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Also in this issue

  • 16,000 m³ in volume, 30 metres in height and as many in width—the ITER cryostat is not only one of the world's largest vacuum chambers, it's also by far the most complex.

    Keeping it cold

    For keeping your coffee warm, there's nothing like a thermos—an ingenious and simple device invented at the end of the 19th century. In between the two walls o [...]

    Read more

  • On the north side of the work site, two of the five levels of pillar are already in place. Work has just begun on the third level (one third-level pillar is visible in the photo).

    Assembly Building pillars, climbing ever higher

    As ITER components arrive on site, their first stop will be the cleaning facility at the entrance of the Assembly Building. Then, in the vast hall of the Assem [...]

    Read more

  • Procured by the United States, manufactured by Hyundai in Korea, transported by DAHER (ITER's global logistics provider), the first Highly Exceptional Load—an electrical transformer—arrived on site on 17 January 2015.

    The lightest of the "heavy" loads

    The voyage got off to a start in mid-November in the industrial port of Ulsan, Korea—more than 9,000 kilometres from the ITER site. Two months later, in Januar [...]

    Read more

  • At the Industeel-Le Creusot plant in central France (a business unit of the global giant Arcelor-Mittal), some 450 different grades are available. At the top of the line are the steels that will be used in ITER components.

    In the forges of ITER

    Men of the Iron Age, long before the term was coined, accidently discovered that by adding a bit of carbon to molten iron, a harder and more durable metal was [...]

    Read more

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ITER MAG 6

Fusion and fiction

The spaceship that carries passengers on a quest for inhabitable planets in the 2014 blockbuster ''Interstellar'' is fuelled by compact tokamaks that also provide the vessel's electricity. (Click to view larger version...)
The spaceship that carries passengers on a quest for inhabitable planets in the 2014 blockbuster ''Interstellar'' is fuelled by compact tokamaks that also provide the vessel's electricity.
In this scene from the 1985 movie ''Back to the Future,'' fusion makes its film debut. (Click to view larger version...)
In this scene from the 1985 movie ''Back to the Future,'' fusion makes its film debut.
In 1985—the very year that a collaborative international project in fusion was proposed by General Secretary Mikhail Gorbatchev to President Ronald Reagan—fusion made a discreet but noteworthy appearance in a film that would be seen by millions around the world: Back to the Future.

In one of the last scenes of the movie, the sports car that had travelled through time thanks to a "flux capacitor" powered by plutonium is equipped with a brand-new apparatus: a coffee-grinder-shaped fusion called "Mr Fusion."

The successful harnessing of fusion power shows up in other blockbuster productions: cold fusion is at the centre of the intrigue in the spy thriller The Saint (1997); we encounter it in Spider Man II (2004) when another "Doc" (Octavius) wields its supposed devastating power. Superheroes seem to have a privileged relationship with fusion: take, for example, Iron Man (in a 2008 film of the same name) whose exoskeleton integrates a miniature fusion reactor; or Batman, in Dark Knight Rises (2012), who prevents the villain from transforming an experimental fusion reactor into a thermonuclear bomb.

The action in Oblivion (2013) fast forwards us to the year 2077, where off-shore fusion power stations furnish energy to the colonies established on the largest of Saturn's moons, Titan. For the first time in movies, fusion is treated as the energy source it is, whose main vocation is to produce electricity.

A main vocation, perhaps, but not an exclusive one: for many years, scientists have been studying the possibility of using fusion for space propulsion. NASA, for example, is developing a conceptual vehicle that it calls Discovery II (in reference to the film 2001: A Space Odyssey) based on a small, spherical tokamak that could produce enough energy to propel a spaceship to Jupiter in one hundred days. In its conceptual design, the energy produced by fusion reactions would heat and expel a propellant at high speed, providing the thrust to move the spaceship forward at 500 km/sec.

In last year's megahit Interstellar, the main characters travel aboard a fusion-powered spaceship, Endurance, on their quest for habitable planets outside of our solar system. In each of the vessel's modules a compact tokamak is responsible for propulsion and for providing electricity throughout the vessel.

The creation of a colony on Titan or the search for a habitable planet may belong to a far-off (and hypothetical) future, but in science fiction movies, the depiction of fusion energy is getting closer to the reality of tomorrow.