OXFORD, United Kingdom (Reuters) — A British fusion reactor, the ST40, has been turned on and officially achieved first plasma, says the company behind it – Tokamak Energy.
The firm, based in Oxfordshire, aims to produce a record-breaking plasma temperature of 100 million degrees – seven times hotter than the center of the Sun and the temperature necessary for controlled fusion.
Tokamak Energy, one of the world’s leading private fusion energy ventures, says it believes the ST40 will be able to produce plasma temperature of 15 million degrees in Autumn 2017.
According to a company press release, “100 million degrees is an important threshold, as it is only at or above this temperature that charged particles which naturally repel can be forced together to induce the controlled fusion reaction. It will also prove the vital point that commercially viable fusion power can be produced in compact spherical tokamaks.”
Fusion is how stars produce energy. It occurs when the nuclei of light atoms, such as hydrogen, are fused together under extreme pressure and heat.
The firm aims to put fusion power into the grid by 2030.
Dr Bill Huang, senior tokamak engineer for Tokamak Energy, told Reuters in December 2015: “We’re looking to generate these high temperatures which are reactor relevant, so we’ve set ourselves a 100 million degree challenge, and we’re aiming to get 100 million degrees in that device.”
Key to Tokamak Energy’s design is the spherical shape of its tokamak – a device using a magnetic field to confine plasma – and thin high temperature superconductor strips.
The company says its technology would be similar in costs to a nuclear fission plant, but without any fissile material and with no risk of meltdown.
In December 2015, Tokamak Energy CEO told Reuters: “Fusion is one of those technologies which, if it could be harnessed, could be scaled up rapidly to be deployed world-wide by 2050 and could make a very big difference to carbon emissions and therefore to climate change from 2050 onwards.”
But Tokamak Energy is not without its critics.
Professor Steven Cowley, Chief Executive Officer of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, described Tokamak’s claims as being beyond incredible at a British parliamentary committee in 2015.
He told MPs: “In presentations to investors, Tokamak Energy claimed that it could get fusion by 2018. We had several people working with Tokamak Energy. That is not just incredible, it boggles the mind – you cannot get fusion by 2018, not with any of these things. Nuclear licensing would take you 10, 15 years at best; a fusion device is a highly nuclear machine, and so on. So claims to investors of being able to get to fusion by 2018 drove us to say, ‘We need to have you at arm’s length.'”
Cowley added: “When you tell your investors that you can do fusion by 2018, you cannot tell them that the (UK) Atomic Energy Authority agrees with you, because we do not. We do not think that you can get electricity in 10 years and that that is a credible claim.”
The ongoing inability of the multi-billion dollar International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project in France has encouraged many small companies to take advantages of advances in various technologies to attempt to make fusion themselves.
A number of high-profile investors, such as Microsoft’s Paul Allen and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, are backing various small-scale fusion projects.
