Assystem takes a STEP towards fusion

The Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) project, which aims to design a power station fired by nuclear fusion, has announced another new collaborator, with France-based contractor Assystem coming on board to provide designs for a key component of the fusion system and services that will help other collaborators deliver the project.

STEP is a UK government-proposed project to take a lead in the development of fusion. In early October, the government announced a £200m investment to develop the concept behind STEP, which is to use a spherical Tokamak to perform and manage nuclear fusion and harness the heat produced to generate electricity. The ambitious goal for the project is to have a power station – which would be the first fusion unit – sending electricity to the grid by 2040.

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Spherical Tokamaks are part of a family of reactor designs that generate nuclear fusion by heating and compressing plasma (a gas formed of charged particles) using electromagnetic technologies. They are, to date, the most successful kind of fusion reactor, with the Joint European Torus (JET) located at Culham in Oxfordshire, the current record-holder for fusion energy production, although like all fusion reactors, it has not yet produced more energy than it takes to generate fusion. While conventional Tokamaks like JET, and the ITER reactor currently under construction in the south of France, are shaped like ring doughnuts, spherical Tokomaks resemble cored apples and produce a more stable plasma which the design’s proponents believe will be easier to manage and would allow energy to be produced from a smaller and therefore cheaper reactor.