Professor Ian Chapman heads the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA). He is also the head of Britain’s nuclear fusion program. He says that the U.K. needs to commit hundreds of billions of dollars to green technologies in order to tackle global warming. He told an interviewer that he believes that nuclear fusion is viable but society “does not have its priorities right” when it comes to spending on green technologies.
Britain is one of the leading countries in global nuclear fusion research. The UKAEA’s campus in Oxfordshire is hosting several projects with the goal of unlocking the enormous potential of nuclear fusion. Proponents of nuclear fusion argue that it will be much safer than conventional nuclear fission in producing great power with little attendant radiation.
It is expected that Britain will decide where to site their first functioning prototype fusion power plant in the near future. The prototype is due to be operational by the 2040s with 300 million dollars of public funding. ITER is a twenty-seven-billion-dollar multinational fusion project in France. It is expected to begin operations in 2025.
Professor Chapman said that he feels that a flood of private investment into fusion projects is a “really important sign” that energy businesses increasing believe that commercial fusion will become a reality. General Fusion is a Canadian company that recently announced plans to construct a four hundred million dollar demonstration plant on the UKAEA’s campus in Culham, near Abingdon.
Speaking ahead of a forum on fusion power at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Chapman warned that global leaders have not yet fully grasped the urgency and importance of fulling funding existing and emerging technologies including fusion, carbon capture and next generation solar power to provide a full portfolio of green energy sources.
Chapman also said that “There are all sorts of things that we should be investing hundreds of billions into and we’re not. Globally, we are spending hundreds of billions this year on extracting fossil fuels. As a [global] society, we don’t have our priorities in the right place. We should realize that this is an existential problem and deal with it in the same way that we have approached Covid-19, where we have invested heavily in the technology that it going to get us out of the crisis. If we treated climate change in the same way, of course we would deal with it quicker.”
In spite of private sector investment in commercial fusion companies of one and three quarters billion dollars in recent years, many analysts remain skeptical that fusion technology will become a commercial reality any time soon. Senior industry figures say that hope of commercial fusion production by the 2030s are over optimistic and that the 2060s or 2070s are a more realistic target.
ITER will be fully operational by 2035. It is designed to provide definitive proof of fusion’s potential by taking an input of fifty megawatts and turning it into an output of five hundred megawatts.
Chapman argues that fusion power has the potential to replace gas and coal as the source of “base load” continuous energy production to supplement weather-dependent sources of green power. Britain has a huge opportunity to become a global exporter of fusion technology. He said that the U.K. government understands the potential of nuclear fusion and was taking progressive action. This includes investment and recent publication of proposals for a regulatory regime that would be separate from the strictures of the requirements placed on conventional nuclear power.
The U.K.’s prototype fusion plant is due to open during the 2040s. It is known as STEP and it offers the possibility of a more compact fusion reactor which will probably be much cheaper than supersized fusion reactors such as ITER.
Chapman said, “I completely believe that we will make fusion work – I believe in the ingenuity of people to solve the problems we face.”