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Can Britain afford fusion?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 29 Dec 08, 10:44 GMT

Nuclear fusion? Not my thing really - hard science stuff for clever colleagues like Pallab Ghosh, rather than the soppy digital stuff which is my beat. But a few months back I sat next to an engineer at a lunch and he persuaded me that I really needed to see JET, Europe's biggest nuclear fusion experiment. Just before Christmas, I took him up on that offer.

I'm glad I did because it is healthy for someone with an arts degree and then 20 years in business journalism to spend a day listening hard to scientists. And it gave me food for thought about the complex decision-making involved in deciding where to put government funding for technology.

Three questions came to mind as I drove onto the sprawling Culham site in Oxfordshire, the location for both JET, and for MAST, the UK's contribution to the quest for clean, virtually free nuclear energy. Where was the security? How long has all this been going on? And how far away are they from turning cutting-edge science into real power stations that can deliver cheap energy to the grid?

The answers were swiftly forthcoming. The security is relatively light because the kind of fusion they are working on does not have a military by-product and involves only small amounts of radioactivity. The research has been going on since the early sixties - and even at the height of the Cold War it was an international collaborative effort involving Russian scientists. And how far away from reality? Well the old joke amongst nuclear fusion scientists is that whenever that question has been asked the answer has been the same - "about 30 years away".

Visiting this place is like going back and forward in time. The long pale green corridors, with separate offices housing small groups of scientists, are redolent of some Cold War secret base where brilliant chaps are working against the clock to defend their country against a devastating weapon developed by SMERSH. And it is clear that many of Britain's smartest scientists have worked here - indeed some have spent their entire careers on this project: "Until recently," one of my escorts proudly told me," there were two professors of physics and three fellows of the Royal Society on my corridor alone."

Then you are taken into a control room packed with computing power and with a live web link which allows University of York physicists to participate in the experiments. Finally, after passing through an airlock, you are escorted into the giant hanger housing JET itself.

This is a great big industrial machine - again, partly ultra-modern, partly constructed of bits and bobs that appear to have been recovered from the local scrapyard. The machine, first fired up in 1983, in essence replicates what happens inside the sun. It heats two hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium, to 100m ºC so that fusion can take place.

Gradually, the process has been refined over the past quarter of a century, so that bursts of fusion power can be produced albeit for no more than a matter of seconds. "So," I asked, "the next stage is to turn this into a working power plant?". Err, no.

The next stage is another, much bigger experiment, called ITER, an international fusion project which will be built in the South of France, and may then be up and running by 2024. So, we're about 15 years from fusion? Afraid not. Only if ITER proves successful can a demonstration power plant be built.

So why is it all taking so long, when it took a much shorter period to turn nuclear fission into power plants - and of course bombs? My hosts showed me a graph produced by American colleagues illustrating progress towards commercial fusion at different rates of investment. At the current rate, the graph is a horizontal line - so it looks as though we will continue to be "30 years from fusion" for the foreseeable future.

But even this level of funding means billions have been spent on a dream of cheap energy that may prove to be just that - a dream. But the scientists at Culham believe passionately that they are making progress in a project vital to Britain's future, and the only form of renewable energy that will keep the lights on in the coming decades (there was a lot of harrumphing when I mentioned other sources like wind).

Now there are plenty of other calls on government funding for technology. Just as our universities were beginning to have some success in spinning off clusters of small high-tech start-ups, the funding from venture capital is drying up, and so the search for alternative finance is on.

So here is the choice for ministers - provide a cash boost for hundreds of small ventures that will quickly thrive or fail, but are unlikely to change the world. Or think long-term, and bet the farm on fusion, which may provide huge benefits for future generations long after you have left office - or may prove a complete waste of money. Glad it isn't my job to make that decision...

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