Slightly puzzled this morning to read in an email from UKAEA about a £2m contract to accelerate the growth of the UK's fusion industry - given that the sort of numbers bandied about in the fusion world are usually in billions rather than millions. I am all for throwing money at fusion, potentially a cheap source of clean power, but fusion power stations are very complicated bits of equipment and £2m might be just about enough to build the canteen for the workers who are going to assemble one of the them. But I dare say that if I troubled to read the email properly, I would find that it is all very worthy.
And I wonder today whether anyone has drawn up a balance sheet, balancing all that clean power against all the pollution involved in making all the cement and steel needed to build a fusion plant - with cement manufacture being one of the bigger sources of global warming. I don't suppose that steel is that clever either.
Previous emails have told me about the STEP project, so I also wonder today how that (a cored apple fusion vessel) relates to the international ITER project (a doughnut fusion vessel). Were we ejected from ITER when we left the European Union? Does our government want a UK project which it can boss about, rather than have to cooperate with pesky foreigners? Better to be a big fish in a small pond, rather than have to rough it with a lot of other middle sized fish in a large pond?
Reference 1: https://step.ukaea.uk/.
Reference 2: https://www.iter.org/.
Reference 3: https://home.cern/science/accelerators/large-hadron-collider. Another big physics project, but not to be confused with fusion. Quite different.
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