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20 hours ago
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The UK government has just allocated another £2.5 billion to an ambitious fusion energy project without any indication it's progressed much beyond the planning stages.
The bundle of cash ($3.4bn) will go towards the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) project planned for construction at West Burton in Nottinghamshire, the government announced Thursday.
Tokamaks heat gases until they become plasma, then use powerful magnets to confine that super-hot soup. Many experimental machines take the form of a torus – a cylinder with a central axis – and create a donut-shaped plasma loop of plasma to induce a fusion reaction. Spherical tokamaks produce a narrower ring of plasma, more sphere-like than donut. They are apparently more efficient and stable than toroid tokamaks.
Tokamaks are of interest because fusion reactions produce a lot of energy – they literally make the sun shine – and could potentially deliver a non-stop stream of clean power.
Thursday's announcement marks the second cash injection the UK government has made in STEP - the first coming in 2022 along with the choice of Nottinghamshire to host the facility.
That first lot of funding saw the UK government allot £220 million to the project, meaning this latest investment is a 1,036 percent increase from that first bit of backing.
As for what STEP has done to encourage that added investment, that's anyone's guess - by all accounts it doesn't seem like a lot has happened with the project of late.
STEP's website describes its plans as being divided into three phases: The first, which involves concept design, organizational development, site selection, and regulatory approval.
"We now have a concept design for the powerplant," the STEP team noted on its website. "We also have a site."
Phase one was supposed to wrap up last year, with phase two involving securing planning consent and permission as well as program development, technology demonstrations and component manufacturing.
A couple of recent news items on STEP's press page indicate it's in the process of selecting industry partners for engineering and construction, and has begun collaboration with Seoul National University on the development of high-temperature superconducting magnet cables.
Phase three isn't scheduled to begin until the 2030s and will see construction of the actual STEP plant. The project's goal is to have the facility operational in 2040 "with at least 100MW of net energy demonstrated as soon as practicable," per STEP's website.
Fusion? Future.
"We are now within grasping distance of unlocking the power of the sun and providing families with secure, clean, unlimited energy," UK energy secretary Ed Miliband said during a recent visit to the UK Fusion Research Campus.
Grasping distance, maybe, but holding on is proving to be difficult.
- Viable fusion power in a decade? Tokamak Energy dares to dream
- Fusion eggheads claim modeling fix for particle escape - at least in stellarators
- UK's dream of fusion power by 2040s will need GPUs
- Helion bags $425M in fresh funding despite fusion power still being a distant dream
The only known facility to achieve fusion ignition - the point at which the fusion reaction becomes self-sustaining - is the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California. The NIF has achieved ignition multiple times since first achieving it in 2022, and technically exceeded the amount of energy that went into the reaction chamber (2.04 megajoules from 192 lasers) by producing 3.15 megajoules of energy as a result. Unfortunately, powering those 192 lasers required 322 megajoules, meaning the reaction still didn't make up for the energy required to get it going.
Chinese researchers also reported a fusion breakthrough in early 2025 with nearly 18 minutes of plasma confinement in a tokamak - quite the achievement, but the researchers made no mention of how hot it was (fusion reactions don't start under 100 million degrees Celsius), whether there was a net energy gain, or anything else specific. European researchers later Indeed, extended China’s tokamak runtime world record by four minutes.
In other words, the UK's latest investment in the fusion dream is still betting on just that - a dream. We may be making advances toward fusion energy, but £2.5 billion is a big ask for a country buried in debt and a Chancellor of the Exchequer struggling to justify spending. ®
