Max Rigby-Bell is a Project Lead Scientist at the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), based at Culham Campus in Oxfordshire. His work focuses on developing and testing materials capable of surviving the extreme environments inside future fusion power plants, one of the most ambitious scientific and engineering challenges of our time.
Can you talk us through your journey from Radley to university?
I first visited Culham while I was still at Radley, during GCSE years – I think Removes or Fifths. We were taken on a tour of the Joint European Torus (JET), one of the world’s largest and most powerful fusion machines, which ran plasma experiments for 40 years and is now being decommissioned. At the time, I didn’t know anything about fusion. I just remember the scale of it. The enormous hall, the machinery, the sense that something advanced was happening.
That visit stuck with me more than I realised. At Radley I was interested in lots of different things rather than one single subject. Physics gradually became more compelling, particularly once I reached sixth form, and that interest narrowed into astrophysics.
I went on to study Physics with Astrophysics at the University of Leeds. As part of that degree, I did an industrial placement year, working for engineering companies linked to the energy sector. One of those projects involved a startup trying to develop fusion technology, which led me to a PhD open day at Culham. When I arrived, I realised I’d been there before as a schoolboy, and it reminded me why I’d become interested in physics in the first place.
How did that second visit to Culham change or narrow your focus?
That was the point at which my interest shifted from astrophysics into experimental materials science, which I pursued for my PhD. It was hands-on, applied, and much closer to real-world engineering challenges. Before I’d finished my PhD, roles opened up at UKAEA that matched the skills I’d been developing. I joined at a time when the organisation was growing rapidly, and I’ve now been here almost six years, working on the STEP Fusion programme to design and build the UK’s first prototype fusion energy power plant in Nottinghamshire.
How would you explain nuclear fusion to a Radleian in a couple of minutes?
Fusion is the opposite of nuclear fission. In conventional nuclear power production, we split heavy atoms like uranium to release energy. In fusion, we do the reverse: we fuse light atoms (usually isotopes of hydrogen) together, and that also releases energy.
It’s the same process that powers the stars. Hydrogen fusion is what makes the Sun shine. The challenge is doing that in a controlled way, on Earth, in a relatively small machine.
Fusion reactions can produce enormous amounts of energy. In principle, you can produce a person’s lifetime’s worth of electricity using just a bathtub of seawater and the lithium you’d find in a laptop battery. Compared to fossil fuels or even conventional nuclear power, the energy density is extraordinary.
It’s also potentially safer. Fusion doesn’t involve chain reactions in the same way as fission, and it produces far less long-lived radioactive waste. That said, it’s extremely difficult from an engineering perspective, which is why it’s taken more than 70 years of research to get to where we are now.
Fusion is often described as “always 20–30 years away”. How close are we really?
That phrase exists for a good reason. Fusion is genuinely hard, and progress has historically been limited by funding and engineering capability rather than scientific understanding.
What’s changed in the last decade is the scale of investment and international commitment. In the UK, the STEP Fusion programme represents a serious attempt to bring all the necessary technologies together – materials, plasma physics, engineering, power generation – into a single integrated system.
The target is to produce electricity from fusion in the 2040s. Whether that exact date is met is less important than the fact that we’re now solving engineering and materials problems that were previously out of reach.
Why are materials such a critical challenge in fusion?
Fusion environments are among the most extreme we can create on Earth. We’re dealing with temperatures higher than those found at the core of the Sun, intense radiation, high pressures, and corrosive conditions, all at the same time.
Every component inside a fusion machine is under constant assault. Materials can melt, warp, crack, erode, or become brittle. Radiation, particularly high-energy neutrons which are produced during a fusion reaction, causes damage at the atomic level and can also make materials radioactive.
My team’s role is to design and test materials that can survive those conditions long enough to make a power plant viable. That involves a combination of experimental testing and predictive modelling, including AI-driven simulations. We’re effectively trying to understand how and when materials fail, and then prevent that from happening.
Your PhD focused on ceramics for extreme environments. Why ceramics?
Most people think of ceramics as plates or bathroom tiles, but technically ceramics are a huge class of materials – anything with certain types of atomic bonding, including oxides, carbides and nitrides.
Ceramics are useful in extreme environments because they have very high melting points and are often resistant to radiation damage. In fusion, we use ceramic-based materials for shielding, armour and insulators inside the machine, particularly to protect delicate components like magnets from neutron radiation.
Tungsten-based ceramics are especially important. Tungsten is very dense and excellent at slowing down neutrons, which makes it ideal for shielding. Almost all the engineering challenges in fusion ultimately come back to managing those neutrons. They generate heat, cause material damage, and make materials radioactive.
What is it like to work on something that has never been done before?
You have to enjoy the journey rather than just the destination. Fusion has a very clear goal: producing clean, abundant energy. But it’s also a long-term project, and it may not be fully realised within any single career.
For me, the motivation comes from curiosity and problem-solving, as well as the possibility that what we’re doing could make a real contribution to global energy and climate challenges.
There’s also a strong historical precedent. Large research programmes like Apollo didn’t just achieve their headline goals, they generated technologies that transformed computing, communications and engineering along the way. Fusion research is already producing spinouts in areas like high-temperature superconducting magnets, microwave drilling, high-performance computing and advanced radiation shielding.
You lead a team of scientists and engineers. What is collaboration like in this field?
It’s one of the most rewarding parts of the job. Everyone comes from a different background – different universities, different PhD topics, sometimes entirely different disciplines – and each person brings a very specific expertise.
That diversity is essential, because the problems we’re tackling are too complex for any one person to solve alone. At the same time, managing strong personalities and specialist expertise can be challenging. Academia and technical industries attract people who are deeply invested in their niche.
A large part of leadership in this field is about building bridges between teams, making sure people communicate, and avoiding duplication of effort. It’s not always easy, but it’s extremely satisfying when a seemingly impossible problem starts to become manageable.
What advice would you give to Radley boys interested in physics, energy or future-facing science?
First, you don’t have to have everything planned out early. I certainly didn’t. What matters is building a strong technical foundation (e.g. maths, physics, engineering, or another scientific discipline) and keeping that part of your brain active.
Second, you don’t have to do a PhD to work in science or engineering. Vocational routes, industry roles and applied research careers are far more accessible than they used to be.
Third, be curious and talk to people. Try different roles, ask questions, go through open doors. Careers rarely work out by luck alone, they’re shaped by exploration and conversation.
Finally, you don’t need to be a genius. You need curiosity, motivation, and a willingness to put the work in. If you’re genuinely interested in what you’re doing, that will sustain you far more than prestige or a salary will.
