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 generator with the label "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.   In this scene from the 1985 movie "Back to the Future", fusion makes its film debut. Doc's DeLorean travels through time thanks to a a coffee-grinder-shaped fusion generator with the label "Mr Fusion." 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.

Recent images of JET interior tiles have shown, in graphic detail, the damage that can be caused by so-called 'runaway' electrons in JET plasmas. In stable fusion plasmas, fast moving electrons are slowed down by collisions. The balance between acceleration and slowingdown due to collisions ensures that under usual circumstances the electrons have a normal thermal distribution of velocities within the confined plasma. However, there are certain circumstances—especially just after a plasma has terminated or disrupted — where the 'slowing down' effect of collisions is diminished and indeed largely removed. In this situation, JET acts like a particle accelerator enabling 'runaway' electrons to be accelerated to velocities close to the speed of light. When the beams of runaway electrons hit the beryllium wall tiles they can travel many centimetres through the material producing characteristic melt pools like the one shown here. Special experiments are designed in JET to create and understand the formation of runaway beams. Fortunately, since installation of JET's ITER-like Wall such events do not occur naturally and have to be deliberately generated for such studies. The JET experiments are providing ITER with vital information on which strategies are effective at mitigating this threat. 

With the successful completion of tests on its 70 magnetic coils, the Wendelstein 7—X fusion device is now one step closer to first plasma. Located at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald, Germany, the device will be the world's largest fusion device of the stellarator type when it turns on before the end of this year.  In preparing for operation, each technical system is being tested in turn. Since late April 2015 the focus has been the magnet system, a set of 50 superconducting coils whose job it is to create a stable, thermally insulating magnetic cage for the plasma, surrounded by a second set of 20 planar superconducting coils.   In the most recent tests, the magnet coils were tested under current—first in groups and then as a complete set. "Everything agrees well with the calculations," reported Hans-Stephan Bosch, department head of Wendelstein 7-X Operation on 17th June.   This was the first time that all coils together were supplied with current up to the ultimate required value of 12.8 kiloampere. "The complete set of coils has withstood all technical tests," said Bosch on 6 July 2015. "This assures the required functionality of the primary components of the system. We can now take up the challenge of the next major step, the measuring out of the magnetic surfaces." This will test whether the coils produce the plasma cage in the desired form and shape.  Read the full press release here.

As the heat wave lingers, a cool mist vaporizer provides workers on their way in and out of the Tokamak Complex worksite with a few seconds of respite from the high temperatures.

​Chuck Kessel, a principal engineer at the US Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), has won the 2015 Fusion Technology Award. The honour, from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' (IEEE) Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society, recognizes outstanding contributions to fusion engineering and technology. "Chuck has long been a widely recognized pioneer in developing advanced tokamak operating scenarios that have served as the basis for several machine design concepts," said Michael Williams, associate director for engineering and infrastructure at PPPL and a past recipient of the honour. "Receiving the 2015 Fusion Technology Award duly recognizes Chuck's outstanding contributions to the development of fusion technology." Presentation of the award came during the 2015 Symposium on Fusion Engineering (SOFE) that was held in June in Austin, Texas. The annual event focuses on the latest developments in the quest for fusion energy. While at the conference Kessel gave a plenary talk about the Fusion Nuclear Science Facility (FNSF), a proposed next step in the US fusion program. Kessel heads a nationwide study that will detail options for the FNSF and consider its role in relation to ITER. (Photo by Elle Starkman/ PPPL Office of Communications) Read the whole article on the PPPL website.

​The first edition of the new Summer School "PhDiaFusion" for students and postdocs was successfully realized last week (16-20 June 2015) in Poland.  The aim of this initiative (cooperation between CEA Cadarache, Institute of Nuclear Physics PAN and Rzeszow Technical University in Poland) is to establish a thematic school, i.e. Summer School of Plasma Diagnostics, with a strictly defined topic: the first edition was devoted to 'Soft X-ray diagnostics for Fusion Plasma'.  The choice of the School's venue, in the south-eastern part of Poland, was not accidental. In this region the 'green field' for DONES is proposed under the auspices of local government and Consortium IFMIF/ELAMAT. This region has a heavy concentration of aerospace industry, scientific research centers, as well as educational and training facilities.  The next edition of the School in 2017 will be devoted to neutron and gamma for fusion plasma diagnostics. Book your time in the summer of 2017 for PhDiaFusion !  Photo: Chairman of the School Didier Mazon (CEA) has invited the eminent scientists who led lectures and tutorials for young students. Among them they were: Luigi Alloca, Robin Barnsley, Dimitri Batani, Andreas Dinklage, Tony Donne, Christian Ingesson, Hans-Joachim Kunze, Martin O'Mullane, Jef Ongena, Marek Rubel, Marek Sadowski, Jan Stockel and Tom Todd.

​For one week at the end of June, a representative of the ITER quality assurance team inspected a number of Russian industries for compliance with the quality system requirements of the ITER Organization. These companies are producing hardware in the framework of Russia's commitments to ITER's in-kind procurement program, which distributes the manufacturing of ITER components and systems among the seven ITER Members. The industries inspected—the Dollezhal Institute (Moscow), the Efremov Institute (St. Petersburg), JSC Energopul (Moscow), Fusion Centre (Moscow), and CJSC RTSoft (Moscow)—are responsible for the development and procurement of switching networks and fast distribution units, DC busbars and instrumentation; the blanket first wall; the electron cyclotron radio frequency gyrotrons; blanket module connections; and diagnostic systems and port plug integration. The Russian Domestic Agency was also inspected for its compliance to quality systems requirements. The final report highlighted compliance with ITER Organization requirements and identified a number of "good practices" at the industries inspected.  Alexander Petrov, ITER Russia