A fusion reactor needs a lot of energy (heat & electricity) in order to make more. But a big problem is that the heat wants to escape. (Think of when you hold something warm -- the warmth you feel is the heat escaping into your hands! How would you stop it from doing that?) Different kind of reactors try to keep the heat in in different ways, but several of them do it with big magnets, which basically can keep the fuel floating so it doesn't touch anything.

Now there are two main parts to the stuff inside the reactor, ions & electrons. Think of them as mac & cheese. When the reactor gets really hot, these bits start jostling around. (It's in the nature of hot things to want to move more, and really "hot" means that the little atomic components of everything are wiggling and moving faster and more excitedly.) Think of boiling the mac and cheese. For a long time scientists thought that the wiggles of the ions would diminish the wiggles of the electrons, because 1) the ions & electrons want to be near each other so they form a clump (like how the noodles absorb the cheese but waaaay stronger) and 2) because each ion/noodle is way bigger than each piece of cheese powder/electron, so its wiggles should be way stronger.

Now to figure these things out, scientists have to use computers to predict how it all might work. But the formulas they use don't have a single answer they can just solve by hand. Instead the computer can take a guess and then spend a lot of time seeing how good the guess was, and trying to make it better. A computer can do things fast, but it's hard because when it does math, it's only figuring out how a single piece of cheese dust moves at a time! There are so many little pieces and knowing how a few cheese dusts move won't give us a good idea what a big pot of mac n' cheese is like. (Could you learn how sand feels by holding one grain?) So they have to keep the computer running until it can tell them what a lot of cheese moves like. Even harder is that they need to watch the cheese move for a long time to make sure it's "stable". (For example, if you put mac and cheese back on a hot stove it might be quiet for a bit before suddenly a big cheese bubble burst and splattered everywhere. We need to know if there are bursting bubbles or not, so just looking for a second won't be enough to tell us.) So the computer also has to do this guessing for many little tiny moments, until they add up to a longer amount of time. Then they can figure out how the sauce behaves when you leave it on the stove for a while.

Ultimately these scientists found that the ions & electrons don't act exactly like we thought. The heat actually causes the electrons/cheese to stretch out into long strands that pull away from the main blob! Also when the cheese starts swirling around, instead of bumping into the noodles and stopping, they can bump strong enough that the noodles and cheese all start swirling together crazily. These two things give us big clues on why our reactors won't stay as hot as we want them to, because they explain why the mac and cheese gets so wiggly and wild, and with the discovery we can now try to find new ways to build better reactors that work better.

All the guessing by the computers was so much work it would've taken a single computer 15 million hours (over 1700 years!), but they got 17000 computers to all work as a team and give them answers in about a month. Then the scientists could get a couple answers in a year, which made them feel more confident that they probably did things right.

NOTE: Totally not a physicist or anything, and I probably started with a bad analogy, but wanted to try this as a writing challenge. Also I know you probably didn't want it this simpified, but I tried to take "ELI5" at face value for once.