Tokamak Solutions (TS) is currently designing machines, based on fusion science, aimed at tackling some of the world’s most urgent, universal energy problems, such as how to dispose of toxic nuclear waste, in simpler and more cost-effective ways than are currently available.

"Part of our challenge has been to be taken seriously, given the boldness of our original ideas," says physicist Dr David Kingham, one of three founders who set up TS two years ago. Dr Mikhail Gryaznevich and Alan Sykes joined forces with Kingham to develop different kinds of smaller tokamaks to use for plasma research and also as neutron sources.

"Our concept of using tokamak fusion reactors specifically to produce neutrons is new," says Dr Kingham, 54. "The plan is to develop a series of powerful fusion neutron sources over 10 to 15 years.

"Our goal is to develop the world's most intense neutron source and then to see it used routinely to destroy nuclear waste by providing a cleanse-as-it-goes process for plants, enabling them to create their own fuel and destroy their own waste. Neutrons can bombard the most difficult elements of waste and destroy them."

Kingham adds: "Global warming has been a big factor driving our work. Nuclear power offers a well-proven way to generate large amounts of energy with zero carbon emission. But there are concerns about waste burial and the capacity of its toxicity to increase over time. Our technology has the potential to clean up the worst and could be retro-fitted to existing plants. There would be less material buried and it would be safer too."

Based in the Culham Innovation Centre, Abingdon in Oxfordshire, the new investment will enable the firm now to commercialise its compact version and extend the ways its technology can be applied. Its devices, which can scale from two-metres wide right up to the size of a small room, use a different production method to that of their costly counterparts.This is based on injecting a high-energy beam into warm, modest amounts of plasma within a spherical tokamak, the shape of a cored apple, the advocates say.

The company's other intention is to offer a new and improved way of making medical isotopes, which increasingly are being used in the diagnosis and treatment of cancers, according to Kingham. Kingham says: "Our first step is to design and build small tokamaks for the 250 plasma physics research laboratories around the world. To start with the simplest solutions and improve performance as quickly as possible has been a central part of our　business strategy. We have now worked out how to construct within two years a useful but far less powerful neutron source and also how to build increasingly intense ones." The company, which is planning to create more jobs in the near future, has filed patents and used partnerships extensively to enrich the available skills input as well as control costs, says Kingham. "We work with those who know the technologies and those who understand the applications," he says, citing Oxford Instruments, which is designing its magnet systems, as a typical example. Now, in a further boost, Tokamak Solutions has just won a £110,000 contract to contribute to ITER, Europe’s large-scale fusion creation project based in France.

"Most fusion efforts are directed at the long-term problem of producing electricity from this method," says Kingham. "However our dramatic breakthrough has been finding a way of making fusion useful in the medium term. "There really is no limit to where our technology can go in future."

More information can be found at: http://www.tokamaksolutions.co.uk