A fusion reactor in France has kept a hydrogen plasma burning for 1,337 seconds — more than 22 minutes — setting a new world record and pushing humanity one step closer to the long-sought goal of clean, limitless energy. The milestone was reached on February 12 at the CEA WEST Tokamak facility in Cadarache, operated by the Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives.
At a glance
- Fusion plasma record: The WEST Tokamak sustained a stable hydrogen plasma for 1,337 seconds — surpassing China’s previous record of 1,066 seconds, set in January 2025, by roughly 25%.
- Heating power: The reactor maintained the plasma using just 2 megawatts of injected heating power, while keeping reactor components free from erosion, contamination, and malfunction.
- ITER connection: Data from WEST will directly inform the design and operation of ITER, the much larger International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor being built nearby in southern France.
Why this record is harder than it sounds
Getting atoms to fuse is not the hard part. Scientists have done that in labs for decades. The challenge is making the reaction self-sustaining — producing more energy than goes in — while keeping an intensely hot plasma stable long enough to matter.
Fusion requires temperatures between 100 and 150 million degrees Celsius, roughly three to five times hotter than the core of the Sun. At those temperatures, hydrogen isotopes fuse into helium and release enormous amounts of energy. A single gram of hydrogen isotopes holds the energy equivalent of 11 tonnes of coal.
Holding that plasma stable, without it degrading the reactor’s inner surfaces or simply flickering out, is where most efforts have historically fallen short. The WEST Tokamak didn’t just hit a new time record — it did so while keeping the reaction clean and the hardware intact, which is the harder engineering feat.
What CEA says it means
“WEST has achieved a new key technological milestone by maintaining hydrogen plasma for more than twenty minutes through the injection of 2 MW of heating power,” said Anne-Isabelle Etienvre, Director of Fundamental Research at the CEA. “Experiments will continue with increased power. This excellent result allows both WEST and the French community to lead the way for the future use of ITER.”
CEA says the next phase will push for even longer reactions, accumulating combined plasma durations of several hours, at progressively higher temperatures. WEST itself will never generate electricity for the grid — it is an experimental machine. But every second of stable plasma it produces adds to a growing body of knowledge that will shape how ITER and the reactors that follow it are designed and operated.
The bigger race
Fusion research is accelerating on multiple fronts. China’s EAST Tokamak set the previous record in January 2025 C.E. Private companies, including Commonwealth Fusion Systems in the U.S. and Tokamak Energy in the U.K., are pursuing compact reactor designs that could reach commercial viability in the 2030s. And the ITER project, a collaboration between 35 nations, remains the largest single bet on fusion’s future — a machine designed to produce 10 times more energy than it consumes.
The momentum is real. Governments and private investors have poured billions into fusion research in recent years, and results like WEST’s are the reason. Each new record shifts the question slightly — from whether fusion is possible to when it becomes practical.
One honest caveat
Fusion power has been described as perpetually “30 years away” for most of the past century, and commercial fusion electricity remains unproven at scale. WEST’s record, while significant, reflects plasma duration — not net energy gain, which is the true threshold for practical fusion power. That barrier has not yet been crossed in a sustained, reproducible way.
Still, the gap between today’s experiments and a working fusion reactor is closing faster than at any point in history. France’s 22-minute plasma is not the finish line — but it is an unmistakable marker that the race is moving in the right direction.
Read more
For more on this story, see: New Atlas — France runs fusion reactor for record 22 minutes
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Renewables now make up at least 49% of global power capacity
- Indigenous land rights win at COP30 covers 160 million hectares
- The Good News for Humankind archive on France
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