00:05 · Ahead of Us · 16 min
The Sun in a Bottle
What would it take to run a city on fusion?
Premieres soon
- Channel:
- 00:05
Ahead of Us - Languages:
- In English, Arabic and Spanish
The question:
What would it take to run a city on fusion?
Fusion powers the Sun. On Earth it means heating hydrogen into a plasma about ten times hotter than the Sun's core, then keeping it there. The film goes inside a tokamak, the ring-shaped machine at the heart of ITER, to see what it takes to hold that fire, and what still stands between a working reactor and a city's power.
From storyboard to screen
- 01 Sketch
- 02 Animatic
- 03 Final frame
Sources
Built on primary sources
- ITER OrganizationITER Research Plan within the Staged Approach
- International Atomic Energy AgencyIAEA World Fusion Outlook
Fusion is easy to start and almost impossible to hold.
What you'll understand
Fusion joins light atoms, usually the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium, and releases the energy of the mass they lose.
A tokamak holds plasma at about 150 million °C in magnetic fields, so it never touches the walls.
The hard part is holding it: the plasma must stay hot and dense long enough to give back more energy than it took to heat.
Powering a city would also take a way to turn that heat into electricity, and to breed tritium fuel, steadily for years.
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