He explains how original investment for JET started in the late 1970s, in the aftermath of the global oil crisis. With the fuel crisis currently dominating UK headlines, Chapman points out how the energy we generate using current methods will eventually become so expensive that governments and private companies will be impelled into investing further and taking more risks to harness nuclear fusion. He was asked this question at a press conference in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, and his answer was: ‘When mankind needs it, maybe a short time before that.’ I think that’s still true.” Fusion futures I always quote Lev Artsimovich, one of the founding fathers of the tokamak. “That’s an imponderable question and depends so much on energy dynamics, government policy, and what’s going on with carbon pricing,” he tells National Geographic UK. Ask him when nuclear fusion might produce cost-effective energy on a commercial scale, and he’s less precise. He predicts that ITER will start achieving net energy gain by the late 2040s.
The man in charge of JET is the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s CEO, Professor Ian Chapman. On 3 October its location was confirmed as the site of the West Burton power station in Nottinghamshire. There are also plans for a British project called Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production, or STEP. Currently being constructed near Marseille, in the south of France, is the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER – a collaboration of 35 nations, including the UK. The scientific understanding and much of the technology it has proven will be used in the next generation of tokamak fusion projects. At the end of next year, after 40 years of service, it will make its swan-song before eventually being decommissioned. nuclear testing's legacy lingers 30 years after moratorium.)įirst operational in 1983, JET has produced nuclear fusion pulses on tens of thousands of separate occasions.
Entry is through a security turnstile, with each visitor measured by a dosimeter for radiation levels on entry and exit. JET itself is housed behind one-metre-thick, 20-metre-tall concrete barriers, which close during operation, primarily to contain dangerous neutrons produced by the fusion reaction. ( Based on early Soviet designs from the 1950s, ‘tokamak’ is an acronym derived from Russian phrases meaning ‘toroidal chamber’ and ‘magnetic coil’.)Īlthough nuclear fusion reactors are far safer than nuclear power stations (more of that later), the security and safety at Culham is understandably tight. Hidden somewhere in the centre is the doughnut-shaped (or toroidal) vessel called a tokamak. On the outside it’s 12 metres tall with a diameter of over seven metres.
While the experts at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (overseen by the UK Atomic Energy Authority) are familiar with every inch of this huge machine, to the untrained eye it’s a bewildering, asymmetrical jumble of steel bars, joists, cages, ladders, wires, cables, pipes, ducts, switches, monitors, valves, plugs, scaffolding, catwalks and steel runners. (A reality star and a physicist are building a nuclear reactor in Milton Keynes. Once harnessed on a commercial scale, fusion could produce so much energy from so little raw material, that it may solve all of humanity’s energy problems in one fell swoop – amongst many other things. Fusion produces energy by fusing atomic nuclei together, the opposite of what happens in all nuclear power stations, where atomic nuclei are split through nuclear fission. Nevertheless, as far as humanity is concerned, proof that nuclear fusion works is a very big deal indeed. On December 21 st 2021, JET set a new record by producing 59 megajoules of sustained energy through a process known as nuclear fusion.ĥ9 megajoules isn’t a huge amount just enough to power three domestic tumble dryer cycles. When operating, temperatures here can reach 150 million degrees Celsius – ten times hotter than the centre of the Sun. Housed inside a vast hangar, it’s a nuclear fusion experiment called JET, or Joint European Torus. The hottest place in our solar system is not the Sun, as you might think, but a machine near a south Oxfordshire village called Culham.
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