NUCLEAR fusion is never an easy subject to explain to the average citizen.

So Oxfordshire’s Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) has used Lego to give an insight into a day at the lab.

Graphic designers at Culham Studio, based on the site, made an animation featuring Lego fusion scientists getting to work after Culham’s human staff have gone home for the night.

It includes a wizard and a panda bear sending a “pulse” around the Joint European Torus (JET) project fusion reactor.

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Illustrator Russell Perry, who animated the tiny plastic physicists, said: “One of the people who works here, Fernanda Rimini, is really into Lego.

“She made a model of the control room, and the lab asked if I could it bring it to life.”

The video, now uploaded to YouTube, took four days to make.

Mr Perry, 31, from Oxford, had to do all the animating in a room with no windows so natural light would not spoil the shoot.

He added: “I really enjoy the science stuff.

“I’m from an arts background so I find it fascinating when people explain to you what this machine does.

“It’s exciting to think you’re working in the world’s biggest fusion device and I have made the world’s first Lego animation of it.”

Culham Studio does graphic design work and web design for the laboratory.

Scientists at the Jet project are trying to harness the power of nuclear fusion, the process that lights up the sun, to produce clean, cheap energy. The project has been under way since 1982.

The scientists’ main challenge is maintaining fusion conditions at a temperature of between 100 and 200 million degrees C.

At the moment JET’s researchers are operating its reactor in 20-second bursts, about three times an hour.

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