A major breakthrough in the search for nuclear fusion

For 60 years, the hope of producing vast amounts of clean energy from nuclear fusion has remained tantalisingly beyond our grasp. Now scientists claim it’s within reach.

JET nuclear fusion reactor
The JET reactor has made a major breakthrough
(Image credit: © EUROfusion)

So this is the holy grail of nuclear fusion?

Not quite. Last week scientists at the Joint European Torus (JET), a nuclear fusion research project based near Oxford, set a new world record for the most energy ever generated from a fusion experiment. The team of researchers from the 30-nation Eurofusion consortium, based at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, produced 59 megajoules from a sustained reaction lasting five seconds.

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.