The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet by Arthur Turrell

The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet by Arthur Turrell

Author:Arthur Turrell [Turrell, Arthur]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781982130664
Google: dOR-EAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1982130660
Barnesnoble: 1982130660
Goodreads: 55711601
Published: 2021-08-03T00:00:00+00:00


Engineers in Charge

Thanks to decades of publicly funded research, fusion is increasingly a technological challenge rather than a scientific one (though big scientific challenges remain). To take it to its next phase, new types of talent will be required—those who can convert scientific ideas into working technologies. Enter the engineers.

Engineers like Nick Hawker and Jonathan Carling, CEO of Tokamak Energy. The latter told me that “things like the steam engine and internal combustion engine were invented long before anyone understood how they worked. Once it kind of works, engineers will take over.” And so they are.

Just twenty miles south of First Light Fusion’s office, past Oxford’s dreaming spires, is the industrial park that houses Tokamak Energy, a fusion start-up that uses a radical tokamak design. Until very recently, Tokamak Energy’s building sat in the shadow of the great cooling towers of Didcot Power Station. For years Didcot burned oil, coal, and gas, and pretty much dominated the landscape. That is, until the towers were brought down by controlled demolition. How appropriate that this part of Oxfordshire, which is also home to JET, should see this emblem of fossil fuels fall to the ground and so many innovative fusion schemes appear.

Tokamak Energy has raised more than £117 million (about $158 million) in private investment and is looking for as much as £700 million ($936 million) for a future phase. Its star builders are nothing if not ambitious. The former CEO, now executive vice chairman, Dr. David Kingham, brought Jonathan Carling in because of the need to transition from fusion-in-principle to fusion-in-practice. David is a theoretical physicist by background, but for most of his life he has been involved in the UK’s high-tech start-up scene, previously running business accelerators that have helped launch several thousand firms.

“Fusion was always seen as too hard,” he tells me in Tokamak Energy’s meeting room, “the preserve of big government labs. That was very much a dominant view of the world until just a couple of years ago.” He’s excited about what the private sector can do for fusion. He sees the relationship between private fusion ventures and the big laboratories—like Culham—as being analogous to the relationship between SpaceX and NASA. He’s not alone—everyone I speak to in fusion start-ups keeps coming back to that analogy with space.

Tokamak Energy has taken the usual tokamak plasma shape and squished it so that it looks less like a doughnut and more like a cored apple. The resulting machine is called a spherical tokamak. The rationale behind this is really simple: magnetic fields dissipate over distance, so when the plasma is brought in closer to the core (which generates the toroidal magnetic field), less magnetic field is needed for the same amount of confinement. It also creates a more compact machine, which—given the increasing sizes of each generation of tokamaks and their high costs—would make magnetic fusion power more economical. David enthusiastically explains that there’s a lot of academic work showing that spherical tokamaks will be able to deliver fusion more quickly, with smaller, cheaper machines.



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