IS THE FUTURE NOW?
Nuclear fusion, the ‘magic bullet’ for renewable energy, may be on the U.K.’S horizon
Nick Hawker is standing inches away from a gun that can fire bullets at 56,000 km/h. “Let’s just say, it wouldn’t end well if somebody got hit,” he laughs. This is the fastest rail gun in Europe: a 12-metre pulsed-power machine capable of discharging up to 200,000 volts — the equivalent of 500 simultaneous lightning strikes.
The device is in the secretive laboratory of First Light Fusion, in a bucolic corner of Oxfordshire. This place, claims the 34-year-old scientist, offers one of the best hopes the planet has of creating limitless clean energy through nuclear fusion.
Hawker is not quite ready to change the world just yet. “Fusion is definitely, definitely coming. This is the decade ... but like everything in energy, it takes time,” he says.
That prediction may sound familiar. Since the ’50s, scientists have spent billions of dollars trying to harness the fusion reaction that powers the sun. Generations have promised that a commercial reactor is just decades away. Each has failed to make it reality.
“Essentially, what you need to do is make a little star on Earth,” says Dr. Melanie Windridge of the Fusion Industry Association. “You have to find a way of getting your fuel hot enough and dense enough for long enough that fusion reactions occur.”
Within the sun, temperatures of 15 million C cause hydrogen atoms to collide so hard they fuse to become helium. Every second, 600 million tonnes of hydrogen is converted in this way, releasing a tremendous amount of energy.
A similar process could work on Earth at temperatures 10 times hotter than the core of the sun. The problem is designing a fusion reactor that can produce more energy than it uses.
The most advanced state-backed fusion project, the $29-million Iter reactor in France, has yet to come up with a solution. With multiple delays and mounting costs, the project has caused many to lose hope in the dream of limitless energy.
A separate British project in the ’50s, the Zeta fusion reactor, was forced to close down in the late ’60s after failing to produce power. Successive failed attempts have led to the cliché that nuclear fusion is always just 20 years away.
Hawker believes, however, he can succeed where hundreds of Iter and Zeta scientists have failed. “What’s interesting about U.K. startups is that they’re tackling it as an engineering challenge rather than the government labs who are just looking at it as a physics experiment,” says Windridge. “The startups are really coming in and saying, ‘How would we do this in the real world?’”
Hawker’s radical solution to fusion takes its inspiration from an unlikely source in nature: the pincer shrimp.
“It’s quite remarkable,” says Hawker, who studied the shrimp as part of his PHD research at Oxford University. “The pincer shrimp is the only example of inertial fusion on Earth . ... It was the seed for First Light.”
Pincer shrimps click their unusually large claws so rapidly underwater that their bubbles create shock waves as loud as a Falcon space rocket launch. At the same time, vapours inside the bubbles reach temperatures in excess of 15 million C, causing plasma to form.
In 2011, Hawker gathered a team of engineers to see if he could scale up the shrimp’s technique by firing copper bullets at 43 times the speed of sound into a capsule containing deuterium and tritium fuel.
“It worked,” smiles Hawker. “Well, not at first, because we set it up wrong, but it did eventually. ... That was a really cool period.”
First Light Fusion recently raised more than $43 million from investors including Oxford Science Innovation, Invesco Perpetual and IP Group. That is helping it create an even more powerful machine that can fire projectiles at 173,500 km/h. The next step will be to have a fusion plant powering the grid by the early 2030s. “I’m 100 per cent certain that the science problems can be solved in the 2020s,” says Hawker. “We have more to prove around the physics for the core process, but if we can find a way to make that work, the onward engineering is dramatically simpler for our concept.”
A short drive away from First Light, rival engineers at Tokamak Energy in Abingdon are working on a very different method for creating fusion. They too, have the ambitious goal of creating a commercial plant by 2030.
“This device has produced plasma temperatures hotter than the centre of the sun,” says Dr. David Kingham, founder of Tokamak, as he proudly looks out on to a 45-tonne machine called the ST40. “Our goal is to get up to 100 million C. That’s the challenge, and the device will definitely do it. We just have to add a few more things ... we’ll have all the equipment in place to go on to high magnetic fields in about two months.”
ST40 is a fusion reactor based on a “tokamak” design, which was developed in Russia in the ’60s and later used by Iter.
The doughnut-shaped device, like other tokamaks, uses the world’s most powerful magnets to hold plasma in place and away from the reactor’s walls. This atomic soup is then heated to temperatures above 15 million C.
If all goes to plan, when the team increases the temperature to 100 million C, atomic nuclei within the plasma will fuse and release “clean” energy.
Next to ST40 is a mission control room with more than 50 screens showing every detail of the plasma as it is forming. Dozens of engineers work day and night to monitor the temperature and pressure of the tokamak — and it seems their efforts are paying off.
Since it spun out of Oxford’s Culham fusion research laboratory, Tokamak Energy has raised more than $203 million to speed up its research.
Backers include Dr. Hans-peter Wild, the billionaire founder of Capri Sun maker Wild, and David Harding, chief executive of Winton Capital Management. It’s this private backing that has triggered new hope in the fusion industry.
Plans are already afoot to raise hundreds of millions more.
“I think that the conditions for developing fusion are changing,” says Jonathan Carling, chief executive of Tokamak Energy and a former chief operating officer at Rolls-royce.
“Historically, fusion was the province of large government megaprojects. Now what we see is there’s also private money coming into the fusion business because people can see this is realizable, but it’s going to need pace and agility and multiple attempts and approaches.”
Windridge agrees: “For the last 10 years, it’s been really interesting because there has been a lot more investment. And it’s not just highnet worth individuals, it’s institutional investors as well who are thinking about returns for their shareholders.”
There are good reasons why scientists such as Hawker and Kingham refuse to accept defeat. If it can be harnessed, fusion power would be the holy grail of energy production.
Fusing atoms releases almost four million times more energy than burning coal, oil or gas. Its main fuel, deuterium, can be found in water and so there is a limitless supply. It’s also relatively safe, and does not emit harmful toxins such as carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has pledged $379 million pounds of public money to help the U.K. build the world’s first fusion plant by 2040. The Step (Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production) project is taking place in Culham, not far from First Light and Tokamak Energy, using expertise from the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority.
But Hawker believes that Britain must be more ambitious if it is to take on the likes of China and the United States.
Brexit, he says, offers an unrivalled opportunity. “My mind is just straight on to, ‘Well, where can we find advantage here? How can we do something?’ We’re kind of up against great economic might, but we can win, because fusion is really, really hard.
“I think there’s a difference between engineering problems and science problems. Engineering problems: more money, more people and you get there. Science problems: unless you have the core of expertise it doesn’t matter how much money you throw at it, you might not solve it.
“And I think that can be a critical advantage for us in the U.K. This could be the place where it’s finally cracked.”
Fusion is definitely, definitely coming. This is the decade ... but like everything in energy, it takes time.