Appleford-on-Thames

Appleford railway station serves the village of Appleford-on-Thames in Oxfordshire, England, as well as nearby settlements such as Sutton Courtenay. It is on the Cherwell Valley Line between Didcot Parkway and Banbury, 55 miles 16 chains (88.8 km) measured from London Paddington. The station and all trains serving it are operated by Great Western Railway.

Appleford Railway Bridge carries the Cherwell Valley Line from Didcot to Oxford across the River Thames near the village of Appleford-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, England. It crosses the Thames on the reach between Clifton Lock and Culham Lock. Originally, a timber bridge was built at the approximate location of the present bridge; by December 1843, it was reportedly under construction, and was completed during the following year. By the 1850s, it has been replaced by a more substantial bridge principally composed of wrought iron so that heavier trains could be run along the line. A third bridge was completed in 1927, which was built out of steel; it is this structure that is presently used as of the 2010s.

Culham railway station serves the village of Culham in Oxfordshire, England. It is on the Cherwell Valley Line between Didcot Parkway and Banbury, 56 miles 17 chains (90.5 km) from London Paddington. It is served by local train services provided by Great Western Railway. The station is just off the A415 road, between the villages of Culham and Clifton Hampden. It is close to Culham Science Centre, an 80-hectare (200-acre) scientific research site housing two nuclear fusion experiments: JET and MAST. The Science Centre was built on the site of RNAS Culham (HMS Hornbill), a World War II airfield.

Reaction Engines Limited is a British aerospace manufacturer based in Oxfordshire, England.

The East Hendred Brook is a small tributary of the River Thames which starts on the springline at the base of the Berkshire Downs, and joins the Thames between Abingdon and Wallingford.

Pendon Museum, located in Long Wittenham near Didcot, Oxfordshire, England, is a museum that displays scale models, in particular a large scene representing parts of the Vale of White Horse in the 1920s and 1930s. The scene, under construction since the 1950s and with parts dating back earlier, was inspired by detailed research into the architecture and landscape of the vale, with some models of cottages taking hundreds of hours to complete. The late Roye England founded it, (an anglophile Australian who lived in England), and run jointly by the late English Model Maker, Guy Williams, (who made fifty-seven of the museum's ninety locomotives). They can be seen working together in the 1958 British Pathé short, 'Hair Thatching'. A group of volunteers runs the museum and it is open to the public most weekends and holidays, except during the winter. and Wednesdays during school holidays.

Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak (MAST) was a nuclear fusion experiment, testing a spherical tokamak nuclear fusion reactor, and commissioned by EURATOM/UKAEA. The original MAST experiment took place at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, Oxfordshire, England from December 1999 to September 2013. A successor experiment called MAST Upgrade began operation in 2020.

The Small Tight Aspect Ratio Tokamak, or START was a nuclear fusion experiment that used magnetic confinement to hold plasma. START was the first full-sized machine to use the spherical tokamak design, which aimed to greatly reduce the aspect ratio of the traditional tokamak design. The experiment began at the Culham Science Centre in the United Kingdom in 1990 and was retired in 1998. It was built as a low cost design, largely using parts already available to the START team. The START experiment revolutionized the tokamak by changing the previous toroidal shape into a tighter, almost spherical, doughnut shape. The new shape increased efficiency by reducing the cost over the conventional design, while the field required to maintain a stable plasma was a factor of 10 less.

The Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) is the UK's national laboratory for fusion research. It is located at the Culham Science Centre, near Culham, Oxfordshire, and is the site of the Joint European Torus (JET), Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak (MAST) and the now closed Small Tight Aspect Ratio Tokamak (START). Formerly known as UKAEA Culham, the laboratory was renamed in October 2009 as part of organisational changes at its parent body, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA).Since 2016, the director has been Professor Ian Chapman, and the centre has been engaged in work towards the final detailed design of ITER as well as preparatory work in support of DEMO. In 2014 it was announced the centre would house the new RACE (Remote Applications in Challenging Environments).

Royal Naval Air Station Culham (RNAS Culham, also known as HMS Hornbill) was a former Royal Navy, Fleet Air Arm station near Culham, Oxfordshire. It opened in 1944 as an All Weather Airfield for the Royal Navy. The airbase was used by Receipt and Despatch Unit No.2, No.1 Ferry Flight, 739 Photographic Trials and Development Unit and home to 1832 R.N.V.R. (Air) Squadron.The airbase is situated around 5 miles (8.0 km) south of the city of Oxford, with the village of Culham lying 1 mile (1.6 km) to west. The notable landmarks include the city of Oxford where through it runs The Isis, which then forms a loop around the airfield to the north, west and south as it flows south east. The market town of Abingdon-on-Thames is about 2 miles (3.2 km) to the north west. Didcot junction, where a line running north/south, intersects the Great Western Main Line, is situated 3 miles (4.8 km) south, with Culham railway station, on the north/south Oxford-Didcot line, at the south west corner of the airfield.The ground layout was typical of many bomber stations, with three runways. However it had many hangars, mostly sited around the field's perimeter. Initially HMS Hornbill was used to train reservists based in the Thames Valley area using several different types of aircraft including: Supermarine Seafire, a navalised Supermarine Spitfire fighter aircraft, Hawker Sea Fury, a single-seat fighter aircraft and North American Harvards, an American single-engine advanced trainer aircraft. In May 1947 the Photographic Trials and Development Unit was based at HMS Hornbill, and in 1951 1840 Naval Air Squadron operated from the airfield for a short time. Ab initio flight training of cadets from Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, flying primary gliders, was also undertaken here in the early 1950s.

The Joint European Torus (JET) was a magnetically confined plasma physics experiment, located at Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire, UK. Based on a tokamak design, the fusion research facility was a joint European project with a main purpose of opening the way to future nuclear fusion grid energy. At the time of its design JET was larger than any comparable machine. JET was built with the hope of reaching scientific breakeven where the fusion energy gain factor Q =1.0. It began operation in 1983 and spent most of the next decade increasing its performance in a lengthy series of experiments and upgrades. In 1991 the first experiments including tritium were made, making JET the first reactor in the world to run on the production fuel of a 50–50 mix of tritium and deuterium. It was also decided to add a divertor design to JET, which occurred between 1991 and 1993. Performance was significantly improved, and in 1997 JET set the record for the closest approach to scientific breakeven, reaching Q = 0.67 in 1997, producing 16 MW of fusion power while injecting 24 MW of thermal power to heat the fuel.Between 2009 and 2011, JET was shut down to rebuild many of its parts, to adopt concepts being used in the development of the ITER project in Saint-Paul-lès-Durance, in Provence, southern France. In December 2020, a JET upgrade commenced using tritium, as part of its contribution to ITER. On 21 December 2021, using deuterium-tritium fuel, JET produced 59 megajoules during a five-second pulse, beating its previous 1997 record of 21.7 megajoules, with Q = 0.33.In November 2023, a petition asking that JET not be closed was started, with scientists fearing a research time gap and personnel loss between JET's closure and the start of ITER's operations. JET finished operations in December 2023, with decommissioning expected to last until 2040.

The European School, Culham (ESC) was one of the fourteen European Schools and the only one in the United Kingdom. Located in Culham near Abingdon in Oxfordshire. It was founded in 1978 for the purpose of providing an education to the children of staff working for the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom).