UK's Nuclear Fusion Site Ends Experiments After 40 Years

15th October 2023

"It felt brilliant. One thing is to work on a design, another thing is to operate it."

Barry Green recounts the moment in June 1983 when the JET fusion laboratory in Oxford undertook its first experiment.

For the next four decades, the European project pursued nuclear fusion and the promise of near-limitless clean energy.

But on Saturday the world's most successful fusion experiment will wind down.

Nuclear fusion was "discovered" in the 1920s and the subsequent years of research focused on developing fusion for nuclear weapons.

In 1958, when the United States' war research on fusion was declassified, it sent Russia, UK, Europe, Japan and the US on a race to develop fusion reactions for energy provision.

Fusion is considered the holy grail of energy production as it releases a lot of energy without any greenhouse gas emissions.

It is the process that powers the Sun and other stars. It works by taking pairs of light atoms and forcing them together - the opposite of nuclear fission, where heavy atoms are split apart.

Read the full BBC article HERE

What is nuclear fusion and how does it work