Tokamak Energy CEO Sees Promising Days Ahead For Nuclear Fusion

With all the recent news regarding advances in nuclear fusion, including the Department of Energy’s announcement that scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had achieved a fusion reaction with a net energy gain, an opportunity that arose recently to interview Chris Kelsall, CEO of Tokamak Energy, seemed fortuitous.

In an email on Friday, Kelsall called the DOE announcement “an impressive result. We’re in a race against time to phase out fossil fuels and make fusion a globally available solution for the world’s energy needs. Progress of this nature is great for the industry as more private and public investment flows into fusion technology.”

During our interview, conducted before the DOE announcement, Kelsall pointed out that a marginal net energy gain like the one reported by Livermore last week (3.15 megajoules of energy output from an input of 2.05 megajoules delivered) is, however, a fraction of the magnitude of net energy gain that must ultimately be achieved to make a fusion technology truly scalable.

“This is not solely about proving net energy gain,” he told me. “The scientists call it Q greater than one. That’s not a sufficient condition for commercial fusion energy. In fact, we need to be getting to at least Q greater than ten. “We are aiming for a Q of 25 for optimal commercial fusion to provide a constant energy source for homes and industry.”

Kelsall says the company is on path to demonstrating clean, grid-ready power by the early 2030s. “The spherical tokamak has significant efficiency advantages on the route to cost-effective fusion energy in compact power plants, to be deployed globally. Our technology uses strong magnetic fields to contain the plasma – the fusion fuel – in a spherical tokamak which will deliver continuous power output. We’re now focused on developing the critical know-how for our ST80-HTS advanced prototype fusion device and our pilot plant, ST-E1, as we work towards delivering clean, secure, low-cost fusion for all.”

Based in Milton Park, which lies just south of Oxford and west of London, Tokamak Energy was founded in 2009. “It was a spin-out from the Culham research laboratories that are just north of our office location,” Kelsall says. “The labs are affiliated with Oxford University and have quite a long pedigree in investigating fusion technology, going back several decades. So, we’re about 13 years old. Up until a few years ago, we only had a couple of dozen people. Now we’re over 230 people, and we have over 20 nationalities of staff, all different types of physicists, all different types of engineers.”

Tokamak Energy’s business centers around two key technologies: The unique spherical Tokamak containment system the company has created; and the high temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets that are an integral part of its function. The word “tokamak” is derived from a Russian acronym for “toroidal chamber with magnetic coils”. It is in its simplest terms a device designed for the creation and containment of a nuclear reaction that simulates the plasma fusion that happens within the Sun and all other stars.

The superconducting magnets are designed to simulate the Sun’s massive gravity field and confine the plasma. The plasma is created by superheating a gaseous hydrogen fuel until it forms an electrically charged plasma, the fourth state of matter, which is neither a solid, liquid, nor a gas. The nuclear fusion reaction that results creates only a small radioactive signature that presents no long-term, high-level waste or related disposal issues common with current nuclear fission technology.

Research first began on the basic tokamak technology in the 1960s using containment modules which resembled ring donuts. Tokamak Energy uses a modified version that is spherical in shape, similar to a cored apple. The company’s current target is to be able to start deploying a fleet of small-footprint power plants, each with the capability of delivering 500 Megawatts into the grid by the mid-2030s.

Kelsall says the small footprint of “no more than one or two football fields in size,” combined with minimal radioactivity, waste and disposal concerns will enable the siting of the plants in or near population and industrial centers, thus, dramatically reducing costs and time lags related to the need to build big electric transmission infrastructure.

Not surprisingly, Kelsall sees power markets as by far the largest market opportunity – and need – for fusion energy. “We know that, in order to meet our climate targets, the world is going to have to massively electrify,” he says. “Our future grids are also going to have to grow significantly. So we see the power markets representing approximately 60% of the total addressable market opportunity for fusion.”

The decarbonization of hard-to-abate industrial sectors like steel, chemicals, cement and others is fusion’s second-biggest potential prize. “It often gets overlooked, but it’s crucial,” Kelsall says. “We see that as 30% of our target global market, alongside combined heat and power opportunities.”

But what about renewables, wind and solar? “Our view is that renewables are still really important, but the challenge we’ve got is that they alone will not get us to the targets we need globally,” Kelsall answers. “This is this is not just about climate. This is also about energy security.

“The ongoing situation in Ukraine has reminded us that it’s not just about lowering system costs, with fusion acting as a complement to renewables. This is also about providing resilience, agility and diversification in global energy supply, so that if one source of energy cuts, we’re not completely in a crisis. It’s a world today in which we’re reminded that energy security is national security, and I think a number of governments have been reminded about that the hard way. Europe’s been very exposed. So, it’s the question of addressing climate targets with fusion providing a crucial complement to renewables. It’s about energy security. It’s about lower costs. So that’s the trilemma – it’s also got to be affordable.”

In the two years since he assumed the role as CEO at Tokamak Energy, Kelsall says he has seen a dramatic rise in investor interest in the nuclear fusion sector. “There’s been a very significant, I think palpable inflection in investor appetite and interest in the fusion space over the last 12 months,” he says. “The sector has had in recent years over $5 billion of equity investment coming in from top institutional, sovereign wealth, and strategic names, as well as ultra-high net worth influencers and energy incumbents – frequently through their venture units.”

He also finds the initiatives by governments in Europe, and more recently, in the United States to prioritize funding for fusion-related research and development highly encouraging. “We really respect and admire the ecosystem that’s building up in the US. We’ve had some great partnerships with the University of Illinois and Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Oak Ridge and others, and we want to continue that journey,” Kelsall says.

“The US Government has recognized that fusion is of geostrategic importance, and has launched a public/private milestone-based funding program that is an analog of a prior program that ultimately yielded SpaceX as NASA’s preferred supplier of orbital delivery platforms. And the other big positive is obviously the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $280 million in funding allotted for the Department of Energy to advance fusion research and development.”

All in all, it is an increasingly promising investment environment for those engaged in fusion energy research and development today. The challenge for Tokamak Energy and other aspiring fusion companies is to demonstrate their respective technologies and processes can achieve the magnitudes in net energy gains that will make them scalable in an economic way.

As Kelsall says, it’s a race against time, one that grows in urgency with every passing day.