Fusion: The race is on, but everyone wins

Rachel Reeves’ recent Spending Review announced that: “The government is investing over £2.5 billion in nuclear fusion including progressing with the STEP programme (Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production), the world-leading fusion plant in Nottinghamshire, creating thousands of new jobs and with the potential to unlock limitless clean power.”

This is clearly good news given the potential benefits / advantages of fusion (see, for example: Fusion in brief | UKAEA Fusion Energy) and that it was billed as a “tough” Spending Review. It should also help to ensure that the UK remains internationally competitive given that both public and private funding for fusion are reaching previously unprecedented levels, that the pace of development and is more rapid and “breakthroughs” are more frequent than ever before, and that China and the US are leading the race in terms of investment with (among others) Germany, Japan, Korea and Canada also emerging as key players in the international arena.

Notwithstanding this, while sitting in an annual fusion conference recently I found myself thinking that some of the talks and messages emerging were strikingly similar to those from the previous year, and the year before that. I asked myself why and concluded that it was because whilst there has been a lot of progress in some areas, in others there has been far less (regulation in the UK being an example, where other than the amendments made to the Nuclear Installations Act 1965 to clarify that the nuclear site licencing regime does not apply to fusion energy facilities the only other notable development in the last year or so has been a consultation on a new National Policy Statement for fusion energy regarding the proposed approach to siting fusion energy facilities).

Many would no doubt take issue with this suggestion and could cite numerous examples of how / why it is wrong, but (justified or not) that is my perception. I also asked myself why that bothered me – and I think, ultimately, it is because to my mind it is because it is very clear that the commercialisation of fusion is a “good thing”, but I also think it is due to my own ignorance (of the science / technological challenges and simply how hard it is), and impatience: perhaps my attitude is borne of my profession, where things are very fast-paced, but I found myself thinking “let’s get on with it”. And then I wondered who I thought should get on with it (because that comment could be directed at national policymakers, lawmakers and regulators, international agencies and associations, public and private funders, insurers, fusion developers, other supply chain / industry participants etc.), and concluded that the answer was “all of them”.

I feared then that I must have reached the point in my life (middle age) at which the process of becoming “grumpy” begins and started lamenting this and mentally chastising myself. But then I realised, from chatting to others and overhearing conversations at the conference, that I may not be the only one feeling like that and felt slightly better about myself. I think that what I, and perhaps others feel, is a slight sense of unease / frustration at the yet to be fully realised potential of commercial fusion and a desire for that to happen faster – some really, really good progress has been made but that momentum needs to be maintained lest the moniker that “fusion is always 50 years away” which the industry has worked so hard to shed be all too quickly reapplied.

How does the fusion industry maintain that momentum? In my view, by continuing to do all of the good stuff it has been doing (educating, lobbying, innovating, developing etc.) and getting to the point where usable fusion-produced net electrical output is being generated as fast as possible. On the latter, one way of characterising the projects racing to achieve this would be to liken the large publicly funded projects (e.g. ITER, STEP) to tortoises and privately funded projects to hares. Others might disagree with this analogy, decry one or the other, or take the analogy and run with it (pun intended – e.g. likening the hare’s nap to privately funded projects that may be more agile and thus quicker out of the blocks then encountering issues), but for me what matters most is not who wins the race but the fact that without both there simply isn’t one, and that whether the tortoise or the hare wins once one of them does hopefully everyone else (i.e. the wider fusion industry) does too – and so does humanity.

And that is something to be the opposite of grumpy about – which cheered me up no end. So my message to the global fusion industry is a rallying cry: don’t listen to any naysayers or (as I perhaps had done) let doubts creep in – have faith, keep shouting loud, knocking down barriers to progress, and please, please keep going! And whether it’s a race or not we are developing an industry with the skills, people, finances and enthusiasm to see this through - and I’m delighted my law firm is in the thick of it.