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Dr Nicholas Hawker sits inside "Machine 3", also known as the electronic magnetic launcher, one of the machines being used to create nuclear fusion at their laboratories
The rumours began late last week. There were, said Dr Nicholas Hawker, co-founder and chief executive of First Light Fusion, “conspiratorial whispers around the table tennis table”. Like all good start-ups, his has a table tennis table.
Then, one of his investors got in touch. Had he heard the news?
By the weekend, the secret was out: on the other side of the Atlantic, a team of fusion scientists — fusion scientists doing something very similar to those at First Light - had achieved something that had eluded the field in its 70 years of trying to develop clean and limitless energy.
They had, by one definition at least, got more energy out of a fusion reaction than they had put in.
So it was
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