England. The Joint European Torus (JET) nuclear fusion experiment based in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom, has more than doubled the amount of fusion energy produced in a single “shot,” breaking a previous record that JET had held since 1997. Officials announced today that during an experiment in late 2021, JET achieved 59 megajoules (MJ) of fusion energy, breaking the previous record of 22 MJ. JET, built in 1983, is operated by the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE), the United Kingdom’s national fusion research laboratory. It is a fusion reactor that uses magnetic confinement to retain a hot plasma that reaches temperatures of 150 million kelvins, 10 times hotter than the center of the Sun.
