Fusion is what makes stars hot
What's going on in the centres of all stars is small nuclei of atoms are being joined together to make bigger ones
It's a process we would like to harness to power the Earth. 
Fusion's been a long time coming. It has taken a long time to get where we are but we can actually do fusion. And we've just always been at the innovative frontier of fusion. So the fusion reaction that we'd really like to do or we do in fact in Jet is a reaction between two isotopes of hydrogen. Deuterium and tritium. Deuterium is heavy hydrogen, tritium is sort of super heavy hydrogen and we want to join them together to make helium and with it lots of energy
Jet is a very large device. I mean if you stand next to it you're dwarfed by its scale
Jet is a device that has a radius of 3 metres but in order to get to the stage where we can actually burn a plasma, fully self-sustained fusion, we have to go to the next stage which is Iter. Iter is twice the size of jet. Really an enormous device
The bigger we make the device, the more perfect the confinement of the plasma. And therefore as we get to bigger devices the fusion performance goes up and up
It's very important in motivating people in a lab like Culham to constantly be showing progress to be moving towards the final goal
One of the challenges of fusion research is that it is not one thing. It is engineering, it is theoretical physics, it is experimental physics, it is material science and you've got to put all these things together to make the eventual product. And it is a challenge for someone like me who has spent their whole career doing calculations to really integrate with engineers, fitters. People just working on the machine
I've worked my life trying to understand what the hell is going on inside hot plasmas. Hot plasmas in the cosmos, hot plasmas in fusion experiments and they wriggle. They shake. They move around. 
And describing what that is and how that works has been my life's work
Jet produces a magnetic cage that holds the hot plasma. The shape of that magnetic cage turns out to be very important and Jet chose exactly right. And it is that shaping of the cage and the flexibility of the design. That has meant that Jet has continued to innovate from 1983. And we're heading on one more year to 30 years of operation of Jet, every year getting better
The flagship of the UK programme is an innovative device called Mast. We evolved to design a what we call a spherical top. It really has remarkable properties  
Some of the innovations that we are introducing in the Mast programme will allow us to bring down the cost and the scale of the fusion to a more managable size making the development of the first commercial reactor easier and something that will be within our grasp 
I don't like to do research alone. I love doing it for young people because they're enthusiastic about it. They're learning about it, they're working hard and together I feel like I am passing on something but I also feel like I am getting a tremendous amount out of it
The most enjoyable things that I have ever done. Is the moments of discovery. The moments when you're doing a calculation and you say "yeah, yeah that must be right. That just looks right, it feels right it seems exactly what the experiment is doing." It's great to just be amongst it. Just to be there. To see the results happen. To have the experiments perform. It is not just your ideas it is everybody else's ideas it is the collective effort
This award of the Glazebrook Medal is an award for Culham. Here in South Oxfordshire is a world leading scientific institution and I am very proud about that. I am lucky to lead the organisation
I'm very lucky to have an extraordinarily strong, clever, motivated, skillful set of people working at Culham. And we'll be there at the finish line. We'll be there when fusion is actually an energy source that people will actually get some of their electricity from
