Britain races against the world to unlock energy’s holy grail

UK’s quest to make nuclear fusion a reality is approaching the Manhattan Project in scale

“Most British people don’t know that their Government has started a Manhattan Project,” says Michael Cole, a plasma physicist and author of a history of fusion energy. “It is an engineering project on the same scale.”

I’ve come to see it for myself, but as my train slows to a halt at what feels like a branch-line station that Richard Beeching forgot to close, it’s hard to believe.

Culham railway station is as quiet as the Adlestrop of Edward Thomas’s melancholy poem, in which there’s nothing but “willow-herb ... and all the birds of Oxfordshire”.

But just behind the hedges is Britain’s Los Alamos: the Centre for Fusion Energy.

Spread across a sprawling industrial park more than 160 acres, it is home to some 2,600 scientists and engineers busy trying to tame atoms. The project, some believe, is as ambitious as Robert Oppenheimer’s in New Mexico.

“There’s enough energy potential in a glass of seawater to light up a city,” says Mark Thomas, the chief executive of First Light Fusion.

But unlocking it requires a dramatic, violent process called nuclear fusion.

Every star, including our own sun, is a giant natural fusion reactor, and here in the Oxfordshire countryside, they are making machines that operate on the same principles of physics.

Temperatures inside the machines have reached 10 times hotter than the sun’s core, easily the hottest ever recorded in the solar system.

After decades of demonstrations and experiments, the UK has decided it’s time to commit to building the world’s first commercial prototype fusion power plant.

“The UK’s Step reactor is the only state-backed project for a real working power plant, not an experiment,” Cole says.

This means grappling with the things that research scientists don’t necessarily enjoy, such as cleaning, maintenance and, most awkwardly of all, finessing the fuel. All of this will be tackled here in Britain.

The reactor will be based more than 100 miles away at West Burton, Nottinghamshire.

A large industrial site once occupied by a coal-fired power station will be cleared for the first Step reactor.

This will generate power by 2040, albeit a modest 100 megawatts (MW) – one 20th of the output of the coal plant that made way for it.

However, success will be defined more by the bigger plants it could pave the way for in the future, which will hopefully deliver cheap and reliable energy.

“We know enough about fusion now that we think that this is possible – that you can go for that moon shot and create the power plant, confident enough that it will work,” says Heather Lewtas of the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA).

Such is the scale of the project it’s even possible to imagine a quite different Britain: one not only re-energised, but reindustrialised. For the power station itself is only part of the story.

To produce a commercial fusion power plant requires perfecting and then manufacturing several areas of advanced technology. That includes high-temperature superconducting magnets, gyrotrons, software modelling and robots to inspect, maintain and clean up new reactors.

“If we just build a prototype power plant, we will have failed,” says Ryan Ramsey, the former nuclear submarine captain who is now the operations chief at UK Fusion Energy, the vehicle created to deliver the Step power plant.

To achieve this, the UKAEA is partnering with the private sector. The aim is to empower engineer-entrepreneurs to not only tackle the global fusion energy business but new markets too, ranging from medicine to power distribution.

“We’re here to build a power plant and a fusion industrial base in the UK at the same time,” says Ramsey. “One that serves the world.”

I can begin to see what this means while examining a machine the size of a small terraced house down the road from Culham at Tokamak Energy.

It’s a gyrotron, an energy gun similar in principle to a kitchen microwave, but developed specifically for fusion research and vastly more powerful. For example, it fires a million watts rather than the hundreds of watts a domestic appliance throws at a lasagne.

Only three or four companies in the world make gyrotrons, Tokamak Energy executives tell me, and they can make a couple every year at best. The Step reactor at West Burton will require no fewer than 200.

“So much British innovation has been commercialised elsewhere,” says Ross Morgan, the director of strategic partnerships at Tokamak Energy. “Governments are now really determined to ensure this doesn’t happen with fusion.”

Rising potential of fusion

Fusion promises to be the last energy technology we will ever need.

At its crudest, water goes in and energy comes out. Rather than splitting the atom, however, fusion squeezes it, fusing two hydrogen isotopes.

One of these is deuterium, which is extracted from seawater at little cost. That means that no matter how populous a civilisation, there will always have an abundance of energy if humans have mastered fusion.

“A tiny fuel pellet a millimetre wide has the energy potential of a barrel of oil,” says Mark Thomas, the chief of British fusion pioneer First Light.

As a bonus, fusion leaves behind almost none of the dangerous residual products of nuclear fission, the process which powers today’s atomic reactors.

If fusion goes wrong, it will damage the power plant. But it cannot create irradiated ghost towns or contaminate crops thousands of miles away.

Britain races against the world to unlock energy’s holy grail