ITER shines bright as a future energy at the World EXPO 2017

One of the annual international events which has a long tradition of drawing attention to breakthrough innovative technologies, this year’s World Expo hosted in Astana, Kazakhstan, kicked off on 10 June and featured a futuristic glass-walled 80-metre-in-diameter central sphere surrounded by the nationally-themed pavilions of a 100 countries, the exhibits of ten international organizations, and grounds designed to host over two million people during the coming three months. The theme of this year’s event is “Future Energy” – a topic which clearly resonates with the ITER project and the work of F4E.

In keeping with France’s role as Host to the ITER project, the ITER Organization was invited to participate as an international presence within the French Pavilion which was located a few steps away from the World EXPO central sphere. Over 100 square metres was allocated to showcasing – through multimedia tools, models, displays and virtual reality – the benefits of fusion as a potential source of safe, clean and virtually unlimited energy, the international collaboration behind the ITER project, and the construction status of this the world’s largest and most complex undertaking in the history of science.

F4E Director, Johannes Schwemmer, attended the inauguration of this ITER exhibition in a delegation which included the ITER Director-General Bernard Bigot, and the Heads of the ITER Domestic Agencies in China, Korea and Russia, and member of the French Commission of Energy Regulation, Pascal Lorot. “Fusion is what powers the sun and the stars, and ‘solar fusion’ as I like to call it, has the potential to provide sustainable, clean baseload electricity for future generations”, said the F4E Director. “I’m proud that F4E is providing the EU contribution to the ITER experiment – about half of the entire project – and that our work brings together companies and research organisations from all over Europe”, he added. “The future of fusion – like the future of science – is partnership”, said the ITER Director-General during the inauguration.

In addition to the ITER exhibition, fusion energy was also showcased in the World EXPO’s Chinese Pavilion where an impressive 4D cinema show which underlined humankind’s need for fusion energy and an innovative model of the ITER machine that used holographic animation featured. In the central EXPO sphere, visitors could climb into a model of the KTM (Kazakhstan Tokamak for Materials studies) tokamak.