Jacob Rees-Mogg, the UK Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, announced West Burton A power station in Nottinghamshire as its site on 3 October 2022 during the Conservative Party Conference.
The funding covers the initial five year concept design phase, while the total capital costs are estimated to be several billion pounds.
[8] The planned UK facility is based on a ‘tokamak’ design that uses magnetic fields to confine a plasma of heavy isotopes of hydrogen, tritium and deuterium, which fuse under extreme heat and pressure.
UKAEA's MAST Upgrade spherical tokamak device started operation in October 2020, and will heavily inform the STEP design.
The first phase, from 2019 to 2024, should create an integrated concept design for the reactor together with a strategy to amass an intellectual property portfolio and manage technical risks.