A company backed by Microsoft and Amazon's Jeff Bezos has won approval to build and operate a nuclear fusion demonstration plant in the UK.
Approval was announced by the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) today and construction is expected to start next year ahead of the planned starting of operations in 2025.
READ: Viable nuclear fusion energy could be a reality by 2025, says UBS
General Fusion, a startup is based in Vancouver, Canada that has been supported by Bezos since 2011 and Microsoft since 2019, will build and operate its fusion demonstration plant (FDP) at UKAEA’s Culham Campus, just south of Oxford.
The Canadian company expects to benefit from the cluster of fusion supply chain activities in the UK, where scientists have also been making significant progress of late.
General Fusion will enter into a long-term lease with UKAEA once a new facility has been built at Culham to host the FDP, which will then demonstrate General Fusion’s proprietary Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) technology.
Successful demonstrations will pave the way for the company’s subsequent commercial pilot plant, General Fusion said, as it hopes to show that the MTF technology "can create fusion conditions in a practical and cost-effective manner at power plant relevant scales, as well as refine the economics of fusion energy production, leading to the subsequent design of a commercial fusion pilot plant".
Amanda Solloway, UK science minister, said: “This new plant by General Fusion is a huge boost for our plans to develop a fusion industry in the UK, and I’m thrilled that Culham will be home to such a cutting-edge and potentially transformative project. Fusion energy has great potential as a source of limitless, low-carbon energy, and today’s announcement is a clear vote of confidence in the region and the UK’s status as a global science superpower.”
To produce energy from fusion, we must control the plasma fuel's temperature, density, and duration. How does it work? https://t.co/dO1qvkQ1Id #fusion #plasma #energy pic.twitter.com/XSLnY6ML8f
— General Fusion (@GeneralFusion) June 14, 2021
General Fusion and UKAEA intend to collaborate on a range of fusion energy technologies for power plant design and operation.
Christofer Mowry, CEO of General Fusion said it was "incredibly exciting news for not only General Fusion, but also the global effort to develop practical fusion energy".
The Culham campus includes various fusion experiments, including currently home to the Joint European Torus (which is moving to France) and the MAST Upgrade, which is part of the wider STEP plan.
General Fusion’s MTF technology takes a non-traditional approach to fusing atoms, where tremendous heat built from fusion is transferred from plasma into a molten metal cavity, where it is channelled to turbines that produce power.
The company has so far been supported by over US$190mln of investment, according to Crunchbase, with Bezos and Microsoft contributing to a US$127mln investment round two years ago.
Bezos and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates are also invested in another nuclear fusion startup, Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), looking to bring fusion energy technology to the market.
The spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is building a compact fusion power plant based on the SPARC tokamak concept, a precursor to a practical, emissions-free power plant.