FUSION UPDATE | COVER STORY
As private companies hit milestones, other projects continue to progress.
UK government support for fusion In October the UK government consulted on a strategy to move from being a ‘fusion science’ superpower to a ‘fusion industry’ superpower. It wants to build a prototype fusion power plant in the UK — the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) — by 2040 and a fusion industry to export the technology. Five sites have been shortlisted and a final decision is expected by the end of 2022. In May, results from UKAEA’s new ‘MAST Upgrade’
experiment at Culham demonstrated that the new ‘Super-X divertor’ exhaust system reduces tenfold the heat load on materials, so components last much longer. In addition to an initial £222 million ($300 million
commitment to STEP from the government (via BEIS and the EPSRC) and the EUROfusion consortium, the UK has invested an extra £184 million. In August UKAEA announced a collaboration with the
Science and Technology Facilities Council on a Centre of Excellence in Extreme Scale Computing in Fusion. In December it signed a £4 million, four-year framework agreement with Assystem, Atkins, IDOM, Morsons, NUVIA, EASL and Norton Straw Consultants, for fusion research, plant design, robotics, modelling, materials and other areas. Under a second £3.5 million framework, five lead companies — Ansaldo, Doosan Babcock, Frazer-Nash, Nuclear AMRC and Rolls-Royce — will be supported until March 2024 by more than 25 collaborators from industry, research and technical organisations, the High Value Manufacturing Catapult and academia. Assystem was also selected as key partner on the STEP
Fuel Cycle Tritium Engineering Framework and to assess different designs for STEP’s tritium breeder ‘blanket’, working with Thornton Tomasetti to develop simulation software to help define breeder blanket designs. Assystem has been architect engineer at ITER since 2005. September saw the UKAEA’s Fusion Technology Facility open in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, which will be used to test fusion plant components. November saw 15 organisations secure contracts worth
£50,000-£250,000 ($68,000-$340,000) focusing on challenges in digital engineering and hydrogen technology across the range of commercial fusion energy. Others secured funding to reduce fuel requirements by researching advanced production and handling technologies for hydrogen isotopes. UKAEA also took on Doosan Babcock and Altrad to
provide industrial support services and Atkins to help design the Hydrogen-3 Advanced Technology facility for research into the use of tritium in fusion energy. Atkins and supply chain partners including Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, Ansaldo Nuclear, and FlexProcess will deliver design of the H3AT tritium recycling loop, comprising storage beds, a distribution system, impurity processing system, and systems to detritiate water and air. U
Top: An engineer working on high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets Photo credit: Tokamak Energy
Centre: Illustration of Super-X divertor in MAST Upgrade Photo credit: UKAEA
Bottom: Seen from above, each of NIF’s two identical laser bays has two clusters of 48 beamlines, one on either side of the utility spine running down the middle of the bay Photo credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
www.neimagazine.com | March 2022 | 19
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