TOKYO – Tokamak Energy, the UK’s leading nuclear fusion technology developer, has become part of Japan’s energy innovation strategy.
After several years of building relations with Japanese government agencies, corporations and academic and scientific institutions, Tokamak Energy established a subsidiary in Tokyo in February and won a “green transformation” award from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government in April.
Tokamak Energy was founded in 2009 as a spin-off from the UK Atomic Energy Authority. Of the approximately ten fusion technology developers in the UK, it is widely regarded as the one closest to commercialization, although that appears to be at least a decade away.
Tokamak Energy has been shortlisted for the role of engineering partner in the UK Government’s STEP (Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production) initiative, which aims to build a fusion energy pilot plant in Nottinghamshire.
In 2019, Tokamak Energy established a subsidiary in the US. As part of the US Department of Energy’s Milestone Based Fusion Development Program, it is designing a spherical tokamak-based fusion pilot plant with the goal of demonstrating net energy output in the 2030s.
Tokamak Energy also works with General Atomics, the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, the Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Sandia national laboratories and the University of Illinois.
Tokamak Energy’s most prominent Japanese partners are wire and cable manufacturer Furukawa Electric, component producer and system integrator Kyoto Fusioneering, trading company Sumitomo Corporation and the University of Tokyo.
Tokamak Energy is also part of Japan’s FAST (Fusion by Advanced Superconducting Tokamak) fusion power development project, which brings together industrial and academic experts from Japan, the UK, the US and Canada.
Tokamak Energy specializes in two technologies: the compact spherical tokamak fusion reactor and the high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets that make it work.
A tokamak is a machine that confines a deuterium-tritium plasma using magnetic fields to force them together. In the 1980s, Alan Sykes, the UK physicist who was one of Tokamak Energy’s founders, demonstrated that a compact spherical design was more efficient, stable and cost-effective than the older donut-shaped design. A spherical design is now the global standard. Sykes was the principal designer of the ST40 spherical tokamak.
Tokamak is a Russian word, an acronym derived from the phrase “toroidal chamber with magnetic coil.” The concept was formulated by Russian (Soviet) physicists Oleg Lavrentiev, Andrei Sakharov and Igor Tamm in 1950 and 1951.
Tokamak technology has since spread around the world, with the UK, US and Japan racing China, the EU, Russia, India and South Korea to commercialize fusion energy.
In January 2023, Tokamak Energy signed an agreement with Furukawa Electric and its US subsidiary SuperPower, under which the Japanese will supply several hundred kilometers of HTS tape for the magnets in Tokamak’s fusion pilot plant.
“HTS magnets,” the three companies state, “are an essential enabler for the low cost, commercial operation and global deployment of spherical tokamak devices. They are essential for confining the fuel, which reaches temperatures above 100 million degrees Celsius. Tokamak Energy and Furukawa Electric Group are, respectively, leaders in the fields of HTS magnet design and superconducting wire development.”
In November 2024, Furukawa announced that it had invested about 10 million pounds (US$13.5 million) in Tokamak Energy, becoming its first strategic investor in Japan.
This was part of a 100 million pound Series C funding round co-led by East X Ventures, a London-based firm that “invests in early-stage, science-led companies with high-growth, world-scale potential,” and Lingotto Investment Management, a Netherlands-owned fund also based in London.
The funding will support the expansion of its HTS magnetics business and ongoing work on the company’s fusion pilot plant. Tokamak Energy has also raised capital from other private investors as well as the UK and US governments.
Kyoto Fusioneering supplies gyrotrons to Tokamak Energy and other private and public sector clients in Japan and overseas. Spun out of Kyoto University in October 2019, it was Japan’s first fusion energy startup.
“The gyrotron,” the company explains, “is a high-power, high-frequency oscillation heating device primarily used for plasma ignition, electron heating, and plasma instability suppression. Kyoto Fusioneering has commercialized the gyrotron by consolidating technologies accumulated by national institutions, academia, and manufacturers, including the National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology (QST) and the University of Tsukuba.”
Sumitomo Corporation has a collaboration agreement with Tokamak Energy aimed at establishing a fusion energy supply chain and the realization of commercial fusion power plants. It is also investigating potential applications of Tokamak Energy’s technology in other industrial sectors.
Tokamak Energy’s Plasma Physics senior technical advisor, Yuichi Takase, is a former professor of physics and complexity science and engineering at the University of Tokyo.
In May, Tokamak Energy CEO Warwick Matthews and Director of Strategic Partnerships Ross Morgan visited Japan to meet with government officials, industrial companies and investors.
In an interview at their office in Tokyo, they told Asia Times that the level of trust with the Japanese is very high and that the time and effort put into building relationships should enable them to navigate the long-term collaboration required for commercializing fusion energy.
Matthews joined Tokamak Energy in January 2023 after a 24-year career at Rolls Royce. Morgan, who has led the effort to establish the company’s subsidiary in Japan, began his career in 1996 at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, the UK’s national fusion laboratory.
On May 20 of this year, the Nikkei business newspaper reported that the Japanese government plans to revise its Fusion Energy Innovation Strategy to include a roadmap toward conducting the world’s first test of a fusion energy pilot plant in the 2030s.
The strategy, which then-Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s Cabinet approved in June 2023, identifies fusion energy as “the next-generation energy source that can solve both energy problems and global environmental problems at the same time,” while ensuring Japan’s energy security.
Fusion energy, it notes, has the following advantages: (1) Carbon neutrality (no carbon dioxide emitted), (2) Abundant fuel [hydrogen isotopes deuterium, found in seawater, and tritium, which can be produced from lithium], (3) Inherently safe (nuclear reaction stops when the fuel or power supply is cut off), and (4) Environmental preservation (low level of radioactive waste that can be processed with existing technology).
Fusion technology is of particular importance for a country with no significant reserves of fossil fuels, “as energy hegemony will shift from those countries possessing energy resources to those possessing the technology, it will become vital to ensure energy security.”
With that in mind, Sanae Takaichi, then-Minister of State for Science and Technology Policy, emphasized the need to create business opportunities by “industrializing fusion energy.” Which is exactly what Tokamak and its Japanese partners are doing.
Tokamak Energy’s HTS magnetics business is organized as a separate division within the company called TE Magnetics, which aims to be the leading supplier of HTS technology not only for fusion energy, but for other applications including efficient power transmission within data centers, renewable energy, propulsion on land, in water, air and space, medicine and scientific research.
The idea is to develop a commercial business that pays its own way while fusion energy is still under development. Tokamak Energy has “spent more than ten years and over $50 million developing ultra-high field HTS technology that is robust, quench-safe, tunable, scalable and cost-effective.”
Watch a presentation here by Principal Magnet Engineer Greg Brittles on the subject of “What is ‘quench’ and how do we protect our HTS magnets against it?”
Not surprisingly, this has helped the company raise capital. Commenting on the recent funding round, James Anderson, managing partner & CIO of Lingotto Innovation Strategy, said: “We think the company is developing and scaling impressively and particularly admire its global reach in high-temperature superconducting magnet technology.”
Furukawa Electric made low-temperature (near absolute zero) superconductivity a target of its R&D efforts in 1963 and succeeded in producing a composite fine multifilament conductor in 1970.
In 1986, it turned to high-temperature superconductivity (HTS), making advances in cable composition and manufacturing processes until, in 2011, electric power from a thermal power plant could be transmitted over a single superconducting cable.
Superconducting wire supplied by Furukawa Electric was used in the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) near Geneva, where Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN), the European Organization for Nuclear Research, discovered the elementary Higgs boson particle in 2012.
HTS wires and cables conduct electricity with zero resistance at temperatures that are manageable. They are compact and feature both large transmission capacity and low transmission loss. According to Furukawa, HTS cable can “reduce transmission loss by up to 77% compared to conventional cables using copper or aluminum.”
In 2015, Furukawa joined a project supported by Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NED) to develop a superconducting flywheel power storage system that was connected to a large-scale solar power plant in Yamanashi Prefecture.
Today, Furukawa sees opportunities for the commercial application of HTS technology in electric power transmission, transformers, power storage devices, electrical generators, smart grids, electric vehicles, ship propulsion and Maglev trains.
Obviously, as Tokamak Energy CEO Mathews pointed out, this is “not just a science project.”
In 2022, Tokamak Energy’s ST40 spherical tokamak set a world record plasma temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius, which is the lower limit for the practical generation of fusion energy. Above this temperature, deuterium and tritium can be forced to combine, producing helium and neutrons and releasing a large amount of energy.
In 2024, Tokamak Energy announced an ST40 upgrade in collaboration with the US Department of Energy and the UK Department of Energy Security and Net Zero. Tokamak Energy’s participation in Japan’s FAST project makes this a trilateral endeavor.
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