ITER is an experiment to show ‘net gain’ of energy-out versus energy-in, so it isn’t designed to be connected to the grid. This plant is meant to show that a fusion plant can produce power as reliably and sustainable as a conventional thermal plant.
The UK was certainly a founder member of the ITER consortium through its membership of the EU. AFAIK, its status following Brexit isn’t entirely certain, but the UK has said it wants to remain a member - although thanks to Theresa May’s stiupid decision to leave Euratom, that has got much more complex.
Might be an option since the Moorside site alongside Sellafield, which was going to host three Toshiba AP1000 reactors was abandoned in 2018.
There has been some talk of EDF building two EPRs on the site, but those things are white elephants that no one seems to be able to get to work and it will be a hard sell to get the taxpayer to subsidise another pair of reactors well over the market price for electricity.
One way to control the intensely hot plasma is to use powerful magnets. The most advanced device for this is the ‘tokamak’
thats funny;
Since the 1990s, the stellarator design has seen renewed interest.[2] New methods of construction have increased the quality and power of the magnetic fields, improving performance. A number of new devices have been built to test these concepts. Major examples include Wendelstein 7-X in Germany, the Helically Symmetric Experiment (HSX) in the US, and the Large Helical Device in Japan.
During the last experiments of 2018, the density reached 2 × 1020 particles/m3 at a temperature of 20 million degrees. With good plasma values, long-lasting plasmas with long discharge times of 100 seconds were obtained. Energy content exceeded 1 megajoule.
Concerning Sellafield. The site is hewg, they want to clean it up, there’s 4000 or so buildings and they cleaned around 80 for now. Approx date for end of work is 2120: http://fissilematerials.org/library/rr05.pdf
or 2140, depending on which presentation you read. It’s not very often someone quotes an end-of-contract date in the next century.
Also, if memory serves, in there you’ll find the most dangerous building in Europe: a pool continuosly almost-boiling for the decay heat of what’s inside. And what’s inside, no one knowsssss…
No Sellafield then.
The frustrating thing about fusion power is that it is not some fantasy nonsense, fusion power is abundant in the universe and would be the solution to basically all current power problems.
It is just supremely difficult to recreate the conditions of a star, in a small, controlled, replicable manner.
To hell with solar panels, if we can nail down fusion, we will be tapping right into the source.
Or, we could go big on solar panels, surround the sun with them, and beam the energy back to Earth. There is no way that could go wrong.
Thing is, fusion perpetuates the centralization of Power. Solar makes it possible for people to live off grid wherever they want, and the whole point of big power projects was to make that difficult.
It’s a pity that the sort of nuclear power that will get you a permanent seat on the security council has not, as yet, proven amenable to being the sort of nuclear power that will keep the lights on.
