The abandoned coal-fired power plant at Aberthaw has missed out on the five-site shortlist to house the UK's first nuclear fusion plant.

Five sites in England and Scotland are now in the running to host a proposed £2bn nuclear fusion plant that will test pioneering technology which it is hoped will make nuclear fusion a viable form of power generation.

Aberthaw, near Barry, had been put forward as a site after the coal-fired power station there closed in 2019.

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The UK government has committed £200m to develop plans for the fusion plant, which would generate electricity in the same way as the sun by fusing hydrogen atoms to make helium.

The government plans to build the reactor by 2040 but concerns were raised about the value for money. The £2bn plant would only be expected to produce 100MW of electricity, making it much more expensive than other forms of energy.

The five successful sites are: Severn Edge in Gloucestershire, Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire, Moorside in Cumbria, Goole in Yorkshire and Ardeer in North Ayrshire.

A total of 15 locations had long-listed following an open call between December 2020 and March 2021.

The proposed power plant would test a different type of nuclear fusion reaction called a spherical topamak. It is a variation on the previous types of reactor shaped like giant doughnuts where atoms have been fused together to produce heat. The heat is then absorbed by the walls of the tokamak, and turned into electricity.

‘Tokamak’ comes from a Russian acronym: ‘toroidal chamber with magnetic coils’. ‘Toroidal’ means doughnut-shaped; and huge magnets are needed to control the hot plasma inside to stop it touching the walls of the machine and keep it under high pressure.

A spherical tokamak is shaped more like an apple without its core than a doughnut, and is expected to be smaller and relatively cheaper to operate than larger, traditional doughnut-shaped tokamaks. The technology is still, however, far more expensive than wind or solar power.

With no Welsh site being considered to house the £2bn investment into clean energy, it becomes the latest blow to the old coal-fired plant which opened back in 1971 and employed around 170 people.

Market conditions meant the decision to close the plant was deemed "necessary" in 2020.

Considered "vital" by Aberthaw to the UK's electricity supply, a report in 2015 by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth found it was a major contributor of pollution with claiming it had the third highest emissions of nitrogen oxides of any industrial installation in the European Union at the time.

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