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Around 100 long-term engineering and technical vacancies urgently need to be filled for work on the Jet experimental nuclear fusion reactor at Culham, Oxfordshire. And thousands need training and recruiting to avoid a “skills gap” at its successor reactor, Iter, in the South of France.
The Joint European Torus (Jet) is running until 2020 as a test bed for components and processes for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor project. Iter was delayed last year from its original commissioning date of 2017. The delay has extended the life of Jet, which will be switched off when Iter is switched on.
Jet, which was designed in 1975 and commissioned in 1983, remains the largest experimental fusion reactor in the world and holds the record for fusion power production, 16MW in 1997. It is the only reactor capable of running the deuterium-tritium fuel mix that Iter will use. Scientists believe this mix will fuel all future magnetic nuclear fusion reactors.
Iter is viewed as the next developmental step for tokomak reactors, which use a magnetic field to confine a high-temperature plasma within which deuterium and tritium fuse to release massive amounts of energy. Work on a demonstration commercial reactor is planned to start in 2030. The European Union is committed to pursuing the development of clean, unlimited fusion power as the ‘holy grail’ of energy production and recently published A Roadmap to the Realisation of Fusion Energy.
However, the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, which runs Jet, has had difficulty filling engineering and technical positions to work on experiments. The centre has 100 vacancies across the site, half of which are for professional engineers, mainly in electrical and mechanical engineering. Around 500 people work at Culham. This number increases while researchers visit during experimental ‘campaigns’.
Tim Jones, Jet operations manager at the Culham centre, said: “We deal with extreme engineering and cutting-edge physics here and are central to the success of Iter. There are some very exciting things happening up until the end of the decade, including the deuterium-tritium experimental campaign in 2017. We’re the only reactor that can run that fuel mix, and the last time it was done was in 1997. There are long-term career prospects in fusion energy, with Iter and the 2050 roadmap.”
Around 50 people who have worked on Jet have so far relocated to Cadarache to work on Iter, which could employ up to 2,000 staff from across the world when operational.
Niek Cardozo, chairman of the governing board of Fusenet, the European Fusion Education Network, said that there is a growing need for engineers in the fusion community. He said: “With Iter we will progress from a project which is science driven to one which is industry driven, from something which is physics driven to engineering driven. Unfortunately we have a skills gap for engineers in a physics-biased community.
“Industry also says there is not enough people in the fusion community that can talk the language of industry and engineering. The European fusion community does have excellent engineers, but we need more. Fusion offers a long-term career that combines physics and engineering with extreme challenges.”
More information on careers in fusion can be found at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy's careers page and at Fusenet.
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