Brit boffins boast of beating barriers to building fusion power

Scientists at the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) say that they have overcome plasma instability issues standing in the way of commercial fusion power plants. The boffins overseeing the MAST (Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak) Upgrade installation at UKAEA's Culham Campus in Oxfordshire conducted a fifth series of experiments on it during 2025 and 2026 and produced more than 1,100 fusion plasmas. During these experiments, the team demonstrated the highest pressure ever achieved with the MAST Upgrade machine, without the super-hot plasma destabilizing, they say. One of the challenges they set out to address is to figure out how to suppress instabilities known as Edge Localised Modes or ELMs. These are described as “sudden bursts at the...

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