£200m from the UK government to deliver fusion by 2040 looks like a joke. It's a drop of water.
https://www.vox.com/2019/5/17/18624740/fossil-fuel-subsidies...
[1] and quotes a figure closer to 500billion, globally. Which isn't nothing, but probably also includes places like Venezuala who massively subsidize their domestic consumption.
This isn't even one of those situations where their use of the word is technically correct. I've never seen a definition of 'subsidy' that wasn't an out-of-pocket expense paid by governments.
The use of the word subsidy is intended to put the idea into our heads that we're all paying out of pocket via taxes to support the fossil fuels industries. But that is the opposite of the truth. With a few exceptions (the Petro-states) fossil fuel prices aren't artificially lowered by subsidies, but rather are bloated by taxes paid by corporations and by end consumers. Fossil fuel industries fund our governments, our roads and infrastructure.
In terms of human working time, £200M roughly pays for 1000 person years of work, so it's certainly more than "a drop of water". Yes, I know there's more than salaries and research tools and material are expensive in this case. But still, imagine 50 people just working on theory and cheap experiments for 20 years; they could achieve a lot.
$200M is laughable - as is the 20 year plan. I recently reread Summa Technologicae by Stanislaw Lem. Written in 1961, it also guessed that fusion will be there 20 years in the future - meaning 1981 :)
The budget for ITER is 20b. The UK is only pitching in 200m. Other countries are pitching in the rest. The USA already pitched in $1b for example. The article only mentioned the UK because it was written for UK readers.
Nuclear fusion has a chance of being the solution to that problem.
These smaller reactors should be cheaper and faster to build.
Are suitcase-sized fusion reactors still on the table, or does this just mean smaller-than-a-football-stadium fusactors are probably possible?
You still need to work the HTS material into magnets, a vacuum vessel, turbo and mechanical pumps, lots of fittings and mechanical engineering work, gyrotrons and their high voltage supplies and all the engineering that goes with (including wave guides), neutral beam injection, two dozen diagnostic systems, coil power supply system, and all of the work that goes with cryogenics.
Edit: If this would be for a medium scale science machine then you would need divertor and first wall materials, as well as a decent cooling system if you want long pulse operation. If this is a power plant then you can ditch most diagnostics, make everything twice as large, add a breeding layer between the coil cryogenics and the vacuum vessel, add a tritium separation facility ($$$), and add a big ass heat exchange/steam turbine system. ITER is in between these two and is the first time it's ever been done, with all of the diagnostics and full D+T operation caked into the design. It's not surprising it costs 20 billion Euro and even then if it was a power plant it wouldn't be priced out of reasonability (~twice current electric costs). At what point do we say we just need to pay more for our energy and kick fossil fuels?
Basically this level of funding gives Tokamak Energy the ability to order purchases of HTS tape in bulk and start ramping up to building all their full-scale magnets as they get deliveries over the next 3-5 years.
Edit: I find nothing in the announcement that says this is going towards magnets or HTS material, but this would be a the scale of advance funding for 3 meter radius magnet development.