In 1991 JETs Preliminary Tritium Experiment achieved the worlds first controlled release of fusion power.
In 1992, Physics Today published Robert McCory's outline of the current state of ICF, advocating for a national ignition facility. This was followed by a review article from John Lindl in 1995, making the same point. During this time various ICF subsystems were developed, including target manufacturing, cryogenic handling systems, new laser designs (notably the NIKE laser at NRL) and improved diagnostics including time of flight analyzers and Thomson scattering. This work was done at the NOVA laser system, General Atomics, Laser Mégajoule and the GEKKO XII system in Japan. Through this work and lobbying by groups like the fusion power associates and John Sethian at NRL, Congress authorized funding for the NIF project in the late nineties.
In 1992 the United States and the former republics of the Soviet Union stopped testing nuclear weapons.
In 1993 TFTR at PPPL experimented with 50% deuterium, 50% tritium, eventually reaching 10 megawatts.
In the early nineties, theory and experimental work regarding fusors and polywells was published. In response, Todd Rider at MIT developed general models of these devices, arguing that all plasma systems at thermodynamic equilibrium were fundamentally limited. In 1995, William Nevins published a criticism arguing that the particles inside fusors and polywells would acquire angular momentum, causing the dense core to degrade.
In 1995, the University of Wisconsin–Madison built a large fusor, known as HOMER. Dr George H. Miley at Illinois built a small fusor that produced neutrons using deuterium and discovered the "star mode" of fusor operation. At this time in Europe, an IEC device was developed as a commercial neutron source by Daimler-Chrysler and NSD Fusion.
The next year, Tore Supra reached a record plasma duration of two minutes with a current of almost 1 M amperes driven non-inductively by 2.3 MW of lower hybrid frequency waves (i.e. 280 MJ of injected and extracted energy), enabled by actively cooled plasma-facing components.
The upgraded Z-machine opened to the public in August 1998. The key attributes were its 18 million ampere current and a discharge time of less than 100 nanoseconds. This generated a magnetic pulse inside a large oil tank, which struck a liner (an array of tungsten wires). Firing the Z-machine became a way to test high energy, high temperature (2 billion degrees) conditions. In 1996.
In 1997, JET reached 16.1 MW (65% of heat to plasma), sustaining over 10 MW for over 0.5 sec. As of 2020 this remained the record output level. Four megawatts of alpha particle self-heating was achieved.
ITER was officially announced as part of a seven-party consortium (six countries and the EU). ITER was designed to produce ten times more fusion power than the input power. ITER was sited in Cadarache. The US withdrew from the project in 1999.
JT-60 produced a reversed shear plasma with the equivalent fusion amplification factor  of 1.25 - as of 2021 this remained the world record.
In the late nineties, a team at Columbia University and MIT developed the levitated dipole, a fusion device that consisted of a superconducting electromagnet, floating in a saucer shaped vacuum chamber. Plasma swirled around this donut and fused along the center axis.
In 1999 MAST replaced START.