Too late?

How much better off would the world be if someone hadn't discovered nuclear fission first? After that, they put all their money in that direction. But, hey, maybe "better late than never" will hold.

Researchers at the Joint European Torus (JET), a fusion experiment in Oxfordshire, generated 59 megajoules of heat – equivalent to about 14kg of TNT – during a five-second burst of fusion, more than doubling the previous record of 21.7 megajoules set in 1997 by the same facility.

The feat announced on Wednesday follows more than two decades of tests and refinements at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy and has been hailed as a “major milestone” on the road to fusion becoming a viable and sustainable low-carbon energy source.