Unlimited energy from fusion became a more feasible prospect in 2022

Landmark confirmations of physics theory, including an energy production breakthrough at the end of the year, have turned fusion power stations into an engineering challenge rather than a physics one

By Matthew Sparkes

There is a joke that fusion power is 30 years away and always will be. But 2022 has seen records broken and hypotheses confirmed by experiments. The remaining hurdles are issues for engineers, not physicists, Lee Margetts at the University of Manchester, UK, told New Scientist earlier this year.

In February, the Joint European Torus reactor near Oxford in the UK sustained super-hot plasma for 5 seconds, producing a record 59 megajoules of energy. The hope is that ITER, a larger reactor being built in France, will build on this once it is running in 2025.

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