Viable fusion power in a decade? Tokamak Energy dares to dream

Brit biz updates world on why tech might not be forever 30 years away

Brit nuclear fusion biz Tokamak Energy has detailed early progress in a US Department of Energy (DOE) project that aims to deliver commercial fusion energy in the next decade.

The Oxfordshire-based company gave an overview of its early design workflow for the US Fusion Development Program at the 66th Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) Division of Plasma Physics in Atlanta, Georgia, last week.

This milestone-based development program was established by DOE as a competition, with the aim of pushing private companies to bring fusion energy production toward technical and commercial viability.

It's a running joke among scientists that fusion power generation is 30 years away, and always will be, but if this DOE project comes to fruition, viable technology could be expected in about a decade, although it will take much longer to commercialize. However, reaching that goal is a long way off.

In a presentation at the event, Tokamak's assistant chief engineer, Erik Mårtensson, detailed the company's contribution to the program. It aims to deliver a pre-conceptual design for a fusion pilot plant based on a high-field spherical tokamak with high-temperature superconducting magnets.

Tokamak Energy last month said it was forming a separate division to commercialize the superconducting magnet technology it has developed for reactor projects such as this one.

The pilot plant is estimated to be capable of generating 800 MW of fusion power and 85 MW of net electricity, which the company claims would be enough to power and heat more than 70,000 American homes.

Tokamak says it has completed Workflow Phase 1, which was to narrow down the design parameters for the fusion pilot plant from the "extremely large solution space" that exists. This involved iterating the design using PyTOK, its internally developed systems code. The second phase aims to progress from this to a pre-concept/concept design.

Initial parameters are for the tokamak to have an aspect ratio of 2.0, making it more spherical than donut-shaped, with a major radius of 4.25 meters and a magnetic field of 4.25 Tesla, as well as a liquid lithium tritium breeding blanket.

The plant will include a complete set of Tokamak's latest high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets to confine and control the superheated plasma formed from the deuterium and tritium hydrogen fuel.

Tokamak Energy president Michael Ginsberg claimed the presentation of the first design details caused great excitement at the APS conference.

"We are delighted by the reception from an expert crowd and energized in our mission to demonstrate net power from this pilot plant in the mid-2030s, paving the way for globally deployable carbon-free fusion energy. We now look forward to working with our partners in the US to evolve and progress this design," he said in a statement.

It's a project worth pursuing. As Tokamak points out, generating stations powered by fusion would provide clean energy to towns, cities, and industry. One kilogram of fusion fuel releases the same amount of energy as burning around 10 million kilograms of coal, but without the greenhouse gas emissions, the company says.

Nuclear fusion also does not create long-lived radioactive waste, unlike the nuclear fission plants that many technology companies are investigating as potential power sources for their expanding datacenter networks. ®