I worked at what was then Culham Laboratories under the UK Atomic Energy Authority. I was a Scientific Officer (Junior physics prole in other words) on some of the Tokamak experiments where we were doing studies into plasma physics as part of the overall fusion program.
The big JET torus was next door and in those days they'd not yet achieved fusion reactions so you could still go in and see it like this:
http://www.toodlepip.com/tokamak/pictures/j91- 212cmed.jpeg
It was a really cool place to start your working life but after a couple of years I made the fundamental discovery that they don't pay physicists enough and sold out for a career in computers.
Nuclear fusion is really a holy grail of energy and has been for about 50 years - like I say JET managed fusion reactions but used more energy than it made. ITER is being built now in France and will exceed breakeven - that is will actually create more energy than it uses.
After that DEMO will be the first fusion reactor - probably be about another 30 years but the raw material is water there's no CO2 produced and the radioactive waste should last about 100 years rather than 100,000.
If I'm lucky I should live long enough to see it - and think that I was once a very, very tiny cog in that.
It's a long road but it took them 70 years to write the Oxford English Dictionary and you can't generate electricity out of that!