SPEAKING OF SCIENCE FICTION

World's First Nuclear Fusion Power Plant Wants to Equal Fossil Fuel Output
Jess Thomson - Yesterday 

The world's first nuclear fusion power plant is planned to be built in North Nottinghamshire in the U.K., and hopes to match fossil fuel power plants in terms of energy output.


Stock image of atoms colliding. Nuclear fusion, which involves colliding hydrogen atoms at high speeds, may be commercially used in the U.K. by 2040.© iStock / Getty Images Plus

According to ITV news, the site will be the first in the world to use fusion reactions to generate electricity commercially. It is due to begin construction in the early 2030s and be fully operational by roughly 2040.

Nuclear fusion involves heavy hydrogen atoms colliding with enough force that they fuse together to form a helium atom, releasing large amounts of energy as a byproduct. This is the process that powers the sun and other stars, converting mass to energy with great efficiency. This chain reaction requires a high amount of energy to get started, but once "ignition" is achieved, the reaction becomes self-sustaining. In a world first, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility established ignition in a 2021 breakthrough.

However, nuclear fusion hasn't been developed to the point where it can be used as a major source of energy generation, as there are many hurdles on the path to achieving the technology's full potential.

"The UKAEA [U.K. Atomic Energy Authority] has set itself the target of having the STEP plant operational around 2040. Its purpose is to prove that a fusion reaction can be sustained, and that more power can be exported onto the electricity grid than it takes to make the fusion process work. Alongside this it will explore efficiencies and learnings in the plant construction and operation process," professor Martin Freer, director of the Birmingham Energy Institute and the Energy Research Accelerator, told Newsweek.

"The idea is that this combination will mean STEP is a bridge to commercial fusion plants. A lot needs to be done to demonstrate this is possible, but many breakthroughs and advances have been taking place in the fusion sector in recent years, not just in the U.K. but all around the world."

If successful, the fusion plant may be able to generate huge amounts of electricity, rivaling the output of fossil fuel power plants like coal and gas, and also wind power.

"The design of the plant and specific power output isn't yet determined, but the UKAEA have indicated it might be in the range of 100MW (roughly enough to power 100,000 homes) but the ambition is that subsequent commercial plants would have much higher outputs than that, potentially equivalent to fossil fuel or nuclear plants or offshore wind farms," Freer said. "It's likely that this prototype will not run constantly as it will be used to explore different ways of operating to find the most effective set up for future commercial plants."

Problems facing the field of nuclear fusion research include the issues involved with holding the intense temperatures of the plasma inside the reactor.

"It's a problem because the plasma is very, very hot, and all the energy that you put in, to heat this plasma to the 150 million degrees has to come out either as radiation or as the energy conduction, basically," Fernanda Rimini. senior manager of fusion experiment Joint European Torus, previously told Newsweek. "The walls of the machine in the experiment, in our case, are made of metal, and this metal comes in and kind of pollutes our plasma."

If perfected, nuclear fusion may be able to help tackle the climate crisis. Other than being able to generate large amounts of, one hugely beneficial advantage of fusion power is that it only requires hydrogen as fuel rather than the finite supply of fossil fuels, and also does not produce greenhouse gasses as emissions, nor any radioactive byproducts like nuclear fission power plants.

"In addition there is no radioactive 'spent fuel' to deal with as there is with nuclear fission, and the main byproduct of fusion is helium—an inert, non-toxic non-greenhouse gas," said Freer.

It is also fundamentally safer than nuclear fission. According to Freer, there are many features of design and operations that you need for nuclear fission that you just don't need in fusion.

"There is no chain reaction to control, and if the fusion process stops, the 'plasma' of superheated gas breaks down and there is no hot 'reactor' or fuel left to deal with," Freer said. "Basically a fusion process is very difficult to sustain (famously so!) and if any disturbance occurs, the plasma cools within seconds and the reaction stops."

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