Vulcan 20-20 will be housed in a two-storey extension to R1 built on top of the current Vulcan footprint. The ground floor is shown on the left and the red dotted line is the boundary of the sunset Vulcan facility on the right
Vulcan 20-20 is combining investment from the UKRI Infrastructure Fund, STFC and AWE Nuclear Security Technologies to establish a world leading capability for high energy density (HED) science. HED science studies macroscopic amounts of matter placed under extreme conditions, such as temperature, pressure, density, electric field, magnetic field etc. These are conditions usually only found off planet, for example in the sun or at the centres of gas giants. As a result, it can be used for fundamental research on the behaviour of matter in these extreme environments, or for technological research for example novel approaches to fusion energy or novel materials.
What is sunset ? Vulcan 20-20 is the successor facility for the original Vulcan (1977) and Vulcan PW (2002) facility which have already been decommissioned for this development, parts of which date back to the original 1977 system. Vulcan 20-20 is being built on the same site as the decommissioned Vulcan via an expansion to the R1 building rather than a green field site to reduce costs and preserve existing support infrastructure. Capacity has been built in for academic, industrial and national security and defence use.
