paying local builders and plumbers and electricians to build the data centres, the liquid-cooling work inside them and the power to run them.
That “sandwich shop” argument is economic cosplay. A foreign-funded data centre isn’t building prosperity - it’s briefly renting the local economy. Sure, builders and electricians get work during construction, but once it’s done the lights stay on for a skeleton crew of low-paid technicians whose wages barely cover the sandwiches you’re boasting about.
Meanwhile, the real value - ownership, IP, profit - flows abroad. The site consumes local land, power, and subsidies that could have supported domestic firms, but instead locks them out. And those “skilled worker visas” everyone politely ignores? They let corporations import cheaper labour, keeping wages depressed while increasing demand for housing and public services - costs that locals end up absorbing.
So yes, someone’s buying sandwiches. But they’re doing it in an economy quietly rearranged to serve foreign shareholders.
I see downvotes without counter arguments... so let’s run through it.
A data centre might employ, say, 40 on-site staff once built. Let’s be generous and say they earn £40,000 each on average - that’s £1.6 million in wages a year. Even if every penny were spent locally (it won’t be), that’s a rounding error.
Now compare that to the typical revenue such a facility generates for its owners: hundreds of millions annually in cloud services, most of it billed through Ireland or Luxembourg, taxed effectively at zero. The public sees a few dozen pay packets; the corporation quietly exports hundreds of millions in untaxed profit.
Let’s be honest - the UK doesn’t even make the servers, networking gear, cooling systems or other fittings. Most of that money goes straight to suppliers overseas. The only real local winners are construction and energy companies, and many of them are foreign-owned too. So even the “investment” that looks domestic quickly flows back overseas.
And it’s not just the money. The site eats up grid capacity, land, and water that could have powered real industry. The few technical posts often go to imported “skilled workers” on lower rates, while the local economy absorbs the housing and service pressure.
So yes, someone’s buying sandwiches - but it’s crumbs from a feast that’s already been shipped offshore.
Definitely not an expert but from what little I know, this actually sounds like a big deal. I understand there are plenty of hard problems with Fusion but the main one always seemed to be plasma confinement and control - this sounds like a big step forward. So a tip of the hat from me.
"... It remains to be seen whether its move into "AI" will maintain that reputation."
I'm reminded of some professor and a team of researchers at a place I used to work (Imperial College, London) who for a decade had been hammering away at theories about antibiotic resistance.
They seem to have got there in the end, but this spring they handed the problem to some AI thing, which figured it out in a couple of days.
I think everybody was impressed. Just the difference in the costs would be staggering, never mind the almost incredible speed of such an achievement.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyz6e9edy3o
Yes, hallucinations are a thing. But we're just starting to crawl with all this stuff, let alone walk.
People who know me will tell you that I'll be the last person they'd expect to embrace the latest fad, whatever it is, but my feeling is that the nay-sayers should couch their pronouncements in very well-considered terms, so as not to look like dinosaurs in a few years' time.
There are specific purposes where AI models can be very useful. Medicine is one such field. We must keep in mind that such models are not your average OpenAI ChatGPT or Anthropic Charles model, but bespoke models that have been trained up on all the science data that has been available to the researchers. But frankly, such models should remain right where they are - accessible to scientists, not the general public.
When protein molecules are 'dreamed up' by AI, physical test facilities like the Diamond Light Source and others will likely be used to check that those molecules actually are physically possible and are suitable for the required purpose, and anti-bacterial resistance and other processes are dynamic that could work one way one day, and a different way the next week.
Either way, what MAST at Culham is achieving is still bloody brilliant, and the scientists get one of those *points to top right*
If concern for whether someone gets to say 'Na Na Na Na Na ' a 'few' years ahead was to bother me I would be as culpable as the people telling everyone that 'AI' nirvana is just around the corner.
All this pro-'AI' never-ending pitch that is everywhere does not change the facts ... 'AI' is not here and is not close to being here !!!
The 'AI' thing that you referenced is an example of a very carefully curated set of data being manipulated by a very specific focused 'AI'.
I have said that 'AI' might work in a very controlled and focused scenario when the data is curated specifically for a narrow focused 'AI.
The question is answered because of the time/effort that has gone into curating the data beforehand and possibly also by having the expected answer known !!!
I would ask questions about who created the 'AI' and how much the 'AI' construction was 'influenced' by knowing the answer you expected.
Was the 'AI' created by people who had nothing to do with the original research and therefore could not create something 'biased' towards the known correct answer ???
I am not accusing anyone of fraud BUT someone unbiased needs to prove that this 'AI' does work in a manner that is 'Pure'.
Unintended bias could be ensuring the 'answer' is found !!!
:)
"AI" is a tool, the mistake people make is thinking that the "I" stands for "intelligence" and it somehow has some sort of theory of mind. It doesn't, it's just a big old statistical model that has grown in complexity enough to look like magic. Statistical models are great at some things, but what they can't do is "think", which is why they can't tell you how many "R"s there are in the word "strawberry", but they can find low-energy solutions to protein folding, and that sort of thing.
It's a bit like if you decided to call a hammer a screwdriver. It would still be really good for banging nails in with, but not so great at fitting the case screws to the back of your gaming PC. Statistical models are great at modelling things ins a statistical kind of way, but labelling them as "AI" doesn't make them intelligent. It merely exposes the people who call them that as bullshitters. Some people are better at spotting bullshit than others, and to those of use who have a finely attuned sense of it, our bullshitometers are red-lining at the level they would at a marketing convention.
"I understand there are plenty of hard problems with Fusion but the main one always seemed to be plasma confinement and control"
Yes, having million+ degree plasma hit the wall of the Tokamak is very problematic and very high temperature plasma tends to be very chaotic on very short time scales. There is at least one other magnetic confinement scheme being experimented with that uses an asymmetric plasma chamber and a complex arrangement of magnets to solve this problem. Personally I'd like to see both of them succeed.
It will be fantastic if any of them succeed.
But boiling water using heat exchangers from liquid lithium cooled by absorbing the neutrons from a fusing plasma, then passing the superheated steam through turbines to turn magnets to run generators, is never going to be cheaper than doping silicon and pointing it in the rough direction of the Sun. And it's really questionable whether it's going to be cheaper than buying natural gas from Qatar, burning it in turbines with the shafts going to generators, and then passing the superheated steam through separate turbines to turn magnets to run a separate set of generators.
I sort of agree ... BUT I would imagine that the problem being solved today is ...
Can we get a fusion reactor to function, under our control, without destroying the reactor every time we start it up ???
Build or Running Costs are not the issue ... right now !!!
Once you have proved that fusion is possible on demand, the next problem becomes can we do this better/cheaper ???
Both problems are 'Hard' ... BUT that tends to be the way things are done.
I have low expectations that there will be a Fully Functioning Fusion Reactor TOMORROW ... BUT some hard aspects of the overall problem appears to have been solved.
Well done.
:)
Fifty years ago, solar was never going to be cheaper than ... whatever folk were peddling back then. (From memory, in addition to several flavours of nuclear, there was wind, tidal, and even some fancy magneto-hydro dynamic gizmos that were going to replace your steam turbines.)
What changed? Well firstly, the panels became about four times more efficient and secondly someone realised that the manufacturing them could be outsourced to a dictatorship that gave precisely zero fucks about its own environment. Combined, you have modern panels that are about 10 times cheaper than their 1970s counterparts and so it is perhaps not surprising we've had to revise our thinking over the past half-century.
Go back another fifty years and quite a large number of properties weren't wired up to electricity and so their occupants didn't give two shits what was the cheapest generation method.
When we turn to look at the century old technology of the power station, of creating heat, with coal, oil, gas, nuclear or even fusion, water is boiled to produce high pressure steam, which drives the turbine, to drive the electricity generator; which in turn, creates waste steam which has to be condensed back to water and returned to the boiler. That is a "Heat Engine", the same technology, heat air to drive a piston or a turbine, in all fossil fuel burning vehicles. We know a lot about the development of heat engines; for example, the efficiency of a well managed coal fired power station, is better than a nuclear powered power station, but it is generally accepted that ALL power stations have to remove more than 60% of the heat generated as waste heat, either into the atmosphere, or by pumping water from the sea to cool the waste steam back to water. For example the new nuclear power plants being built at Hinkley Point in Somerset here in the UK need a 2.8 Km long tunnel to deliver 120,000 litres per second of sea water, up to 12 Degrees C warmer, back into the surrounding sea.
For every 1GW of electricity generated, ~ 2.8 GW of heat is delivered back to sea. Very importantly, not just during daylight hours, but continually 24 hours of each day for the next 60 years. Now understand that these power station heat engines are the cause of rapidly growing air and, particularly sea temperatures, which are driving the increase in dramatic episodes of severe rainfall; rain that stems from the higher sea temperatures, creating equally rapid increases in evaporation of the sea surface, which drive the increase in rainfall. So net zero is not going to do anything about the heat generated by power stations. That our problem is the strange belief of those suggesting the solution is the reduction of CO2, when there is no debate about the heat source, and about the simple well known fact that during daylight, CO2 decreases due to adsorption by plant life.
All of us are facing the need to stop the use of ANY form of heat engine to create an energy source; or completely lose control of the climate of the planet. Please think about that when next time there is a report about a massive rain storm destructively washing through a town or city; or when the air temperature reaches the point where we humans cannot survive, and forest fires burn all surface plant growth.
We have no option; we must stop the use of heat engines, and that includes Fusion powered heat engines..
I think you might need to go back to thermodynamics school, laddo. Atmospheric heating from the sun greatly outweighs any of these effects, and the effect of carbon dioxide in selectively absorbing re-emitted solar radiation and thereby warming the atmosphere has been known and properly understood for almost two centuries. Far more warming of the oceans occurs from this effect than could ever be caused by waste heat outflow from power generation, which is very literally a drop in the ocean. Ditto with the effect of plants absorbing CO2 during the day; you do know that this has zero measurable effect on the diurnal levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and no such effect has ever been observed or measured, right? That's on the same level of nonsense as flerfism.
As for alternatives to heat engines for converting mechanical power into electrical energy, I hear Maxwell's demon is waiting just for you with his tiny little pitchfork. I'm sure all the nuclear physicists are eager to hear of your alternatives to using heat to drive a turbine; perhaps a series of tiny baseball gloves on a wheel to catch the fast neutrons, attached to a second little wheel with teeny-tiny boots on it to kick the electrons along a wire?
If you have ever worked in a large mechanical engineering works you will have come across what today might be seen as an old fashioned weight balance scale which might well be capable of weighing, say, 10 Tons. (I am using that as my example, but the same applies to a balance scale to weigh, say 1Kg), What you will discover is that any such balance scale will be disturbed from equilibrium by what is a tiny additional weight. You are telling us that with so much heat being delivered by the sun, (only during daylight hours), any additional heat input to the planet has no effect; when what I am saying is that ANY system in balance will be disturbed by a VERY small additional input.
In addition, as before described, the suns heat is only applied during daylight, and that the greenhouse industry have detailed fact sheets available to show that during daylight hours, CO2 declines as plants adsorb the CO2. Go look for yourself, and also see the very large CO2 storage tanks they need to keep the CO2 levels up during daylight hours. Today CO2 delivery to greenhouses is a very large industry.
What the entire net zero science establishment has done is refuse to accept any additional heat input to the planet as having any effect upon the climate; that, as you so strongly state, the entire problem is heat being retained by the CO2. So now tell me why all the existing science for global warming is now having to come to terms with the warming accelerating much faster than all their previous science has previously predicted using CO2 as the primary driver of global warming?
This is not some form of fun debate; we are experiencing now a dramatic acceleration in heat, and it is way past time for the science to explain why. All I can do is ask everyone to look again at the underlying heat input to the planet from heat engines, particularly those being used to generate electricity. That the existing explanation has no reference at all; to the actual heat input to the planet.
Please think about that?
The rate of heat loss is proportional to the temperature difference. That's Newton's Law of Cooling which is a direct consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (heat flows from hot to cold). A very small additional input has an even smaller effect on temperature. I'm assuming you know the difference between heat and temperature here, but it's probably a big assumption, since your grasp of thermodynamics appears to be slight.
So, they use CO2 tanks to supplement CO2 levels in greenhouses, a closed system with a high concentration of actively growing plants in proportion to the volume of the gases in there. Meanwhile, in our biosphere, plants grow at (some of) the surface of a column of air 100 miles tall. Do you see how these two things are not comparable in scale?
I don't know where you're getting your "science" from; perhaps Temu? You should send it back for a full refund, because it's faulty as hell.
There are several in operation or currently being built in the city I live in. Prior to the pandemic, we had to endure long diversions for the best part of a year while they put the pipes under the roads round where I live.
The main blocker to installing these is the fact that people, who would, on the whole, like the free hot water, don't tend to live in close proximity to industrial sources of heat. I believe the one that was installed near me gets its heat from the incinerators at the local hospital, and is used to heat several of the surrounding buildings.
I didn't read the article, probably wouldn't mean anything to me. But ... when were magnetic fields anything other than 3D? I guess you could call them 4D and maybe some theoretical physicist will claim they have a foot in higher dimensions that we can never experience because it makes his mathematical model work?
I think you might need to go back to thermodynamics school, laddo. Atmospheric heating from the sun greatly outweighs any of these effects, and the effect of carbon dioxide in selectively absorbing re-emitted solar radiation and thereby warming the atmosphere has been known and properly understood for almost two centuries. Far more warming of the oceans occurs from this effect than could ever be caused by waste heat outflow from power generation, which is very literally a drop in the ocean. Ditto with the effect of plants absorbing CO2 during the day; you do know that this has zero measurable effect on the diurnal levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and no such effect has ever been observed or measured, right? That's on the same level of nonsense as flerfism.
As for alternatives to heat engines for converting mechanical power into electrical energy, I hear Maxwell's demon is waiting just for you with his tiny little pitchfork. I'm sure all the nuclear physicists are eager to hear of your alternatives to using heat to drive a turbine; perhaps a series of tiny baseball gloves on a wheel to catch the fast neutrons, attached to a second little wheel with teeny-tiny boots on it to kick the electrons along a wire?
If you have ever worked in a large mechanical engineering works you will have come across what today might be seen as an old fashioned weight balance scale which might well be capable of weighing, say, 10 Tons. (I am using that as my example, but the same applies to a balance scale to weigh, say 1Kg), What you will discover is that any such balance scale will be disturbed from equilibrium by what is a tiny additional weight. You are telling us that with so much heat being delivered by the sun, (only during daylight hours), any additional heat input to the planet has no effect; when what I am saying is that ANY system in balance will be disturbed by a VERY small additional input.
In addition, as before described, the suns heat is only applied during daylight, and that the greenhouse industry have detailed fact sheets available to show that during daylight hours, CO2 declines as plants adsorb the CO2. Go look for yourself, and also see the very large CO2 storage tanks they need to keep the CO2 levels up during daylight hours. Today CO2 delivery to greenhouses is a very large industry.
What the entire net zero science establishment has done is refuse to accept any additional heat input to the planet as having any effect upon the climate; that, as you so strongly state, the entire problem is heat being retained by the CO2. So now tell me why all the existing science for global warming is now having to come to terms with the warming accelerating much faster than all their previous science has previously predicted using CO2 as the primary driver of global warming?
This is not some form of fun debate; we are experiencing now a dramatic acceleration in heat, and it is way past time for the science to explain why. All I can do is ask everyone to look again at the underlying heat input to the planet from heat engines, particularly those being used to generate electricity. That the existing explanation has no reference at all; to the actual heat input to the planet.
Please think about that?
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