Britain is becoming a nuclear fusion superpower outside the EU
Britain is becoming a nuclear fusion superpower outside the EU
Ambrose Evans-PritchardTue, May 12, 2026 at 1:30 PM UTC
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Sir Keir Starmer, who is facing pressure to resign, is lurching towards Brussels - Ben Birchall/PA
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Putting Britain “back at the heart of Europe” is code for ending British self-government over critical areas of policy and national life.
It means implementing regulations drafted by the European Commission without a moment’s thought for British circumstances.
It means subcontracting Westminster’s law-making powers to foreign politicians in the European Council and Parliament, under the jurisdiction of an activist European Court of Justice, without any British say-so or democratic consent.
Whether Labour’s lurch towards Brussels means de facto membership of the EU single market or a crabwise shuffle towards further “dynamic alignment” – ie, cutting and pasting EU laws – the outcome is constitutionally incoherent and untenable over time. It is hard to devise a surer path to incessant quarrels with Europe.
It can be understood only as a way-station towards full EU membership, in which case “if it were done, ’twere well it were done quickly”, with a snap referendum and a full-throated commitment to the European Project, this time including the euro, Schengen and European defence as a pledge of British seriousness. At least that would have democratic credibility.
Sir Keir Starmer with Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission. The EU has yet to come up with its long-delayed fusion strategy - Stefan Rousseau/PA Images via AP
The Rejoiner agenda would have to entail the euro because one of the great fibs of the Remain campaign in 2016 was that Britain could continue to have it all, half in, half out, and that the City of London could prosper serenely as the financial capital of somebody else’s currency.
That arrangement was never going to work for long and was already unravelling before the referendum.
It is an article of faith in the Labour Party that the EU single market offers a quick and easy path to economic growth, even though the UK already has tariff-free access.
Have any of these Labour MPs – or Green MPs for that matter – read the EU’s Draghi report dissecting in cruel detail how the bloc has all but lost the technology race to the US and China and risks a “slow and agonising death” under its current model?
I don’t wish to rehearse past arguments about the alleged cost of Brexit. Academic models show whatever the academic wants them to show. There has obviously been a transition shock, but at the end of the day, Germany, France and Italy – in aggregate – have not done much better than the UK since 2016.
The relevant point today is that going back into economic bed with Europe now entails large reverse costs. The UK is going its own way in AI, gene-editing, ag-tech, financial regulation and a host of technologies that are either handicapped by regulatory overkill or blocked by vested interests in the EU.
Behold the British success story of nuclear fusion.
Last week, the US company Type One Energy said it planned to build a stellarator fusion reactor on British soil in a consortium with the UK’s Tokamak Energy, which will supply the specialist superconducting magnets that squeeze the plasma to 100 million degrees – the temperature required to fuse hydrogen isotopes and replicate the process of the sun.
Warrick Matthews, Tokamak Energy’s chief executive, said this 400-megawatt project promised to be the first functioning fusion plant in Europe, aiming to generate power for the grid from 2034.
“The British authorities did everything brilliantly,” he told me.
The UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) has run with the ball, building very fast on the ecosystem left from the experimental tokamak or Joint European Torus at Culham, near Oxford.
Four years ago, it pioneered the most business-friendly regime for fusion plants in the world – since followed by the US and Japan – turbo-charging the industry by exempting fusion plants from the prohibitive licensing requirements of nuclear fission plants.
To this day, the EU has yet to come up with its long-delayed fusion strategy.
It still treats the technology as a branch of old nuclear under the EU’s risk-averse “precautionary principle” even though fusion cannot suffer a runaway chain reaction and releases almost no long-term radioactive waste. It uses just grams of deuterium-tritium in the chamber, compared to 200 tonnes of uranium in a fission reactor.
Ten fusion companies in Europe have issued a joint letter to Brussels demanding urgent action to remove the regulatory shackles before Europe is shut out of the global fusion race.
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Irritation is mounting in the European Parliament.
“We need clear rules and we need rules that fit fusion and not rules made for nuclear fission,” said Pascal Arimont, a Belgian Member of the European Parliament (MEP).
Germany is losing patience.
“Private fusion companies had raised $13bn (£9.6bn) by the end of 2025 and where did this go?” said Dorothee Bär, the German technology minister.
“53pc went to the US and 34pc went to China and we got 5pc. There is no way to sugar-coat this. Europe needs to massively catch up,” she told a recent hearing in Brussels.
Matej Tonin, a Slovenian MEP, said the EU’s fusion effort had become a leisurely shambles.
“We’re repeating the same mistakes all the time. We’ll debate a lot, we’ll talk a lot and time will fly,” he said.
Europe ought to be the world leader. It has great depths in fusion science and hosts the giant ITER research consortium at Cadarache in France.
But perhaps that is part of the problem because this multinational behemoth, which will never produce one watt for the grid, is sucking away money and focus.
1305 The commercial fusion race has gone global
Others are seizing the moment because advances in superconducting and supercomputers have suddenly made it possible to build a commercial fusion reactor much faster and 40 times smaller than once thought possible, cutting the costs. ITER has outlived its usefulness.
The UK was effectively kicked out of the project for the sin of Brexit, even though Vladimir Putin’s Russia was allowed to remain despite the sin of a European war and even though the highest fusion energy ever recorded – 69.26 megajoules in a 5.2-second pulse – would soon be produced at the Torus tokamak on UK soil. But release from ITER has proved to be a liberation.
The UKAEA has concentrated all its effort on the giant prize of commercial fusion. It is building its own spherical tokamak to generate usable power on the site of an old coal plant on the River Trent.
It is building the world’s largest and most advanced tritium facility to produce the ultra-scarce fuel. Next month, it will start operating the world’s most powerful AI supercomputer dedicated to fusion energy. Its facility at Culham is the global leader in advanced robotics for fusion plants.
This heroic effort is backed by a state budget of £2.5bn over five years, an enormous figure even by global standards.
“To secure £2.5bn last year was frankly phenomenal,” said Tristram Denton, the UK director of the Fusion Industry Association.
The British state spends more on fusion as a share of GDP than any other state in the world despite its fiscal woes. So much for the canard that middle powers are too small to pack a punch on their own.
The opposite is true. They can pick their objectives. They can go hard and fast. Look at Taiwan’s global dominance of advanced semiconductors.
In short, the UK has created a fusion ecosystem in concert with the Americans that is now reaching critical take-off. It is becoming a fusion superpower in its own right. Would this have happened under the inertia of EU membership and faced with endless squabbling over the division of spoils?
Fusion is not a minor matter or a technological luxury. The global energy and economic system will be changed forever the day that the first megawatt from a fusion reactor hits the grid at a competitive cost. The rewards will be immense. It is unfashionable to credit Boris Johnson or Sir Keir Starmer for anything in our petulant society but both deserve a few hurrahs for this at least.
There may be many compelling reasons for the UK to tie its fate closer to the EU – or, indeed, to rejoin – but please stop telling me that higher economic growth is one of them.
Listening to insular Labour backbenchers bleating piously about a Europe that exists only in their heads is worse than enduring the hideous noise of fingernails on a blackboard.
Source: “AOL Money”
