The UK hosts the greatest concentration of skills in nuclear fusion anywhere on the planet. At least, that is the view of the world’s Fusion Industry Association in Washington.
This highly esteemed ecosystem is the legacy of decades of work on magnetic tokamak reactors at the international JET project near Oxford. The UK is also in the top league in the parallel technology of inertial fusion using lasers, led by the plasma physics team at Imperial College London.
The three commercial fusion start-ups on UK soil – Tokamak Energy, First Light Fusion and Canada’s General Fusion – have together raised more money for development than private fusion in the rest of Europe.
Yet Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, scarcely mentioned fusion in his speech last month to the nuclear industry.
He gushed about the “massive industrial opportunity” for Britain from Great British Nuclear and small modular reactors. He spoke in glowing terms about Hinkley Point and Sizewell C, praising big fission as “an economic engine” for the country.
“My message is clear: if you want to build a nuclear project in Britain, my door is open. I think this is a brilliant industry,” he said.
No doubt he means it. Mr Miliband pushed for the biggest expansion of nuclear power in Europe when he last held the job in 2009, against a green Left that was then still viscerally anti-nuclear.
But all he had to say about fusion was a dry, loveless, box-ticking put-down that “significant support” for research had been announced in the Budget, leaving the fusion industry wondering what will survive of its promising cluster after the Government’s spending review this spring.
One has to ask whether Mr Miliband fully understands that fusion is at the point of exponential take-off right now, not far off in the blue yonder, and that the US, China, and Japan are in a technology race to win this incalculable economic and diplomatic prize.
My impression is that even energy experts still tend to assume, from habit, that replicating the power of the sun by fusing hydrogen isotopes remains an exotic experiment in theoretical physics, unlikely to produce anything usable until the late 21st century.
But the confluence of high-temperature superconductors, supercomputers and new laser technology have changed the economics of fusion power almost overnight.
Bob Mumgaard, founder of Commonwealth Fusion in the US, told me that better superconductors had suddenly and vastly increased the power of magnets, used to squeeze plasma to temperatures 10 times hotter than the surface of the sun.
“We can build a plant that is 40 times smaller,” he said. Bingo.
Tokamak Energy, near Oxford, is a world leader in producing these super-conducting magnets, a spin-off from fusion work that is already creating a wonderful side-business. These tapes of rare-earth barium copper oxide (Rebco) can slash energy use for all kinds of things, since they transmit electricity without resistance.
“You can use them in data centres. You just plug into a socket in the wall, and you cool to 20 kelvin (minus 253 degrees),” said Warrick Matthews, the chief executive. “We’re already exploring several hundred contracts for magnets.”
Tokamak Energy is aiming for fusion power at $70 (£56) per megawatt hour (MWh) for its first fleet, and closer to $50 thereafter. “That stacks up against anything. The capital markets are going to wake up and realise that the prize is absolutely immense,” he said.
A recent poll of industry specialists found that 65pc think fusion will generate electricity at viable cost in the early 2030s. Exuberant optimism perhaps – there is a large and glorious list of headaches, from rogue neutrons to unstable plasma that can destroy everything. But if they are anywhere close to being right, it would be criminal negligence for Labour to let this country’s early advantage slip away.
Yet that is what the Fusion Industry Association (FIA) warned in a review before Christmas, as first reported by my colleague James Titcomb. It said the UK had a “time-sensitive and significant opportunity” to capture a chunk of the multi trillion-pound global market. “Failure to seize the moment … risks ceding dominance in one of the most important industries of this century.”
The FIA said 90pc of its members would like to set up shop in the UK, but only a fifth are convinced that the country will do what it takes to become a “strategically significant” supply chain hub. It cited slow bureaucracy and procurement rules that are a turn-off for fast-moving entrepreneurs.
“We’re beginning to wonder if it will even happen,” said one. Another asked whether “the Government wants to see [start-ups] grow here”. Another episode of the perennial British disease?
“The UK has fallen behind massively. It is a big missed opportunity to really lead the world,” said Nick Hawker, head of First Light Fusion, also based outside Oxford. “It is not too late, fusion is a long play; but we need a real national strategy with a diversity of actors and approaches.
“What’s the point of Brexit if it wasn’t to get this stuff done?”
The UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) has been heroically proactive. It has stolen a march by pioneering the most business-friendly regime for fusion plants in the West, since followed in spirit by the US.
It will regulate them much like hospitals, making it much quicker to roll out plants. Fusion releases almost no long-term radioactive waste. It cannot lead to a Chernobyl chain reaction. It uses mere grams of deuterium-tritium in the chamber, compared to 200 tonnes of uranium in a fission reactor.
The EU is driving away its fusion start-ups because it has yet to come up with a risk-based regulation, and by default it therefore still treats the industry as if it were fission, making it uninsurable.
This Brussels effect – precautionary inertia – is not going to last. Friedrich Merz, Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting, is a fusion enthusiast and will read the riot act, with allies in France.
The UK Atomic Energy Authority is leading Britain’s £650m Fusion Futures Programme with its state-led spherical tokamak aiming to produce commercial power by 2040, as well as a tritium breeding facility, a laser facility, a robotics centre, and so forth. It is a superb piece of industrial strategy.
But it is only one pillar. The FIA says money and focus have been heavily geared to the UK’s speciality in magnetic tokamaks, although these account for just six of the 45 fusion companies worldwide.
Seven are pursuing laser-driven inertial fusion, which has the record energy “gain” rate of over 2.0 at America’s Lawrence Livermore lab. Nine are going for stellarators, a German engineering favourite that may prove more stable. These rival technologies feel badly neglected.
At least 12 fusion start-ups aim to launch prototype plants within this parliament. The UK could snag several of them if it rolls out the red carpet, turning Oxford into the go-to site for all-comers. The FIA has a menu of demands, including an urgent task force, and the same contracts for difference available to fission, wind, or solar companies.
Building this second pillar would not cost much – far less than the £2.7bn committed to Sizewell C, which will not go live much before 2040, and may cost $120 MWh in today’s money when it does – but it does require more than a perfunctory one-liner from the Energy Secretary.
If the Government believes its own rhetoric on industrial policy, it should copy the best of the US Inflation Reduction Act and offer tax credits to any fusion company that comes to the UK. Seed money from Washington has pulled in private funds for US fusion start-ups at a ratio of 6:1. That is a multiplier worth having.
Fusion ought to tick every box for Labour. It is clean – its main by-product is inert helium. The fuel is effectively limitless and does not come from Russia. It uses almost no land, and little water, and can be made unobtrusive. Unlike today’s big fission, it can dial up and down, and it produces industrial high-grade heat to help decarbonise industry.
It would be a crying shame, Mr Miliband, if we blew such a marvellous chance.
Is Ed Miliband going to throw away our brilliant fusion industry?
The Energy Secretary risks squandering the exponential take-off of a great British advantage