The business opportunity that this project addresses has been summarised in the editorial and main feature article in The Engineer published on 11 April 2011. In the words of the Editor: “The medical industry relies on nuclear fission for the production of radioactive isotopes – which are essential for a range of scanning techniques and cancer treatments. With the experimental reactors that produce these isotopes coming to the end of their lives and plans to prolong their lives or replace them suddenly not looking so straightforward [due to events at Fukushima], there are genuine fears that we’re heading for a worldwide shortage of nuclear medicine. But where one technology falters, another spies an opportunity and [as Appendix A explains], an impending radioisotope shortage could give nuclear fusion – the energy industry’s holy grail – a more immediate opportunity to prove its worth. Indeed, nuclear medicine is just one application that could drive the development of fusion, its usefulness as a source of neutrons could also see it being used to clean up nuclear waste and even to trigger fission reactions in new, safe, hybrid fusion-fission reactors… Despite its considerable promise, the commercial case for fusion is far from certain and, in an economic climate where investment is increasingly limited to dead-certs, its progress has been stuttering at best. But by providing genuine solutions to short-term problems its credibility will be improved, funding should be more forthcoming and, perhaps most importantly, engineers will continue to advance the technology to the point where it can be used for commercial energy generation.” The opportunity is for Tokamak Solutions UK Ltd (TSUK) to be first to secure valuable IP (patents and designs), first to market with a Compact Fusion Neutron Source (CFNS) and first to form collaborative partnerships with larger businesses capable of addressing each of the major markets for a CFNS. The opportunity arises from the UK’s world lead in fusion research at Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE), TSUK’s invention of a CFNS based on a novel combination of existing technologies and recent developments in high temperature superconducting magnets. This project will set TSUK on course to seize the opportunity. The medical applications of a CFNS are of particular interest. As well as producing isotopes, our CFNS has the potential to produce neutron beams, initially for imaging research and then for clinical use. Fusion neutron beams may also be useful for neutron capture therapy (based on B, Ga and other elements) or for fast neutron therapy. Both of these therapies offer promising approaches to treatment of certain cancers. However, both are held back by the limitations of neutron sources, particularly by the lack of high flux sources suitable for a clinical environment. Appendix A, published in The Engineer on 11 April 2011, gives a good summary of our overall business proposition.

Fusion power has the potential to be clean, green and plentiful. It is inherently safe and carries no risks of nuclear proliferation. Projections of future world energy supply anticipate fusion power being responsible for 36% of all global electricity production by the year 2100. However, with the present R&D proposals, including the €15bn investment in the ITER tokamak in France, it is unlikely that fusion power can become an economic reality before 2050. Tokamak Solutions has built an early prototype of a small tokamak that has the potential to speed up the fusion R&D process and bring forward the time when fusion power will be available. While huge experiments such as JET at Culham and the future ITER tokamak tackle major problems in fusion R&D, small tokamaks designed and built by Tokamak Solutions can tackle many of the challenges of fusion that are amenable to rapid development with a small device. In other words, Tokamak Solutions aims to provide a research tool to allow rapid incremental innovation in fusion in a way that is complementary to, and will speed up, mainstream fusion R&D. As demand for electricity increases (at 5% per annum worldwide) and global warming concerns increase, the need for fusion energy will become more pressing. Annual global expenditure on fusion energy R&D is about £2bn. Our proof of market study has shown that every country with a serious scientific effort would want its own tokamak for fusion research with the latest magnet technology. The objective of this project is to develop and demonstrate the world’s first tokamak with all its magnets made from high temperature superconductor (HTS). We will demonstrate that this small tokamak is easy to use by students and researchers and is capable of ground-breaking research. If we can win initial orders for small tokamaks from universities and research institutes, then the opportunities to participate in larger fusion projects will open up.

Tokamak Energy (TE) has unlocked a potential new route to scalable fusion power that is cost-effective and does not require huge infrastructure and capital expenditure. The technology will revolutionise world energy production -- it will be possible to produce more energy, more cheaply and with fewer undesirable consequences than existing technologies (e.g. by eliminating long term nuclear waste and dramatically reducing carbon emissions while not requiring huge tracts of land). The TE route to fusion power harnesses two specific technologies -- spherical tokamaks and high temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets. The company currently has a world leading position in HTS magnets with 19 families of patents already filed, but wishes to accelerate its development programme, particularly given new competition from an MIT spin-out, funded by $50M from Italian oil company, ENI. Our vision is that this project will deliver rapid progress in a key area of HTS magnet development to keep us ahead of the competition and allow us to raise substantially more private investment over the next 5 years. The key objective is to design and develop novel HTS magnets with particular features crucial for certain magnetic coils on tokamaks. These features, especially the ability to alter the magnetic field on a timescale of 1 to 10 seconds, will mean that the magnet technology is also suitable for other applications such as medical instruments and energy efficiency/storage. The main area of focus is poloidal field (PF) HTS magnet coils. When the current in the coil changes, eg during initial energisation or adjustments to control the plasma, energy is dissipated, warming the coil. If the current sweep rate is too fast, the superconductor can become resistive, warming the coil more quickly. In extremis, the coil can go into thermal runaway, or "quench". These "AC loss" effects can be minimised by changes to the cable design and construction. The necessary PF coil current sweep rates are up to three orders of magnitude faster than required for the main toroidal field (TF) magnet coils. To meet these requirements the PF coils need an innovative cable construction and a different quench protection approach. We have several candidate solutions to this technology challenge and a suitable cryogenic test-rig to enable rapid tests of prototypes. We expect to be able to file new patent applications as a result of this project. During the project we will evaluate the best way forward with the other magnet applications.

Culham Laboratory currently leads the world in the science and technology of tokamaks and magnetic confinement fusion. This is the most promising technology for the huge, long term, challenge of producing electricity from fusion. This project aims to establish the market demand for small tokamaks. In particular we will investigate the market for a small tokamak to produce a plasma suitable initially for plasma physics research and training and for R&D on plasma processing of materials for extreme environments. Technological breakthroughs with tokamaks at Culham, linked to advances in High Temperature Superconducting (HTS) magnets by Oxford Instruments, have led to this opportunity to design and develop a small tokamak (

Tokamak Energy Ltd is a private company targeting the delivery of fusion as a clean and safe energy source by 2030. The company aims to do this by combining spherical tokamaks, which are a type of magnetic confinement fusion device, with high temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets, which can deliver very strong magnetic fields in compact devices. The company believes that HTS spherical tokamaks are the key route to delivering commercial fusion energy on a rapid timescale. This project aims to address two key challenges in the field of HTS magnet technology, in order to accelerate the development of HTS magnets for fusion energy and other applications. The first challenge is to develop a technical and strategic approach towards the characterisation and quality assurance (QA) of HTS conductors, then implement this on several hundred kilometres of conductor procured over a period of several years. The key difficulty here is that the current capacity of rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) HTS conductors is extremely large and has a very complex dependence on temperature, magnetic field strength, field direction and the crystal's nanostructure. Measurement of conductor performance under the end-use conditions in fusion magnets is extremely challenging due to the high magnetic fields and currents involved. Therefore, complete characterisation cannot be carried out routinely despite magnet designs relying crucially on their knowledge. This project will establish the necessary performance indicators (balancing cost, risk and depth of information), develop the methods required to measure them, and implement this on the real conductor as it arrives. The second challenge is the development of dismantlable coil structures for HTS fusion magnets. HTS magnets can be operated at relatively high temperatures (>~20 K) at which substantial heat loads from joints between conductors can be accommodated by cooling systems. Unlike conventional low temperature superconductors (LTS), HTS conductors operated at high temperatures are extremely thermally stable and can therefore tolerate substantial temperature variations of several degrees Kelvin around their structures. This enables dismantlable coil structures to be considered, in which the turns of the magnet can be connected and disconnected from one another during assembly and disassembly. This is an extremely attractive design option for tokamak magnets, where it is advantageous for some coils (e.g. poloidal field coils (PFs) ) to be threaded inside other coil sets (e.g. the toroidal field coils (TFs)). The wider assembly process for tokamaks is also greatly simplified if the coils are dismantlable, for example the assembly of vacuum chambers and neutron shields. Development of dismantlable coils is a multifaceted problem involving development of novel low resistance jointing methods, practical implementation methods in a tokamak assembly hall environment, and design of the wider magnet system to accommodate the joints (including insulation methods and magnet operating principles).