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News & Media

Latest ITER Newsline

  • Collaboration | Japan and Europe inaugurate largest tokamak in the world

    It was 6:00 a.m. in La Bergerie, a former sheep barn located a few kilometres from ITER in the vast Château de Cadarache domain that had been converted in 2 [...]

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  • Stakeholders | ITER Director-General meets Prime Minister Kishida

    In Japan, the prime minister lives and works at the Prime Minister's Official Residence in central Tokyo, just a few blocks from the National Diet Building and [...]

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  • Image of the week | Season wrapping

    Although the travel distance is short, barely exceeding one hundred metres, the transfer of vacuum vessel sector #8 from the Assembly Hall, where it is presentl [...]

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  • In memoriam | Bernard Pégourié, physicist and mountaineer

    The worldwide fusion community mourns Bernard Pégourié, of France's Institute for Magnetic Fusion Research (CEA-IRFM), who passed away on 25 November following [...]

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  • COP28 | Fusion is making a splash

    The 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP28, opened on 30 November in Dubai's Expo City—a sprawling conference centre built two years ago for the W [...]

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Of Interest

See archived entries

Fiction

"Steampunk" fusion machine travels in time

Ever since a "Mr Fusion" device appeared on Doc's time-travelling DeLorean in the first opus of the Back to the Future trilogy (1985), fusion energy has exerted a fascination on the film industry. Countless productions, from The Saint (1997) to the 2014 blockbuster Interstellar have featured fusion machines that are either central or accessory to the plot. Travelers, a Netflix series that premiered in December 2016, offers the latest example in this trend—except that an actual, real-life fusion machine plays the part of an antimatter device used to deflect an incoming asteroid.

In the Netflix series ''Travelers,'' the strange-looking machine developped by General Fusion plays the part of an anti-matter device whose energy, fed to a laser, deflects an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. (Click to view larger version...)
In the Netflix series ''Travelers,'' the strange-looking machine developped by General Fusion plays the part of an anti-matter device whose energy, fed to a laser, deflects an asteroid on a collision course with Earth.
Neither a tokamak nor a stellarator nor even a zeta-pinch, the machine developed by General Fusion, a private fusion venture on the outskirts of Vancouver, Canada, is based on an unconventional approach. It uses steam-driven pistons to compress the plasma and heat it to fusion conditions. As a result, the device has a most unusual appearance that is sometimes described as steampunk—19th century technology and aesthetics set in a futuristic context.

Coming across images of General Fusion's machine on the company's website, the series' producers, also based in Vancouver, were immediately inspired: the strange-looking device, with its array of steel pistons jutting from a central sphere wrapped in aluminium foil, could pass perfectly for a fictional antimatter apparatus.

Having developed its ''sub-scale first generation compression technology testbed,'' General Fusion is presently working on the design of a sub-breakeven demonstration plant. (Click to view larger version...)
Having developed its ''sub-scale first generation compression technology testbed,'' General Fusion is presently working on the design of a sub-breakeven demonstration plant.
Having completed their experimental campaign on the "steampunk" device, the General Fusion team made their workshop available to the Travelers production. A few props were added and—for a couple of days—a team of special agents from the post-apocalyptic future engaged in shootouts, personality transfers and other transforming acts that make up the gist of the series.

As for the future, the General Fusion team is presently working on the design of a demonstration plant—"our equivalent of JET"—whose objective is to "show that the technology works and is ready to scale to a power producing pilot plant" ... a giant step from the steampunk device featured in the series.


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