Impacts on fusion research

Matthews lives near the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, in Abingdon, just outside Oxford. It's home to the Joint European Torus (JET), the main European fusion research centre. “For Abingdon, this is a serious issue for employment,” he said. “It affects local high-tech businesses.”

At some point, JET is going to be replaced by a new, larger fusion centre in Cadarache, France: ITER, formerly the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. However, that will not be up and running until the mid-2020s. “It was planned that Culham would be infilling for ITER until then,” said Matthews. “No one knows what’s going to happen now.” The UK has pledged to continue to fund JET until at least 2020, but that depends on the EU agreeing to extend its contract, which expires in 2018.

What’s more, Britain has a large high-tech industry around fusion research and was going to be a significant contributor to ITER. “We were expecting to get about half a billion euros’ [about £440 million] worth of contracts from ITER,” said Cashmore. “We have a certain level of technical know-how. If we come out of Euratom we lose access to bidding for those contracts.”

The UKAEA is lobbying ministers to establish another way of associating with ITER and Fusion For Energy (F4E), the European fusion agency. But so far it is not clear that one will exist. “Leaving Euratom puts large question marks over the research,” said Cashmore, “but it’s also cutting off investment to this high-tech industry.”

Mackerron was less concerned, saying that other countries outside Euratom, such as Japan and Australia, are part of the ITER collaboration. “I don’t understand why it wouldn’t be possible for the UK to gain a similar sort of status to those,” he said.

Leaving the EU has had wider implications for British nuclear research, not just fusion. Martin Freer, director of the Birmingham Centre for Nuclear Education and Research at the University of Birmingham, told BuzzFeed News that about 25% of his department’s funding comes through European channels. He also said that as well as the risk of losing that funding, access to collaborative projects such as ITER will become more difficult. “European partners will look more within the EU for those partners,” he said. “I think over the longer term UK will be excluded, and that exclusion will impact across the whole piece, certainly in nuclear programmes.”

Another scientist told BuzzFeed News on condition of anonymity that the situation was “already biting”: “I’ve been trying to put together a research proposal, and a vital European laboratory said they won’t collaborate because they don’t understand the relationship between the EU and the UK. It pisses me off, frankly.”