The centre occupies the site of the former Royal Navy airfield RNAS Culham (HMS Hornbill), which was transferred to UKAEA in 1960.

Culham built almost 30 different experiments in its first two decades as a variety of fusion concepts were tried out; among them shock-waves, magnetic mirror machines, stellarators and levitrons.

In the late 1960s, Culham scientists had already assisted in tokamak development by using laser scattering measurement techniques to verify the highly promising results achieved by the Russian T3 device.

Its impressive performance led to the construction of a larger device, MAST (Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak), which operated between 2000 and 2013.

[6] The focus of the UK domestic fusion programme is MAST Upgrade – a more powerful, better-equipped successor to the Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak.

Funding was agreed with the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council for the core upgrade (Stage 1a), which began plasma operations in 2020.

For example, in 2009 to 2011, remote handling engineers stripped out the interior of JET to fit a new 4,500-tile inner wall to enable researchers to test materials for the forthcoming ITER tokamak.

Funding for CCFE's domestic fusion programme is provided by a grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

According to a BBC news report of 29 November 2016: "Since the vote for Brexit, many at the centre have become 'extremely nervous' amid uncertainty about future financing and freedom of movement.