U.K. Start Up on Small Fusion Reactor...

Image Source: Fusion Power Inside a Tokamak

"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 [such a] machine."

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