Event Details

Our speaker is Dr. Alan Costley from Tokamak Energy and he will be talking to us about Tokamak Energy’s plans to deliver nuclear fusion.

Two recent developments in fusion research promise to open a faster route to fusion power. A re-examination of the ITER confinement databases has shown that for tokamaks the fusion gain, Qfus, depends only weakly on device size implying that, at least from a physics perspective, a high fusion performance can be obtained in relatively small devices. Reduction factors of three or four in power and at least an order of magnitude in volume appear feasible from a physics perspective. The main size drivers are found to be engineering and technological aspects rather than physics considerations. The magnets are a major size driver and high-temperature superconductors (HTS) appear to offer significant advantages over low-temperature superconductors as used in current devices. These developments combine well in the spherical tokamak (ST), which is a tokamak with a relatively low ratio of the plasma major radius to minor radius, i.e. a tokamak with a shape that resembles a cored-apple rather than the traditional doughnut. An approach based on STs fitted with HTS magnets is being pursued by Tokamak Energy Ltd, a privately funded company based in Oxfordshire; rapid and promising progress is being made. Details of both developments will be presented and the opportunities and challenges of this alternative route to fusion, including the Tokamak Energy development programme, will be outlined.