Fusion Energy – from Lab to Commercial Deployment and Global Climate Impact

Tokamak Energy (TE) is pursuing the spherical tokamak (ST) path to commercial fusion energy, taking advantage of the latest generation of high temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets. The ST was originally pioneered at UKAEA and at PPPL showing exciting physics including high beta (ratio of plasma pressure to magnetic field pressure) and high bootstrap fraction of self-driven plasma current. In 2015 TE successfully demonstrated a small spherical tokamak with low-field HTS magnets (ST25-HTS) and then moved on to build ST40, a high field compact ST with copper magnets and separately to develop high field HTS magnets (peak field achieved of 26.2T). ST40 has now achieved 100-million-degree plasma ion temperature and a record triple product (nTtauE of 6x10^18 keV.s.m^-3) for a spherical tokamak – demonstrating the advantage of higher field in an ST. TE is scaling up HTS magnets and is now testing a set of toroidal and poloidal HTS magnets in ST configuration producing up to 12MA in the center column with mechanical stresses representative of a fusion pilot plant.

The next step to commercial deployment is participation in the DOE milestone driven fusion development program aiming at a 50MW pilot plant within 10 years. TE has research partners for this program including ORNL, PPPL, SRNL, INL and University of Illinois and industry partners including General Atomics. As the milestone program progresses, TE will be seeking more commercial partnerships to plan ahead for rapid deployment of ST power plant modules (150-500MW scale) in the 2030s. TE is also participating in INFUSE, ARPA-E and FIRE projects to help develop materials and technologies optimised for power plants. The key to Climate Impact will be rapid global deployment and use of fusion for industrial process heat and hydrogen production, in addition to electricity. Global deployment must include developing countries with large and fast-growing populations such as India, Nigeria and Indonesia.