When I was at school in Abingdon, Oxfordshire (UK) around 1988 my physics class (A level aged 17) was somewhat enlivened by a visit by a bunch of clever chaps from JET at the Culham labs from up the road.
This was the first time I heard the "nuclear fusion is 25 years away" joke and it was told as such. We were also shown a graph of how many orders of magnitude away from ignition (for want of the correct word) by date. It had an initial steep decline but then turned right quite sharply and had annoying looking tendency to avoid the magic value.
Now, once you have ignition, you have to sustain it and extract power from it. That's quite tricky too!
We were also shown a graph of how many orders of magnitude away from ignition (for want of the correct word) by date
See p.4-5 of [1] for more recent plots. It includes earlier runs of both KSTAR (the experiment under discussion) and EAST (the Chinese one mentioned in another comment), but not their most recent ones.
That looks like a canonical "how we are doing" for the trade. You may find it surprising that us civilians find that chart a bit tricky to understand.
The graph I was shown was more of a "lies to children" job (a Sir Terry Pratchett term for simplification of a concept to enable teaching to happen). It looked more like a somewhat lumpy y=a/log(bt) where a and b are not 1.
I'm just a simple IT bod what studied a fair bit of engineering and a smattering of science back in the day. That graph looks like it forgot to put it's bloody knickers on. The one in the paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.10954.pdf is a bit closer to what I remember.
I do feel that we can relax the 25 year rule a bit these days. I think we can quite confidently allow 20 years and I'm quite cautiously going to suggest 15 instead.
SimCity says humanity unlocks fusion power plants by 2050, and I always thought that was as reasonable an estimate as any. Based on page 5, it looks like we should have reliable fusion in the lab by 2040, and give that 5-10 years to scale up to production plants widely available. Hopefully Will Wright turns out to be pessimistic and we break through before then!
TY and EoB and co were about three or four years ahead of me.
I recall watching "On a Friday" play on the cricket pav. of Abingdon School ("Royce's") at the end of term, summer '87ish. Thom did wear some very colourful waistcoats with his suit and Ed in mufti generally minced around wearing slippers, no socks and an electric blue jumper and a whopping quiff - as was the style in those days ("I fastened an onion to my belt..."). Actually this was the time of the New Romantics so think Culture Club, The Smiths, The Cure, Duran Duran etc.
History is what is written and WP is not keen on first hand experiences: "The band disliked the school's strict atmosphere ..." is writ on WP.
My perspective:
The school is a public school - so borders, dayboys and any school needs some sort of discipline. At the time it was all boys, I think it is now co-ed. However, next door there was the Park which was "no man's land" (master's and mistresses kept away and let the kids get on with it, provided we didn't take the piss) and both Abingdon boys and St Katherine's girls or Fitz Harry's or whomever could meet up and have a fag (smoke) and socialise in general.
We also had a bar in the cellar of School House for the weekends that was run by the boys and financed etc by us. Again, we were given a lot of slack, it was actually educational too - money in - money out etc. There was also the H&J (Horse and Jockey pub) - keep to the snug and look adult was what the owner told me as ordered a pint the first time (bless). I was in Waste Court House at the time.
My memories of Abingdon School are rather golden - I was extremely lucky to go there at the time. The Army paid for quite a lot of it. Nowadays it costs £40,000 a year to go there.
I would never describe Abingdon School as strict as such in the late 1980s when I was there. The Head was affectionately known as "Freaky Beaky" (a Headmaster is always the Beak) which is pretty standard for any public school. However, Mr Parker was also known as "Miffie" and that was down to someone overhearing his wife using a term of endearment.
At the time, obviously, there was no hint that On a Friday would go on and become a worldwide phenomenon but they were pretty good entertainment for a school band. They clearly had an itch to scratch and buggering off to the US and re-branding etc worked rather well. Well done them. It has to be said that Abingdon school was (with hindsight) extremely supportive. Mr Parker sanctioned On a Friday to play on the cricket pav for end of term entertainment.
Well spotted, and sorry, I seem to have started waffling on a bit ...
This was the first time I heard the "nuclear fusion is 25 years away" joke and it was told as such. We were also shown a graph of how many orders of magnitude away from ignition (for want of the correct word) by date. It had an initial steep decline but then turned right quite sharply and had annoying looking tendency to avoid the magic value.
Now, once you have ignition, you have to sustain it and extract power from it. That's quite tricky too!