Putting the sun in a box…

Last month, Ian Chapman stepped into his role as CEO of the national nuclear fusion resource – the UK Atomic Energy Authority. Aged 34, he is one of the youngest CEOs appointed to a major research centre – here he talks ‘premier league’ nuclear physics, breaking the fossil fuel habit and the path to a fusion future 

Congratulations on your appointment. What are you most looking forward to in your new position? I have always been completely committed to realising fusion energy. Now is a really exciting time for fusion research at the UK Atomic Energy Authority UKAEA: we are gearing up for tests which hold the promise to achieve fusion records in JET – the European experiment we host at Culham – in the next few years. We will be exploring exciting new concepts in the UK’s own experiment, MAST Upgrade, which could make step changes in fusion reactor design. We also have new facilities for materials science research and robotics, which as well as being vital to fusion, are important for the UK’s broader interests. And all of this is happening as we gear up for the start of the international ITER experiment in the 2020s, which represents the next major step on the path to realising fusion power.

Your role will see you oversee the new MAST Upgrade before its launch in 2017? What will the upgrade enable? We know how to produce fusion energy, using a magnetic bottle we call a ‘tokamak’, and much of the physics is now well understood. Increasingly, we are focusing on the engineering challenges of building reliable, economical reactors for the electricity grid. The MAST Upgrade device at Culham will tackle one of the main problems: how do you extract very hot waste material from the tokamak without melting its surfaces? We have developed an exhaust system that we think could be a solution for the fusion power stations of the future and we’re going to test it for the first time on MAST Upgrade.

MAST Upgrade will also look at a design called the spherical tokamak, which could eventually offer us a route to smaller, cheaper fusion devices. Along with Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in the US, we are leading the development of the spherical tokamak. Thirdly, MAST Upgrade will give the UK a ‘premier league’ fusion research device for the next decade. It will allow us to continue making a significant contribution to the world fusion programme. It’s a particularly important time in fusion, because the ITER experiment will begin operating in the mid-2020s. This is a global collaboration based in France that will be the first to do fusion at a power-plant scale, so we want to be at the heart of the action as fusion really takes off.

What are your predictions for the future of fusion energy? Getting fusion power on the grid is a complex task that no one country will solve on its own, so international collaboration is absolutely vital. That starts with the work we’re doing now at JET and intensifies as we move towards ITER, whose partner nations represent more than half the world’s population. Building ITER and sharing the manufacture of a million components between all these countries is as much a political and logistical challenge as a technical one. But if we can keep the project on track there’s no reason it shouldn’t be a success.

The stage after that will be to build prototype fusion power plants. In Europe, the UK is working with 25 other countries to a target of producing electricity by 2050. Other ITER partners, like China and South Korea, have more aggressive plans. Then it will be a question of whether we can build affordable fusion reactors that produce energy at a price consumers are willing to pay. Realistically, fusion will only make big inroads into the energy market towards the end of this century – but it’s one of the very few clean energy technologies that can break our dependence on fossil fuels in the long run, so it makes sense to invest in the research now.

What effect do you think Brexit may have on JET in the future? In the short-term, there will be no effect. We have a contract with the European Commission to operate JET until 2018. The Government is guaranteeing funding for the UK’s EU projects, which gives us added certainty. EUROfusion (the consortium of European fusion labs that runs JET’s scientific programme) is also being very supportive.

We need to keep JET running as close as possible to the start of ITER to ensure a smooth transition between the two; in fact, ITER partners outside Europe want to start using JET to help their own scientific preparations. And hosting JET gives Britain a huge amount of expertise in fusion engineering, which we don’t want to lose as we get nearer to commercialising the technology. We’re confident a way will be found to continue – it’s too important not to.

Tell us a bit more about the Materials Research Facility and RACE robotics centre. Materials are becoming a pressing issue in fusion research. We are trying to replicate how the Sun gets its energy – a fusion reactor is effectively a miniature star. Now we know how to put the Sun in a box, a key question is ‘what do we make the box out of?’. The structures and surfaces will have to deal with intense conditions over many years; very high temperatures and continual bombardment from fast neutrons. This year we’ve opened a Materials Research Facility to examine minute irradiated samples so we can develop metals that can survive in a fusion environment. It’s also useful for engineers working on designs for fission plants and is part of a nationwide push to improve Britain’s nuclear research capability, which has been neglected for too long.

RACE stands for Remote Applications in Challenging Environments. At JET we use remote-controlled equipment to maintain and upgrade the inside of the machine, which has chemical and radioactive hazards. In the past two decades we’ve developed expertise in ‘remote handling’ and robotics that we can bring to other sectors with similar challenges. These range from deep sea to space, construction, nuclear fission – any environment where it’s difficult or dangerous to send human beings. RACE is a new centre where researchers and industry can work with us on this technology; there is a huge emerging market in robotics and autonomous systems and this will help the UK get a share of it. I’m delighted to be taking over as CEO as these new projects are taking off here – I think that fusion can be the ultimate energy source and Culham will be one of the labs where we bring it to fruition.

Ian Chapman is CEO of the UK Atomic Energy Authority