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When Chris Day was in sixth grade, he didn’t feel like one of the cool kids. That is, until the day he broke his battery-powered toy truck and brought it to his dad, James. Instead of buying a new one — Chris knew there was little chance of that — James took a screwdriver to the chassis and pulled out the motor. Then he showed Chris how to wire it to a propeller from a balsa wood airplane. They hooked up a 9-volt battery and voilà: a homemade electric fan. “I brought the fan to school and the kids went crazy,” Chris remembers.

There’s an old joke about nuclear fusion: It’s the energy source of the future — and always will be. When headlines blared last month that researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had hit on a history-making fusion breakthrough, the future felt one giant step closer. To get a sense of just how much closer, we reached out to Jim Bray, who’s worked for GE Research for 48 years and is now a chief scientist in its electrical power group — and the company’s go-to expert on all things fusion (including that joke).