Looking like...
...another twenty years then.
Brit boffins boast of beating barriers to building fusion power
Scientists at the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) say that they have overcome plasma instability issues standing in the way of commercial fusion power plants. The boffins overseeing the MAST (Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak) Upgrade installation at UKAEA's Culham Campus in Oxfordshire conducted a fifth series of experiments on it …
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Monday 10th August 2026 10:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Looking like...
The likely candidates being the conservative party, who will falsely claim it didn't work and was a "liebour party boondoggle" or with the current head "a piece of woke nut zero lunacy, a total waste of money when tried and trusted options like oil, gas and coal are still abundant"
Then when prices of the above spike then they will run around like headless chickens and sign Britain up for some ultra expensive bought in "solution" with some eye watering strike price
That or decide to dust off some old school fission reactor plans and force a nuclear dump through on "national security grounds"
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Saturday 8th August 2026 08:48 GMT frankvw
Re: Looking like...
Thirty years? We have had "working fusion power" since the early 1950s. See icon.
What we have not had, and what the boffins have been working on since then, is finding a way of releasing it in a controlled manner without irradiating the punters with nasty neutrons.
Incidentally, I use the term "boffins" advisedly. I know the scientific community frowns at the term, but really, this level of nuclear tinkering makes rocket science look easy. Case in point: rocket science has had far more explosions lately. So I doff my hat to these guys. Chapeau!
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Saturday 8th August 2026 11:50 GMT james 68
Re: Looking like...
Thermonuclear bombs are fusion.
In regular parlance they are simply referred to as 'nuclear bombs ' as both fission and fusion devices rely upon nuclear processes to function and are both by definition 'nuclear'.
"Nuclear bombs are fission only" would only have been true prior to 1952.
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Saturday 8th August 2026 15:36 GMT cyberdemon
Re: Looking like...
Er well.. The modern ones are fission-fusion-fission. That is to say, they have a fission bomb at the core, which when it explodes, heats and compresses fusion fuel ie Deuterium-Tritium, which fuses to release an intense pulse of 14 MEV neutrons into a final layer of subcritical fissile material, which is what does the real damage.
So while it is correct to say that the only significant amount of Fusion energy we have on Earth (except the Sun, which is not on Earth) is a bomb, it's also correct to say we have never achieved a self-sustaining Fusion reaction, in a bomb or otherwise.
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Sunday 9th August 2026 19:21 GMT Contrex
Re: Looking like...
Tsar Bomba had a yield of 50 megatons, and 97% of that was fusion. If it had the uranium tamper as first designed, it would have reached 100 megatons. The tamper was replaced by a lead one to reduce fallout, so it was tested as a fission-fusion-fusion three-stage design.
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Monday 10th August 2026 02:29 GMT Old Used Programmer
Re: Looking like...
Modern nuclear weapons are generally "fission-fusion-fission". They use fission explosions to compress and heat a mix of Hydrogen isotopes and ignite fusion. The resulting blast of neutrons causes a lot of the leftover fissionable material to fission, upping the total yield.
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Monday 10th August 2026 09:54 GMT KaptainKhaos
Re: Looking like...
James 68 has beaten me to it. Nuclear bombs can be fission only, or they can be fission and fusion. The fission bit kicks of a fusion bomb. The fission and fusion bomb can be dialed up to almost whatever megaton yield the mad man wants , although in practice the delivery system (ICBM etc) will limit the size.
Teller / Ulam managed to make a "Hydrogen Bomb" in the early 1950s with the fission kicks off a fusion explosion.
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Saturday 8th August 2026 20:28 GMT Adair
Re: Looking like...
This is the tragi-comic part. We already have a fully functional and accessible fusion reactor operating on a long term basis, and in a situation that ensures both a modicum of safety and being well beyond the clutches of even the most deluded tyrant or money-grubber. A source of energy that is tappable in all sorts of ways by anyone who wants it.
But apparently 'driill, baby, drill' is deemed the more appropriate option - by some, who place their own enrichment above the well being of everyone, and of life in general.
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Tuesday 11th August 2026 09:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Looking like...
"And no nuclear waste to process"
i.e. it's not processed at all. Waste still exists.
Coal has significant amount of uranium and other radioactive materials and those concentrate to the ash, which is then dumped to a dump or used as a construction material, leading to roads (or walls) that radiate, literally.
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Tuesday 11th August 2026 08:57 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Looking like...
" source of energy that is tappable in all sorts of ways by anyone who wants it."
Really? Here in North Sun doesn't rise above horizon in about 2 months in winter. Add about 2 more months when it's so low that it's irrelevant as an energy source. It also happens to be the period in the year you'd actually need a lot of energy.
"Available to anyone who wants it", right.
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Friday 7th August 2026 18:53 GMT elsergiovolador
The way
If I researched this right, the whole thing had less than £200m of funding. Given how it could transform our energy it is bizarre government prefer to sink billions into foreign consultancies that don't even have to deliver anything than this.
I'd much rather have this properly funded than rent another ERP system that doesn't work.
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Saturday 8th August 2026 13:28 GMT Steve Foster
Re: The way
Seems like we would be better off spending that money on grid upgrades that would avoid the need for curtailment in the first place.
Or, if such upgrades are either impossible or insanely expensive, build plants near to the wind farms that can make use of intermittent/variable electricity.
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Saturday 8th August 2026 15:27 GMT Goodwin Sands
Re: The way
>Seems like we would be better off spending that money on grid upgrades
Yup, grid upgrades are insanely expensive - est 50 to 100 billion over 10 years. Nevertheless they are proceeding with the cost added to all our bills.
Grid capacity though isn't the whole story. The govt is causing to be built so much wind and solar generation that even when the grid is upgraded there will be many periods when there is way more wind and solar than we need which we will have to pay for.
>Or, if such upgrades are either impossible or insanely expensive, build plants near the wind farms
Isn't going to happen unless some very attractive new pricing scheme is introduced. Even then what big electricity using industries has the UK got left that would find it sensible to relocate to take advantage of cheap elec at largely weather dependant times?
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Sunday 9th August 2026 13:08 GMT cyberdemon
Re: The way
And why are grid upgrades that expensive?
Apart from wars and datacentres pushing up the cost of copper and electrical steel, there's another problem, at least in the UK: NIMBYs and Deform UK Ltd deluding themselves and the public that we can have "buried cables" instead of "pylons", without understanding the massive technical challenges with long-distance HV AC cables (and problems with HVDC too).
AC power transmission via cables is problematic because if you shove conductors too close to ground potential inside a cable, then they become capacitors. 400kV 50Hz cables are limited to about 50km before the reactive current (charging and discharging the cable's intrinsic capacitance) reaches about 50% of the cable's rated load. If you want to make longer cable runs, you need to install "static compensators" i.e. sodding great inductors, similar in both appearance and cost to grid transformers, every 40km or so.
Not sure why you got downvoted - your points are absolutely right. We have overbuilt intermittent generation, and are overbuilding continuous (base)load.
If a 1GW datacentre wanted to relocate to scotland and take advantage of a "very attractive new pricing scheme" to use up otherwise-wasted wind energy, it would need something of the order of 10 GWh of storage. For scale, a battery "gigafactory" is loosely defined as producing 1GWh of batteries per year. So a single 1GW datacentre would need the annual output of ten battery factories if it wanted to run on Wind/Solar alone. According to a random search summary, that would cost about $3bn just for the batteries. And batteries depreciate, just like GPUs.
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Friday 7th August 2026 20:24 GMT steelpillow
Balls
With all this sophisticated understanding of plasma physics, maybe soon we will have definitive answer on whether glowing plasma balls can survive for a reasonable period of time, without either exploding or any external energy input; maybe chemically driven analogous to a battery. The ones I used to create would chase each other round in the plasma chamber until I cut the power and they just blew out. Always wondered if I could have done better and created something to wind up the ufologists.
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Saturday 8th August 2026 13:29 GMT retiredFool
I was head guy of a chip design
And this was early on in the software DRC/LVS era of verification as chips were getting too big to hand check. Schedule was completely blown out as we kept hitting things no one foresaw due to software bugs in verification, ATPG, PG, ... I think this is kind of where we are with fusion on steroids. Until you know, you don't know. Its called research for a reason. So fusion might be a couple years away, or a century. It would be great for humanity if it is sooner to maybe mitigate warming. Or maybe not knowing humanity. Some capitalist might think turning earth into a small controlled sun and moving to Mars is a good idea.
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Saturday 8th August 2026 15:36 GMT Sproggit
Reality Check
It's always good/interesting to read of developments/progress towards reliable, economically viable fusion power. However, one of the frustrations I have when reading articles like this is what they *don't* say. For example, after reading the above, I asked a free, web-based AI a simple question:-
"What are the remaining major obstacles to be overcome in order to achieve reliable, commercial hydrogen-fusion-based electrical power?"
The answer I received is pasted below, verbatim, for your amusement. Now, I'll be the first to volunteer that I'm not a fusion scientist, but some of this looks pretty significant to me... I don't mean to "pour cold water" on the incredible work being done by these teams with the various projects around the world... but this is a project running on Normal-Time and not Musk-Time... Some of the technical hurdles that need to be overcome - like engineering a viable divertor that 1) works; and 2) won't turn in to vapour with each use - are not trivial issues.
I welcome updates from el Reg on fusion developments... but let's be realistic for a moment. If we were running a Kanban Board for the MAST project at UKAEA, then - Yay! - we've just added another one to "Done"; we might have two or three in "Doing" panel, while the "To Do" panel would have like a bajillion* stick-it notes in it...
Perspective, please.
* Feel free to substitute a number of your own choosing here... Please note: I've wrapped validation rules around that variable - it has to be a positive integer and range-checking will reject any number with less than 7 digits...
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“Hydrogen fusion” for the foreseeable future means mainly deuterium–tritium (D–T) fusion, not ordinary hydrogen fusion. The reaction itself is now physically demonstrated, but no system has yet shown the complete chain—continuous or high-duty-cycle fusion, net electrical output, self-sufficient fuel, maintainable components, and competitive cost.
1. Sustaining a useful plasma
A commercial plant must keep a very hot, self-heated “burning plasma” stable for long periods, while producing far more fusion power than the heating and confinement systems consume.
The remaining problems include:
Controlling turbulence, disruptions, runaway electrons and other plasma instabilities.
Operating at high pressure and high fusion power without contaminating the plasma with impurities from the wall.
Moving from experimental pulses to steady-state or very long-pulse operation.
Achieving net plant electricity, not merely “fusion gain.” For example, NIF has achieved more fusion energy than the laser energy delivered to its target, but the complete laser facility still consumes much more energy than reaches the target.
2. Surviving the reactor environment
The reactor’s inner components must tolerate two exceptionally severe conditions simultaneously:
Extreme heat flux, especially at the divertor, which removes helium “ash” and other exhaust from the plasma.
14-MeV neutron bombardment, which displaces atoms, causes swelling and embrittlement, produces helium and hydrogen in materials, and makes components radioactive.
No existing material has yet demonstrated the required combination of lifetime, low activation, thermal performance, corrosion resistance and manufacturability under reactor-level conditions. There is also no fully adequate facility for testing candidate materials under the complete fusion-neutron environment.
3. Closing the fuel and heat cycles
D–T fusion consumes tritium, a radioactive hydrogen isotope that is scarce and decays relatively quickly. A commercial fleet therefore cannot depend on today’s limited tritium stocks; each plant must breed its own replacement tritium from lithium in a surrounding breeding blanket.
That blanket must simultaneously:
Breed more tritium than the reactor loses.
Absorb neutron energy and transfer it efficiently to a coolant.
Shield magnets and structures.
Permit rapid extraction, purification and accounting of tritium.
Prevent unacceptable tritium leakage and material degradation.
This is one of the largest unresolved engineering risks: breeding blankets and their tritium-processing systems have not yet been demonstrated at commercial scale or under a full fusion power load.
4. Making a power station, not an experiment
Even if the plasma and blanket work, the entire plant must be reliable and economical:
Heat must be removed efficiently and converted into electricity through a conventional power cycle.
Plasma-facing parts and blankets will eventually need replacement, probably using robotic or remote systems because of radiation.
Magnets, heating systems, pumps, coolant loops, diagnostics and control systems must operate with high availability.
Frequent component failures could make the plant produce too little electricity to be commercially viable.
Manufacturing capacity, specialist materials, superconducting magnets, tritium infrastructure and skilled personnel must scale substantially.
Licensing, nuclear safety, radioactive waste handling, insurance and construction costs must become sufficiently predictable.
ITER identifies power exhaust, tritium breeding and fuel handling, heat extraction, remote maintenance, materials, magnets and nuclear safety as key gaps beyond the experimental stage; it also highlights reliability and plant availability as outstanding issues.
What “success” must ultimately demonstrate
A credible commercial fusion plant needs to show all of these at once:
Stable, self-heated fusion at reactor scale.
Net electricity after counting the whole facility’s power consumption.
A working, tritium-self-sufficient breeding blanket.
Reactor components that last long enough and can be replaced quickly.
High availability—closer to a power station than a research machine.
Electricity whose total cost competes with other reliable low-carbon sources.
Thus, the central obstacle is not discovering whether fusion reactions can occur. It is integrating plasma physics, neutron-resistant materials, tritium breeding, heat extraction, remote maintenance and economics into one durable machine. The U.S. Department of Energy’s 2026 roadmap groups the remaining gaps into structural materials, plasma-facing components, confinement, fuel-cycle processing, blankets and overall fusion-plant engineering.
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Tuesday 11th August 2026 09:09 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Reality Check
"battery gets simpler and cheaper"
They don't. All benefits from bulk manufacturing have been reached by now and the next problem is already on hand: Lack of materials. That's a hard limit.
That won't change unless someone invents something really new way to make batteries with common materials.
Researchers put billions yearly for that and not much has happened since Li-Ion, so I won't hold my breath waiting for it.
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Saturday 8th August 2026 19:59 GMT The man with a spanner
Re: Reality Check
It seems to me that we have maybe got ourselves in a mental rut here. The scientific acheivement here is enormous, and the goal may be reached - though we have no idea when or even it it will be achieved, and if it will be safe.
The outcome of all this effort is extract useable and manageable energy to power our lives.
Currently we have access to a gigantic fusion reactor producing more power than we can forseeably need parked a safe distance away from earth. This distributes the energy in a difuse manner across the globe. We currently have technology to collect and distribute this energy, and whilst this is not perfect it is within our current technology development timescale to resolve the storage, distribulion and collection challanges. It strikes me that these problems are orders of magnitude smaller than inventing, controling safely, and extracting power in a controlable way from our own mini-suns.
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Tuesday 11th August 2026 09:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Reality Check
"This distributes the energy in a difuse manner across the globe"
It does not. Just because it is a globe, it turns and it has seasons. You haven't noticed?
"have technology to collect and distribute this energy,"
We don't have that: Distribution losses are directly relative to distance and those are significant in every case.
Add some distance, like 1000 miles, and 40% of the energy vanishes en route, even with 400kV line.
Collecting isn't too good either, something like 20% of the energy is collected. Add transfer losses and less than 10% efficiency is a reality.
Instead using Sun as source of heat is almost 100% efficient, when available.
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Wednesday 12th August 2026 20:00 GMT The man with a spanner
Re: Reality Check
Funnily enough, whilst sat in my garden I had noticed that the sun occasionaly goes away but when it has its hat on it distributes its power over a wide area.
Modern Solar panels get up to 25% efficient and this is improving.
The UK is approx 300 miles wide, so I am not sure why you would want to transport the power over 1000 miles on a regular basis. Also power loss doesn't care whether the source is a power station or a solar panel.
Moving power around is to be avoided. Covering the roof and car park of Tesco with panels which charge batteries that then sell the power to motorists keeps the power local. Duplicate in many other places...
Obviously this isnt the whole answer, but neither is a fusion power station, and one of these is an option now.
I agree that direct solar heating is a good idea and can be qyite effective.
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Monday 10th August 2026 09:22 GMT disillusioned fanboi
Re: Reality Check
Good summary. I first realised that Fusion power was impractical when I read this article... https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion-reactors-not-what-theyre-cracked-up-to-be/
Fusion is a valid research project but not a valid industrial project. Don't count on fusion to solve any real-world problems. Be suspicious of the motives of anyone pushing fusion. Fission breeder reactors are a much more viable solution to our current problems.
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Monday 10th August 2026 01:52 GMT Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck
These are far more promising developments than are possible with ITER. ITER uses fuel pellets; a Tokamak isn't as "bursty" as a pellet-based system, and produces steadier energy flows. I'm particularly hopeful of these developments because I first saw a laboratory Tokamak at the University of Saskatchewan physics labs way back in 1981 before starting classes in '82 and was told we were "20-30 years away" from fusion. The purple glow was enthralling, but the timescale was way off. Maybe we're finally close to solving the world's energy needs.
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Monday 10th August 2026 13:37 GMT jokerscrowbar
Re: Please don't use the term boffin
The eggheads will also have to come up with new ways to deal with all the radioactive material previously known as nuclear waste.
At scale = Number of generators needed for Earths population times X tonnes plus containment. Do we know how much energy we need to burn making enough rugs to sweep it all over under?
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Monday 10th August 2026 15:24 GMT Elongated Muskrat
Re: Please don't use the term boffin
A coal-burning power station produces far more radioactive waste, in the form of fly-ash, and, unlike, a fission plant, the main product of a fusion plant would be non-radioactive helium. Materials inside a reactor would become radioactive over time from neutron-bombardment, but presumably at a much lower rate than in a fission plant.
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Monday 10th August 2026 17:10 GMT Elongated Muskrat
Re: Please don't use the term boffin
Exactly. People think "radioactivity scary" because of two things: bombs and cancer. Meanwhile, you are far more likely to be killed by a conventional bomb (especially, or perhaps, even, if you live in Gaza or Ukraine), and all the other things pumped out by power stations are going to give you cancer far faster than even an accidental radioactive discharge. Let's not even get onto the "microplastics everywhere" and how they are really good absorbents of all sorts of environmental pollutants, because for some reason people glaze over when you start talking about surface chemistry to them.
People are generally really bad at risk assessment, which is why people worry about rare high-impact risks (such as terrorism) far too much, and commonplace risks (such as getting a life-changing head injury from larking about on an e-scooter) far too little.
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Monday 10th August 2026 17:58 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Re: Please don't use the term boffin
No the radioactivity is dangerous and will have (statistically) killed 1000s, it's just compared to the millions that will suffer due to climate change and global warming it's irrelevant
The number of people killed by terrorist attacks on aircraft are much less than the number affected by their CO2 emissions. It's just one causes governments to make you take your shoes off and go through your holiday photos on your phone and the other lets government deny it and blame girls called Greta
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Monday 10th August 2026 18:09 GMT Elongated Muskrat
Re: Please don't use the term boffin
No the radioactivity is dangerous and will have (statistically) killed 1000s.
I'm not saying radioactivity isn't dangerous; I'm saying the danger is vastly overstated.
The leak of methyl isocyanate at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal in India directly killed, or caused the death within weeks, of around 16,000 people in one incident. Over half a million people were directly poisoned by the spill.
The poisoning of water sources by a DuPont plant that manufactured Teflon poisoned at least 80,000 people, causing deaths, chronic disease, and birth defects; all the sort of horror stories that people attribute to radioactive pollution. Unlike radioactive elements, the "forever chemical," perfluorooctanoic acid, released into the environment does not have a half-life, and does not degrade into something safer.
The explosion and fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, accepted as the world's worst nuclear disaster, is estimated to have caused the premature deaths of 4,000-6,000 people. It's not even on the same scale, and that was about as bad a nuclear accident as you can get.
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Friday 14th August 2026 17:22 GMT Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck
Re: Please don't use the term boffin
Aww, so people who call themselves "Tech Nerds" and "Tech Boffins" etc. are "bad people" because you're offended by the terms? Here's a clue cupcake: the world does not revolve on preventing you from being offended; far from it.
Boffin.
Boffin.
Boffin.
Boffins, Boffins, everywhere.
And you can take that and stuff your "feelings" where the sun don't shine.
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