Nuclear fusion is always just over the horizon, or just around the corner. It still is in spite of the latest breakthrough – see https://phys.org/news/2022-09-plasma.html … for the details.
Electromagnetic waves carry heat. In fusion power, it is essential that the high energy particles generated by fusion reaction in hot plasma heat it to sustain further fusion reactions. The key to this self heating of the plasma is whether it can be heated by waves created by high energy particles. Japanese researchers have found that electromagnetic waves produced by high energy particles carry heat through a process known as Landau damping. This is the first observation of this process.
The research paper was published on September 28th in ‘Communications Physics‘ – see https://www.nature.com/articles/s42005-022-01008-9 .. until now there has been no method to directly measure the plasma heating process caused by electromagnetic waves generated inside the plasma. It was a theoretical idea but has now been established by researchers via experiment.