Key Fusion Energy Milestones
1920 British astronomer Arthur Eddington theorizes that the sun and other stars are powered by the fusion of hydrogen atoms.
1934 Australian physicist Mark Oliphant observes atoms fusing and emitting energy in his University of Cambridge laboratory.
1958 Los Alamos researchers demonstrate the first controlled thermonuclear fusion.
1958 The first tokamak, the Soviet Union’s T-1, begins operation.
1974 KMS Fusion, a private-sector company, fires an array of lasers at a deuterium-tritium pellet, achieving the first successful laser-induced fusion.
1985 Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan agree to a joint collaboration on fusion research, which leads to the ITER experiment.
1995 Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory’s tokamak achieves a record plasma temperature of 510 million °C.
1997 The Joint European Torus (JET) reactor in England outputs 16 megawatts of fusion power, still the world record.
2013 Construction begins on ITER, in southern France.
2013 National Ignition Facility (NIF) implosion yields more energy than the energy absorbed by the fuel.
2019 Construction of ITER is two-thirds complete. It is expected to produce 10 times the input energy.