‘Fusion energy will happen, but I can’t tell you when’
THESE are exciting times for people working for the UK Atomic Energy Authority, with plans for a major new project moving ahead and international news about fusion energy making the headlines – but its chief executive said it is likely to be a long time before people are using fusion-generated power to boil their kettles.
Guernseyman Ian Chapman was knighted in the first New Year’s Honours list under King Charles III, an accolade which he said he found ‘very bizarre – it’s the sort of thing that normally happens when people retire. I’m not retiring any time soon.’
He saw it as a tribute to everyone at the UKAEA. ‘I don’t think it’s really for the work that I’ve done. I hope it’s seen as recognition for the efforts and the achievements of the whole organisation that I have the privilege of representing, the thousands of people that I work with.’
His interest in working in the world of energy stemmed from his student days.
Educated at La Houguette School and then Elizabeth College, he enjoyed maths and science subjects and was good at them.
He earned a degree in maths and physics from Durham University and after deciding he wanted to work on something involved with clean energy, he focused on fusion, which led to him doing a PhD in plasma physics at Imperial College in London.
Sir Ian started working for the UK Atomic Energy Authority in 2008. This is the UK’s largest research organisation which employs some 2,500 people at two sites in Oxfordshire, where he lives, and Yorkshire – soon to be three, when it creates a home for its next major project in Nottingham.
‘I wanted to do something that required development, something that would really solve the global problem,’ he said, but was not interested in getting involved in big civil engineering projects that were already in train, such as wind power.
‘I could have gone into tidal, I suppose, but it’s still decades away from being commercially viable.’
He started off at the AEA working on theoretical physics, then writing computer code for experiments.
He was appointed its chief executive in 2016.
Among the AEA’s recent achievements was breaking the world record for the amount of fusion energy produced, which it did last year.
While it continues to work on projects at Jet, the Joint European Torus, the next big project for the AEA is Step – the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production, which will be built in Nottingham on the site of an Electricite de France power station.
The goal is for this to be up and running by 2040, said Sir Ian.
Fusion energy hit the news a few months ago when a team at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California announced that it had generated energy with a controlled fusion reaction.
The UKAEA posted its congratulations to the team on its website, but Sir Ian said that the work being done in California was different to that which will be done at Step.
‘There are lots of different approaches to fusion, and they’re complementary,’ he said.
‘They’re just different ways of skinning the cat. We collaborate [with LLNL] and work together, where there’s synergies between our different approaches.’
One question Sir Ian said he gets asked most is when fusion will be commercially available – and this is one topic he said he does not answer.
On such occasions he quotes Russian physicist Lev Artsimovich, who he said was one of the forefathers of fusion research. ‘Fusion will be ready when the world needs it,’ he once said.
‘I still think that it’s true today,’ said Sir Ian. ‘When we really get serious about addressing climate change, and we’re prepared to spend real money and take real risk, then fusion will be advanced.’
He likened it to the speed with which a vaccine was developed to deal with the Covid pandemic, because the money and incentive was there.
‘People say to me “Will fusion happen?” and I say if I didn’t believe it would, I wouldn’t do it. I’m doing it because I think it will.’
