UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) is the United Kingdom's national fusion laboratory, a government research body of roughly 2,600 staff that operated JET, runs MAST Upgrade at Culham, and is building the STEP prototype fusion power plant.
UKAEA's 📝fusion research is based at Culham Campus in Oxfordshire, renamed from Culham Science Centre in December 2023. For most of the preceding two decades its fusion arm was branded the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE). UKAEA now presents the organisation as "UKAEA Fusion Energy" and as "the UK's national fusion laboratory"; the former ccfe.ukaea.uk address redirects to ukaea.org, where the CCFE name no longer appears. CCFE remains the correct affiliation to cite for work published under it, and it is the name attached to the UK institution in most of the fusion literature before 2024.
Culham was home to 📝JET, the Joint European Torus and the largest 📝tokamak in Europe. JET ceased 📝plasma operations in December 2023 after a final 📝deuterium-📝tritium campaign that produced 69 megajoules of fusion energy over five seconds, and has entered a decommissioning and repurposing programme expected to run to around 2040. The machine operating at Culham now is 📝MAST Upgrade, a 📝spherical tokamak whose Super-X 📝divertor cut the heat load reaching exhaust components by a factor of ten.
UKAEA's forward programme is STEP, the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production, a prototype fusion power plant planned for West Burton in Nottinghamshire on the site of a former coal-fired station. Delivery is led by UK Fusion Energy, a wholly owned subsidiary of the UKAEA Group, with UKAEA acting as fusion partner alongside separate engineering and construction partners.