The UK Fusion Programme with Professor Sir Ian Chapman – 29th Fusion Energy Conference

Professor Sir Ian Chapman gives a talk about the UK Fusion Programme, to the 29th Fusion Energy Conference in London.

‘The 29th Fusion Energy Conference (FEC 2023) aims to provide a forum for the discussion of key physics and technology issues as well as innovative concepts of direct relevance to the use of nuclear fusion as a future source of energy.’

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UKAEA’s mission is to deliver sustainable fusion energy and maximise scientific and economic impact. Fusion, the process that powers the sun, can play a big part in our carbon-free energy future.

UKAEA leads the world in fusion research with a wide range of programmes covering robotics, materials testing and development, and tritium science. Our scientists and engineers are working with partners around the globe to develop fusion as a new source of clean energy for tomorrow’s power stations.

Find out more: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/uk-atomic-energy-authority

So it’s my pleasure to give an overview of the whole of the UK Fusion sector um and that sector is is moving from uh R&D Excellence so you can see on the left hand side here here jet um adding new technology facilities in the middle and increasingly working with industry um as

We deliver power plants we firmly believe that that has to be led by the private sector um and so it’s really important that we develop more and more of the partnership between the public and private sector um the the right at the heart of the UK government is an energy strategy here

Announced by the Prime Minister from colum in March this year and underneath that energy strategy sits a bespoke and specific Fusion strategy and that Fusion strategy has two ambitious goals the first is to demonstrate the commercial viability of fusion by actually building a prototype which produces net energy

And the second as we’ve touched on on the panel is to establish an industry which is capable of building Fusion components at scale in order to meet that ambitious goal we need a full holistic approach as the minister said to developing the ecosystem so the way I

See this in my head is like a tree so initially you have to set the strong foundations for that sector to to thrive and that means investment in skills it means investment in industry and clusters of Industry it means collaboration and Partnerships with both International partners and Industry

Partners and it means new facilities to overcome challenges so that brings a coordination to a concerted National Endeavor once you have those conditions to thrive you then need a strong trunk um and that trunk means that you need a breadth of skills across all of the challenges to deliver Fusion not just

Plasma physics but then the robotics to maintain and engineer the plant to build the plant the materials that you build it from how you manufacture and verify those materials the tritium that you will fuel fusion with and ultimately because a lot of fusion power plant conditions are simply untestable we need

Computing to be able to demonstrate to funders and Regulators alike that we know what we’re doing and when you have those strong foundations and that core you can then support a penopoly of approaches so lots of different approaches to power plants of course in the UK we’re following a spherical toat

PL path but also we want to support eer and the big toac paths as well as many Concepts being attacked by the private sector so to give you an overview of the UK Fusion sector it’s about 4,000 people now working in Fusion directly um we’ve gone from a few hundred companies

Involved in Fusion to now more than 4,000 companies involved in Fusion there are 32 UK universities involved in Fusion we set up a fusion cluster just a year ago we thought we might get a few dozen companies sign up to that we already have 205 and there are now 45

Companies collocated at our column Science Center as the minister announced this morning that will continue to be supported uh a broad approach to holistic investment across the sector new research facilities a really important stimulation package for industry development a new unprecedented investment in Fusion skills continuing to support our research base and

Importantly supporting new and strengthened outward International collaborations so I’m going to address a few things through the course of this talk firstly the approaches that we have for addressing in technical challenges in Fusion then I’ll talk a little bit about regulation skills and places before finishing with a few words about

Our prototype PowerPlant program called Step so over the years the UK has established a unique breadth from operating jet which Remains the the largest magnetic confinement device in the world um and a number of spherical toomax we’ve supplemented that with a strength in the underpinning technology for Fusion from materials research to

How we might manufacture components test them to robotics to tritium storage and processing of tritium and stitching that together with large Advanced Computing codes and that then gives us the foundation to do power plant design working with industry increasingly working with industry to develop the skills and the people that we need for

That sector and to think about technology transfer into fusion and also from fusion into other sectors so I’m going to touch on each of these different examples over the next 10 slides so starting with high performance um plan ASAS um we are delighted in fact proud to continue working with our

European colleagues in eurofusion over the last few years on jet to now run two more duum tritium campaigns you’ll hear later from castanza the the the results from the duum tritium campaign in 2021 where we set a new world record for the fusion energy released a really important Landmark result for our

Community in and of itself perhaps not that important but it it was what we predicted would happen and that gives us great confidence as we move forward to Ita um just two days ago on Saturday we ran the last duum tritium shots in jet we will now operate with duum for the

Rest of this year but at the end of this year we will um transition from operations into the next phase of Jet’s life cycle during the last two years as Testament to our commitment to working with companies we have had companies embedded in learning about what it

Really means to operate with dyum and tritium here you see secondary from Commonwealth Fusion systems and Ain realis working with us on tritium operations and we are now planning for the next phase of Jet’s life cycle we feel a real responsibility on behalf of the global Community to show that we can

Decommission jet not just reliably but rapidly and with minimum waste footprint in fact the tritium that’s embedded in the machine is not waste it’s fuel it’s what we need so we plan to disassemble inside out taking apart the inside of the machine robotically then um detria solids and and coolants and indeed the

Inconel which makes up about 90% of the intermediate level waste we have already shown that we can take out 80% of the tritium from that and we hope to be able to do better in the future so jet will now move into a decade of of decommissioning and we will learn a huge

Amount that the whole sector will benefit from um we also promote spherical toax in the UK we have um completed the uh the the Assembly of massed upgrade um that was a seven-year project where we were particularly aiming to address how we would extract heat from a compact

Design here you see modeling that we published 10 years ago of the reduction that we hoped we would achieve on heat flux incident on the wall by using our new approach to the the divera configuration and when we turned the machine on in 2021 here were our early

Results um and these I think rather spectacular results show that you really can reduce the heat flux incident on the wall in a spherical toac um by more than a factor of 10 in fact more like 20 now if you combine that approach to how we will exhaust the heat with high

Performance in the core and here’s some results from st40 from toac energy where they have now achieved 100 million degrees temperature in the core of a compact spherical toac they are also now demonstrating with a full set of high temperature superc conducting coils that you can handle the combined loads so all

The PF and TF coils of course on a small scale and looking at the the combined loads between them and and then work with General atomics to do fabrication at scale so the pathway to spherical toomax is Bright Now turning to the underpinning technology um we have developed over the

Last few years of competence in materials research we typically irradiate samples in um test reactors like like Anto in in Australia or Hyer in the US we then take that through our series of materials research facility we can put um small scale samples into now one of 24 different shielded rooms

They’re extracted robotically put into in instruments that the user can operate remotely and that allows us to understand the damage on small scale samples which then informs better structural design and then we can work with our our industry Partners to look at novel fabrication of those improved Steels and improved Structural Materials

At scale and so we’re doing that full loop and then back into IR radiation for testing but that’s only looking at small scale material samples we also care about the brazes and the welds and the dissimilar things um on large scale samples we are building a Magneto thermohydraulic test facility um where

Samples in the middle are about about me 1.7 m tall um and they can contain all those un dissimilar brazes and welds we then apply a very large inductive heat a four Tesla magnetic field and then pulsed magnetic field up to 12 Tesla a second to simulate disruption events all

In a vacuum all under high heat flux so testing those combined loads that you get in Fusion devices we also care deeply about how we maintain devices in fact it has the biggest exponent on ultimately the cost of electricity to the to the consumer so we set up a

Center called race remote applications in challenging environments we have a Heritage in big robots so large boom robots that you see in both of these movies which can do dextrous things on a submillimeter scale but also large payload hundreds of kilos we used to have one of these boom manipulators we

Now have two and you can see that being commissioned in the bottom right with a bit of um and that is in preparation for decommissioning of the inside of jet but as well as those large boom robots we’re also thinking about how you do all of the different robotic functions that you

Need in a power plant which might be in the top left here quadraped robots for inspection and detection um also thinking about how you might control them using new like haptic gloves um from the gaming industry bringing that into Fusion thinking about how you control very large loads in the top left

So components that might make up casts in eer right down to the nuts and bolts how are you going to assemble them when you can’t send people in to maintain the machine and that whole thing then needs a a Control software which a user can use for many dissimilar robots so we

Have been developing a sort of middle layer that sits between the control system of lots of dissimilar robots and the one user and all of this we will need ultimately for power plants another thing we need for power plants is management of our tritium systems so we

Have set up a new center called Heat which is all about um how we store and process tritium this will do storage on metal hydride beds of 100 gram of tritium so something like between 5% and 10% scale of eer um then um Extrusion extraction Extrusion into ice injection

Into vacuum combination with other gases as will happen in a toac then separation of those gases and separation of Isotopes into proteum dyum and tritium and then detritiation of materials and um and coolants and that will allow us to do full inventory management which is super super important for power

Plants as I said at the start there are many conditions in a power plant that frankly we cannot test until we get to a power plant and this means we will need higher and higher Fidelity models now we are a long way from a digital twin of a

Fusion power plant but we are starting on that Journey we do have digital twins in the top right of some of our engineered components um but ultimately for a digital twin of the whole plan you need to bring together engineering simulation plasma simulations higher higher Fidelity and material simulations

So we are working on higher Fidelity plasma simulations getting ready for exoscale compute which is now coming online by developing algorithms and tools which really scale and here you can see some simulations of plasma turbulence in that regard we’re also working on abono modeling for materials damaged due to um radiation effects um

Again improving that using surrogate models to make that go much faster and we are beginning to couple so beginning to couple engineering simulations with material simulations and doing coupling neutronics and Fe that we would do at large scale with this sort of abono modeling that’s typically done at Micron scale and doing

That over meter meter large components and we will now need to bring that together with plasma simulation to have a full digital twin that’s a long road but it’s one that Fusion needs to go on because we’ve set up this ecosystem which supports all different approaches to Fusion we’re also seeing real

Progress in other approaches too so for instance first light Fusion have recently demonstrated that they can um achieve a spherical implosion despite only having a one-sided drive and they’ have demonstrated Fusion for the first time using this approach and are now thinking about the next step aiming for

A gain experiment the design of their next facility called machine fall an equally General Fusion a Magneto Target Fusion approach where they have demonstrated a high Force symmetric collapse of their liquid lithium Vortex cavity um and now are continuing those compression tests as they move forward with their next phase of development

Equally the government are investing in new lasers so the um Central laser facility will soon get a one $100 million upgrade to a single 20 P beam laser the highest power laser in the world um which may not be directly applied to inertial confinement but will teach us a lot about laser development

That could be useful for if in the future and finally we have set up a fusion Industry Program so far we have set up um we have supported 135 companies in that program many of them new to Fusion and the aim of that program is to take Technologies

Developed in other sectors and bring them to Fusion so say we don’t know how to do this this is a challenge for the community let’s throw it out to other industrial sectors and on the left you see just one example of this this is a small company typically working in biog

Gas and combined heat and power plants uh and they took their isotopic Civ technology brought it to fusion um using special membranes in this place graphine um to try to drive down the scale of isotopic Separation which at the moment we expect to be pretty expensive and pretty big in Fusion conversely the

Opposite is also true where we take Technologies in this case Tae Power Solutions who have developed an energy management system for fusion and then spun that out into other sectors they’ve recently acquired two companies in the UK Sprint power and altrium and are now applying that technology into power management into electric vehicle

Charging technology and also into energy storage so we’re seeing lots of spillovers from fusion into other sectors too I’m going to say a few words about regulation our approach to developing skilled people and places on regulation the UK government have gone through a four and a half year Journey now to

Think about how Fusion should be regulated in the UK um that began by commissioning the regulatory Horizons Council a government body who look at new technology to Market and how it should be regulated they’ve recently done genomics and artificial intelligence but the first thing they did was fusion and they advocated for a

Propor pro-innovation approach to regulation that led to a green paper which is a a a consultation process in the government ultimately a government position paper and is now passing as primary legislation we expect it to be written into law in the UK within about a month or so that Fusion will be

Regulated by our environment agency and our health and safety executive not our office for nuclear regulation so taking the same approach as sort of radiation sources in hospitals and that will be a big step forward that we have clarity about how Fusion will be r C ated written into

Law on skills we um just a few years ago we were doing about 10 apprentices a year so these are School levers that we were training as mechanical electrical technicians um so we’ve scaled from 10 we now have 460 Learners in school few years later they are going into one of

35 different organizations and we will continue the government are continuing to invest in this to scale to about a thousand a year within three years from now so that’s a um technician level we are also developing our PhD training provision we have about 160 PhD students

In the UK now U many of whom are trained by the excellent Center for doctoral training led by the University of York but with a Consortium of universities and one of the spinouts from that Center for doctoral training is the establishment of an industry school where people who are new to Fusion they

Might be working in other energy projects and their company is getting involved in Fusion can go on a two-e residential course to learn about the challenges of fusion and upskill themselves rapidly to address Fusion challenges this really is a national Endeavor you see that the the cluster of

Companies working in Fusion those 205 I mentioned earlier really are all over the UK the universities are really all over the UK and even the National Lab UK aea now has four sites our headquarters in Cullum but we have two sites in the northeast of England and one site in the

Far Northwest of England too at Cullum we are developing a campus which continues to grow we have about 4,000 people on site but that we expect to continue to rise and we are building new facilities for tenants in the bottom left you see a new R&D facility which

Will open for one of our tenants in the middle of next year we’re building a new visitor entrance um new skills facilities new conference facilities we really want to um benefit from the clustering of companies and indeed three fusion companies General Fusion toac Energy and first light Fusion have all

Announced that their next facility will be built at the colum Center finally a few words on our ambitious prototype power plant program called Step I put up this quotation from Walter Marshall who was previously the chair of ukaa and went on to be the chair of the electricity generating

Board in the UK he said there will come a time when we sustain a fusion reaction tick then there will come a time when we get as much energy from a fusion reactor as we put in or we can tend that that’s also ticked however there’ll never come

A time when we get as much money out as we put in and personally I don’t agree with this don’t agree with this but I think it’s a really good challenge to the community that we must focus on this it is not enough to have a product that

Works you have to have a product that works and that people want to buy and that means it has to come in at the right competitive cost and so in Fusion we really do need to do more to think about how we’re going to enter the

Market and at a cost that the consumer wants to buy and that ultimately is the Genesis of the spherical toac the spherical toac is all about driving down scale and capital cost of the build so we embarked on the back of the excellent results from Mass upgrade that I showed

You in NSD 40 on a program called Step where we’re aiming to produce net energy gain to minimize the capital cost approach for the power plant and so far the government have invested nearly $400 million into the concept design phase that concept design phase finishes next

Year at which point we had to mature the concept we had to set up a regulatory framework that I told you about we had to choose a site and we had to establish a company for delivering step step then we go into the detailed engineering design phase which will be almost four

Times the budget required uh into long lead procurement and into sight development before the main construction happens over the 2030s aiming to complete the plant by around 2040 we recognize that this is an audacious tone scale but at the same time it’s slower than we’d like so is both too slow and

Too fast um and in terms of sighting we had uh we went through a volunteer nomination process we had 15 nominations all over the UK down selected to five and ultimately the government last year chose this site up until March this year it was operating as a Coal Fired station

Um in the the north of England um that has now is now the decommissioning is now well underway and the demolition of the thermal plant will start soon um but the plant the the the site is huge we could host multiple fusion power plants on this site and it

Has loads of great assets it has a train line for bringing in goods and and people it has a direct connection to our national grid it has a 2 gwatt abstraction license of water from the river that River connects to the second largest port in the UK so it really

Allows us to get going and perhaps most importantly it has a community who for decades have worked in power generation and are desperate for new power generating projects in their community and we really are seeing a project here going from fossils to Fusion so it’s very exciting and finally we said we had

To set up a delivery body so we’ve thought hard about this and we are setting up a new company company limited by shares called UK industrial Fusion solutions that will in the first instance be a subsidiary of ukaa on behalf of the government and the first

Thing that that company will do is to bring on board two large Partners an engineer a whole plant engineering partner and a whole plant construction partner now those actually probably won’t be single companies they’ll be consortia in and of their own right to have the breadth of skills that are

Needed for this large project and and we hope to establish relationships with those Partners which go on for decades um and this is a slightly different approach to maybe a public private partnership that we’re seeing in other countries here we’re trying to bring very large tier ones who have experience

Of building big energy projects that could be in nuclear it could be in Wind could be any type of energy but big energy firms who actually have the balance sheets for projects like this and that’s what we’re trying to achieve through the step program in fact in some

Sense it doesn’t really matter what conet we’re pursuing what we’re doing here is galvanizing an industrial base working together to have a platform that can deliver power plants fusion power plants in the future in in some sense it doesn’t doesn’t matter what concept this is about catalyzing that ecosystem so I

Will finish there and strongly recommend that you go and see some of the many contributions from the UK Fusion sector um being presented here this week and actually it’s delightful for me to see that it’s not just National Labs and universities but also big companies and small companies and fusion companies

All presenting uh contributions here this week so thank you very much