A technician checking a plasma heating system inside a chamber of Tore Supra nuclear reactor (Picture: Getty)

A major scientific breakthrough has been made after scientists got one step closer to finding a limitless supply of clean energy.

A new way has been discovered to make plasma fuel hot enough to generate fusion power.

In modern nuclear reactors, plasma is made up of two ion species.

However the new plasma uses three – hydrogen, deuterium, and trace amounts of helium-3.

The technology, which could finally end the human race’s reliance on fossil fuels, is based on the energy creating processes within the sun.

MIT’s Alcator C-Mod reactor where the breakthrough happened (Picture: Getty)

Dr John Wright, who is working on the breakthrough study, told MailOnline : ‘These higher energy ranges are in the same range as activated fusion products.

‘To be able to create such energetic ions in a non-activated device – not doing a huge amount of fusion – is beneficial, because we can study how ions with energies comparable to fusion reaction products behave, how well they would be confined.’

The plasma breakthrough has been discovered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) which is at the cutting edge of new nuclear technology.

The UK’s Joint European Torus (JET), wants to reproduce the results.

Dr Wright added: ‘The JET folks had really good energetic particle diagnostics, so they could directly measure these high energy ions and verify that they were indeed there.

‘The fact that we had a basic theory realized on two different devices on two continents came together to produce a strong paper.’