HRH The Prince of Wales today saw first-hand how fusion energy
could play a key role in addressing climate change through a
safe, sustainable and low-carbon future energy supply.
His Royal Highness visited the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s Joint
European Torus (JET), the largest and most powerful operating
tokamak machine in the world.
Her Majesty The Queen officially opened JET in 1984. Almost 40
years later, experts based at UKAEA’s Culham Science Centre,
Oxford, discussed with The Prince of Wales how fusion promises to
be an important part of the low-carbon energy mix in the second
half of this century, at the same time presenting a significant
economic opportunity for Britain.
Professor Ian Chapman, CEO of UKAEA, said: “It was an honour to
welcome His Royal Highness to our world-leading fusion energy
research and development facility and showcase the
ground-breaking JET machine.
“We agreed significant changes are needed to decarbonise the
energy supply, and how fusion energy has huge potential to
address that challenge. The Prince of Wales was very keen to
understand more about how fusion can be a critical piece of the
future global energy puzzle and Britain’s leadership position in
overcoming the great scientific and engineering challenges set
before us.”
Fusion, the process that powers the sun and stars, promises a
near-limitless green electricity source for the long term but is
one of the biggest scientific and engineering challenges of them
all. The fusion reaction does not release carbon into the
environment unlike the production of energy by burning coal, oil
or gas.
The history of JET:
- 1975: Proposals for the JET machine were completed
- 1977: Culham in Oxfordshire was chosen as the host site for
JET
- 1983: JET was turned on and achieved its first plasma before
official opening by Her Majesty The Queen
- 1991: Performed the world’s first deuterium-tritium
experiment – the fuel mix that will be used in the first
commercial fusion power plants
- 1997: A world record 22.5 megajoules of fusion energy and 16
megawatts of fusion power achieved in the first dedicated
deuterium-tritium run of experiments, proving large amounts of
power can be produced from fusion
- 2021: Completes a second full-power run of experiments using
deuterium and tritium
- 2022: 100,000th pulse completed, with new scientific results
to be released in February
JET is currently the only tokamak – a machine which confines a
plasma using magnetic fields – in the world running experiments
using deuterium and tritium, isotopes of hydrogen. It has been
key to the development of its successor ITER, the larger and more
advanced version of JET and based in France, and one of the
biggest collaborative science projects in history, involving 35
nations.
ITER, which is expected to come into operation in the mid-2020s,
plans to operate under similar to those conditions used by JET
and will continue working towards demonstrating the scientific
and technological feasibility of fusion energy.
JET’s experiments are run by researchers from the EUROfusion
consortium - 4,800 experts, students and staff from across
Europe, co-funded by the European Commission.
