When James Watt’s first commercial steam engine was installed in March 1776 at Bloomfield Colliery, Tipton in the West Midlands, it was hailed as a mechanical marvel. Yet few could have anticipated the way steam engines would change the world.
Developed initially to pump water from mines, the technology was adapted across so many industries and applications that it sparked the Industrial Revolution. Now, according to those working on the development of fusion energy power plants, we are on the cusp of a similar transformation. “I see this whole endeavour as having the characteristics of a general purpose technology in the same spirit as Watt,” says Lu-Fong Chua, chief strategy officer of TAE Power Solutions in Birmingham.
Fusion is the energy-generating mechanism that makes the stars shine. The cliche is that human-engineered fusion on Earth is always “30 years away”. But if we can make it work, it promises such quantities of clean energy that we will finally be able to leave fossil fuels behind.
Large, state-sponsored efforts and, increasingly, private startups are reporting breakthroughs that many in the industry now think will lead to viable fusion energy. Underlining their optimism, in 2022 the UK government announced the site for the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) project, at West Burton in Nottinghamshire. This demonstration plant aims to supply electricity into the national grid by the 2040s. And in developing such fusion power plants, we are creating new technologies and solutions that can reach far beyond the task of energy generation.
For example, TAE Power Solutions is a spin-out from America’s TAE Technologies, which was founded in 1998 to develop commercial fusion power. Obliged to invent a way to collect and store 750 megawatts (the power needed to spark their experimental reactor into life) from a commercial electricity grid only capable of delivering 2 megawatts, the firm is now adapting its breakthroughs to provide more efficient batteries for the next generation of electric vehicles.
“We don’t see these as side projects; we see these as happy byproducts that have very high intrinsic value on their own for problems and challenges beyond energy generation,” says Chua.
In the UK, the Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) has established the Fusion Cluster at Culham in Oxfordshire to stimulate the growth of a fusion industry.
Since its establishment in 2021, the cluster has grown from a handful of companies to more than 200. While the key goal remains the development of the skills and technology necessary to build a UK commercial fusion power plant by the 2040s, commercialising the spin-offs is also a high priority.
“One of the roles the Fusion Cluster plays is telling people that not only is fusion coming, but there is value from it even years before we’ve got the first fusion power plants, because we’ve got these enabling technologies emerging,” says Valerie Jamieson, the centre’s development manager.
It’s a message that stimulates investment, as Greg Piefer, founder and CEO of Shine Technologies, realised in the early 2000s when he saw that developing commercial fusion power was going to be a long and costly path. It led him to think of how the technologies being developed could be deployed for profit along the way, so that investors could see a more immediate return on their money. “It’s hardcore essential to the mission of commercialising fusion,” he says.
There are currently four key areas in which fusion spin-off technology is playing a key role.
Propulsion
One of the seemingly impossible things that a fusion reactor must do is confine a gas at around 100m celsius – hot enough to melt any material. Fortunately, at that temperature the gas becomes electrically charged and so can be controlled by magnetic fields.
The strength of the field determines the size of the reactor, and therefore how cost-effective it is to build. So, creating highly efficient magnets has been a core goal of Tokamak Energy, part of the Fusion Cluster and headquartered at Milton Park, Oxfordshire. In 2023, they announced the creation of a new generation of high-temperature superconducting magnets that deliver stable magnetic fields 10 or even 20 times stronger than existing technologies. Not only do such magnets open a path to a viable fusion machine, but they “can transform [existing] markets and create new markets”, says Warrick Matthews, CEO at Tokamak.
One such area is the creation of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) drives. Known to…
Read More: Fusion power might be 30 years away but we will reap its benefits well before |