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!
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!