The UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) has partnered with Italy’s Eni to build the world’s largest tritium fuel cycle facility.
The “UKAEA-Eni H3AT (pronounced ‘heat’) Tritium Loop Facility”, located at Culham Campus in Oxfordshire, will help develop techniques to recover and re-use tritium.
This rare gas is an essential fuel for the nuclear fusion process, and effective use of it will be crucial in making the technology increasingly efficient.
UK climate minister Kerry McCarthy said: “We are proud to be at the forefront of global innovation in clean energy fusion technologies, and this collaboration with Eni marks a significant step towards unlocking the potential of fusion energy, supporting our missions for economic growth, clean power and energy independence.
The UKAEA-Eni H3AT Tritium Loop Facility is designed to provide industry and academia with the opportunity to study how to process, store and recycle tritium.
Eni will contribute to the H3AT project with its expertise in managing and developing large-scale projects, helping to de-risk its roadmap.
This partnership combines UKAEA’s extensive expertise in fusion research and development with Eni’s established industrial-scale capabilities in plant engineering, commissioning, and operations.
The partners aim to complete the facility by 2028.
UKAEA chief executive Ian Chapman added: “We are delighted to be working with Eni who have shown great commitment to fusion. We believe that fusion energy can contribute to a net-zero future, including going beyond the decarbonisation of electricity.
“The H3AT demonstration plant will set a new benchmark as the largest and most advanced tritium fuel cycle facility in the world, paving the way for innovative offerings in fusion fuel and demonstrating the UK’s leadership in this crucial area of research and development.”
‘The goal of fusion’
The UKAEA-Eni partnership will help the UK take a leading position in the global nuclear fusion industry – one which could be worth up to £31 trillion.
The UK previously struck a deal with the US government to invest £40.5 million in a joint project aimed at commercialising nuclear fusion energy.
The project was given a 2025 start date, and will take place in partnership with UK-based Tokamak Energy.
Eni CEO Claudio Descalzi said: “Fusion energy is meant to revolutionise the global energy transition path, accelerating the decarbonisation of our economic and industrial systems, helping to spread access to energy and reducing energy dependency ties within a more equitable transition framework.
“Eni is strongly committed to various areas of research and development of this complex technology, in which it has always firmly believed. Today with our UK partners we are laying the foundations for further progress towards the goal of fusion which – if we consider its enormous scope of technological innovation – is increasingly concrete and not so far off in time.
“To continue this virtuous development, international system-level technological partnerships like this one are indispensable.”
The scientific and engineering challenges facing nuclear fusion reactors are legion and all need to be resolved at the same time. This is extremely challenging because the solutions proposed for one problem often exacerbate others or create new ones.
The many challenges include energy confinement, impurity contamination, plasma disruptions, wall erosion, the tritium fuel cycle, availability in terms of operational uptime, excessive power consumption by the plant itself, cost and – contrary to industry marketing – radioactive waste.
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