The Joint European Torus (JET) facility in Oxfordshire has broken new nuclear fusion energy records in a major breakthrough on the elusive power source.
A group of scientists and engineers from the EUROfusion consortium achieved a record-breaking 59 megajoules of sustained fusion energy, marking a new milestone in the quest for a large-scale safe, sustainable, efficient and low-carbon energy supply.
The energy, created by smashing together two forms of hydrogen, was more than double the previous record achieved in 1996 at the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and lasted for a five-second period.
Using fusion energy, the process that gives the sun its power, JET reached temperatures ten times the centre of our star.
The results provide a boost in preparation for the start of the ITER fusion research project, a larger version of JET based in France and championed by China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the US.
EUROfusion programme manager Tony Donneé said: “If we can maintain fusion for five seconds, we can do it for five minutes and then five hours as we scale up our operations in future machines.”
“Crucially, the operational experience we’ve gained under realistic conditions gives us great confidence for the next stage of experiments at ITER and Europe’s demonstration power plant EU DEMO, which is being designed to put electricity on the grid.”
The JET, which is based at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire, is based on a doughnut-shaped design called a torus to hold the superheated plasma where the atoms are fused.
Culham is also home to the UKAEA's MAST (Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak) Upgrade experiment, which last year achieved a major reduction in heat towards the aim of 'cold fusion', and a fusion demonstration plant being built by General Fusion, a company backed by Microsoft and Amazon's Jeff Bezos.
If fusion energy ever becomes commercially viable it could become a competing technology for renewable energy and lead to a major shift in global carbon emissions - and could be possible by 2025, according to UBS analysts.