U.K. Start-Up Aims to Cash in on Small Fusion Reactor

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http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/02/uk-start-up-aims-to-cash-in-on.html?ref=hp

U.K. Start-Up Aims to Cash in on Small Fusion Reactor

by Daniel Clery on 17 February 2011, 1:33 PM

A company in Oxfordshire, U.K., is aiming to make a business out of fusion with a design for a super compact fusion reactor, or tokamak, that it hopes to sell to industry or for research. The reactors are not designed to generate power but to exploit the fact that fusion reactions produce lots of high-energy neutrons, which can be used to make medical isotopes, transmute nuclear waste, and for research on plasma and materials. To produce neutrons in large quantities usually requires a fission reactor or powerful particle accelerator, so a relatively cheap fusion neutron source could open up many possibilities. Also, the size and cost of conventional tokamaks means that they are usually built by government research labs. Attempts to commercialize fusion are rare.

Physicist and entrepreneur David Kingham, chief executive of the new company Tokamak Solutions, says that the firm could build the most basic version of the machine—producing just a hot plasma for research purposes—in a year at a cost of around $1 million. Swadesh Mahajan of the Institute for Fusion Studies at the University of Texas, Austin, welcomes the creation of the company but says: "It's going to be difficult to predict if there is a market for machine."

Governments around the globe have been building tokamaks for more than 40 years in an effort to generate power from fusing hydrogen nuclei together to form helium. A tokamak is a doughnut shaped vessel in which the hydrogen gas is ionized, squeezed, and heated with intense magnetic fields until fusion takes place. The world's largest tokamak, the 6-meter wide ITER currently under construction in France, is expected to be the first that will produce large amounts of excess energy, but at a cost of around €15 billion.

Spherical tokamaks are variants on the traditional doughnut design, shaped instead like a cored apple. They are cheaper to build and the ionized gas, or plasma, they produce tends to be more stable than in conventional machines. The United Kingdom's Culham Laboratory, now known as the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, built the first spherical tokamak, START, from 1990 to 1991. Since then, some 15 spherical tokamaks have been built worldwide.

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