Fusion experiments have been taking place for some 50 years, as physicists try to harness the power of solar fusion "in a bottle." Admittedly, current science has reduced the "bottle" into something the size of a 5-metre Death Star, with the "sun" being just one milligram of helium. 

The European physics machine at the heart of the latest advances is the Wendelstein 7-X, which has eaten up over a million hours of design and construction time, highlighting how complex and cutting edge the technology is. The basic idea behind its doughnut design is around 60 years old, but it has taken to today with advanced and precise design technologies to complete and test the machines at any scale. 

In trials, the machine has successfully created a helium-based plasma at its German home in recent weeks, but just for a fraction of a second and only at 1 million degrees centigrade. To be successful for power producing purposes, it needs to run constantly and at 150 million degrees for fusion to occur. If it ever achieves that we will have "free" power to drive turbines, power cities and help create the next generation of scientific advances. 

Inside the machine, when operating, the magnetic coils, developed by superconducting coils, hold the plasma in place, providing heat that can be used to power traditional turbines and other systems. If the plasma collides with the walls, it loses heat and will fail, but will remain safely contained. 

The German scientists are in a race with Americans, Japanese, Chinese and other Europeans to achieve the fusion dream, but it will take many years of small steps progress until they get there. When a machine is finally designed that is easy to replicate and operate, then perhaps humanity can wind down its reliance on oil and gas, something that those industries and dependant nations would not take too kindly to. 

Most fusion research has been focused on a traditional doughnut-shaped design of plasma machine called a Tokamak. The Wendelstein 7-X, called a stellarator, adjusts this concept to produce a safer design by using twisted magnetic fields. This lets fusion occur without the need for a circulating electric current, required by Tokamak designs but which adds instability to the system. There are trade-offs with any fusion device design, but the stellarator has come back into favour and is leading the way in current research. 

The next steps for the Wendelstein 7-X, located at the Max Planck Institute in Greifswald, are for extended helium plasma runs before they shift elements to hydrogen, which is the element at the heart of solar fusion and will bring the temperature up to 150 million degrees to produce true fusion. It will actually use deuterium, (chemical symbol D or 2H) known as heavy hydrogen and freely available on Earth. 

Europe is looking to reduce its reliance on imported energy sources, currently around 50%, costing a quarter of a trillion euros and creating huge carbon footprint issues. A fusion future would see those costs slashed, making the multi-billion euro project to build stellarators seem trivial in the long term. Read more about the benefits of fusion here (http://fusionforenergy.europa.eu/understandingfusion/merits.aspx).