First fusion power plant ‘most likely’ in Asia

Engineers racing ahead on plans to build prototype plant to in 2030’s

A leading expert from the UK’s centre for nuclear fusion development has said that China or Korea will be the first countries to build a prototype fusion plant capable of producing electricity.  

More than a hundred British engineers are already working on European plans for a nuclear fusion power plant, construction of which won’t start until 2032. However Dr Elizabeth Surrey, Technology Programme Leader at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, said that Chinese and Korean attempts at nuclear fusion would yield results first.

“If things all stay the same economically, the most likely places would be Korea and China. In Korea they have legislated that a fusion power plant has to be built within 30 years,” she said.

“We are working on the European Demo design and will play a major part in the European process. At Culham we operate the only reactor in the world that uses Tritium fuel, Jet, and have the required experience in remote handling.” 

Tritium is the isotope of hydrogen engineers believe will fuel future fusion reactors. The material is radioactive, and developing materials that can withstand embrittlement and the extreme temperatures and forces of the plasma required for nuclear fusion is just one of the many challenges being worked on.

Dr Surrey said: “We’re thinking about generating electricity from fusion in a detailed way for the first time, trying to work out the gaps in knowledge. We've spent 50 years working on the plasma but not 50 years working on how to build a real power plant. The skeletons are coming out of the closet.”  

She added that Culham engineers are focusing on reducing the cost of the planned European prototype, which is called “Demo”, by increasing the efficiency and availability of the plant, similarly to how all power plants improve performance and reduce costs.

The design for Demo is expected to be completed by 2030.

Iter, which is being built in the south of France and will be switched on in 2020,  will not produce electricity, but aims to show that is possible to produce more energy from the fusion process than is used to initiate it. The costs of Iter have more than tripled to €16 billion since the project was first costed. It is funded by seven international entities: China, South Korea, the US, the EU, Russia, India and Japan, each of which is responsible for a portion of the engineering development for the reactor.