Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
Ian Chapman is the CEO of the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority. He said that there had been an ageing workforce in the U.K. ten years ago. However, a training push over the past decade meant that more than half the workforce was now under forty. He added that steps had been taken to ensure the experience and knowledge built up over the past decades at JET would not be lost when it switches to its decommissioning phase at the end of the year.
Andrew Bowie is the U.K. Nuclear Minister. He outlined details of the U.K.’s Fusion Futures Program (FFP). He said that the FFP would see seven hundred ninety-three million dollars spent over the next five years on a package of measures. These measures will include the creation of two thousand two hundred training places, a new fuel cycle testing facility and funding to develop infrastructure for private fusion companies. UKAEA’s Culham campus will be included. He said, “We have a golden opportunity to be at the cutting-edge of fusion and lead the way in its commercialization as the ultimate clean energy source.”
There was much discussion of collaboration being key in the future. Chapman was asked about the U.K. government’s decision not to continue as part of the ITER project. He said that the U.K. was still involved in some work that predated the Brexit-related end of new contracts. He added that the U.K. and ITER had a “lot to offer” and both hoped to continue to collaborate and hoped for success “as soon as possible”.
Barabaschi said that ITER itself continued to work on the project’s revised timeline. He noted that the new timeline was expected to be agreed upon and announced in mid-2024. The original timeline was agreed upon in 2016. It called for first plasma in 2025 but that it is now set to be substantially delayed. He added that the timeline update would “not be good news but we will go ahead, and we will succeed, I'm very sure about that”.
The Eurofusion consortium of fusion laboratories around Europe ran experiments at JET in 2021 designed to explore extreme conditions expected at ITER and future fusion plants such as reaching a temperature of one hundred and fifty million degrees million Celsius. Costanza Maggi is a UKAEA fellow and former JET Task Force Leader. He said, “One of our most eye-catching results is the first direct observation of the fusion fuel keeping itself hot through alpha heating. This is the process where high-energy helium ions (alpha particles) coming out of the fusion reaction transfer their heat to the surrounding fuel mix to keep the fusion process going. Studying this process under realistic conditions is crucial to developing fusion power plant.”
Eurofusion also said that the experiments “confirmed predictions from advanced computer models for heat transport inside the plasma, which are crucial to extrapolate results from current experimental setups to larger future machines like ITER and the demonstration fusion power plant DEMO”.