Tokamak Energy has released the first images of its commercial fusion power plant, which will generate enough electricity to power 50,000 homes in the 2030s.
Fusion power stations will provide safe and secure clean energy to towns and cities, and heat to industrial factories. One kilogram of fusion fuel releases the same amount of energy as burning around 10 million kilograms of coal, with no harmful emissions.
Tokamak Energy’s ST-E1 fusion pilot plant will demonstrate the capability of delivering electricity into the grid in the early 2030s and pave the way for globally deployable 500-megawatt commercial plants. They can be built next to large populations and centres of industry where power and heat is needed.
The process that powers the sun and stars, fusion is the opposite of nuclear fission – combining lighter atoms rather than splitting heavier ones – and is easy to stop because it needs continuous fuel supply. It produces no long-lived nuclear waste.
In 2021, Tokamak Energy achieved a fusion threshold plasma temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius in its current spherical tokamak, ST40. The company will build its next device, ST80-HTS, at UK Atomic Energy Authority’s Culham Campus in 2026 before completing ST-E1 in the early 2030s.
(Source and image: Tokamak Energy)