Perched loftily on Germany's Baltic coast, the small-to-middling town of Greifswald continues to be at the forefront of research into nuclear fusion. This is in no small part down to the presence of the Wendelstein 7-X – a fusion reactor so complicated they literally needed a supercomputer to design it. The latest tidings from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, creators of the Wendelstein 7-X, are that a new record has been set for the so-called fusion product. This is a theoretical performance benchmark rather than physical matter, but all the same, it's another significant step along the path to practical fusion power.

The fusion product is a measure which indicates how close a reactor is to plasma ignition – the critical point at which nuclear fusion becomes self-sustaining, and which happens naturally in stars like our Sun at a mere 15 million degrees Celsius (or 27 million degrees Fahrenheit, if that helps you compare things to a balmy summer's day.) The product is the result of multiplying ion temperature and density, then dividing by time and hence measured in degree-seconds per cubic meter. This latest hoopla is all because Wendelstein 7-X has achieved 10 to the 26th power of those, which is really rather a lot, apparently.

"This is an excellent value for a device of this size, achieved, moreover, under realistic conditions, i.e. at a high temperature of the plasma ions," Professor Sunn Pedersen says in a press release.