Tour the Future of Fusion in Google Earth

Fusion is already spanning the globe with a diversity of research.  In this Google Earth tour, blast off from New York to Paris and onward to the south of France, where Cadarache Forest gives way to the vast scope of Iter, the international megaproject that may lead to fusion power into the grid by 2040.

...Then swing back past Lady Liberty to where a more modest effort is cranking the heat up to a billion degrees.  Here not far from Edison’s labs, the FoFu-1 dense plasma focus and its armament of instrumentation could determine in the next year the scientific feasibility of net energy from a very different and even cleaner fusion approach.  Learn more with a final landing at the Googleplex itself, where the now-in-progress experiment was outlined in a Tech Talk by fusion scientist Eric Lerner.

The tour brings together maps, images, and animations to add some perspective to what could become a major scientific breakthrough in addressing many global problems.  Install the plugin as needed and view in your browser just by clicking “Play” at lower left.  You’ll want to have sound to hear the narration.

Bon voyage!

To learn more with different layers or if you do not consistently see photos described by the narration, download the tour file here, then open it to play directly in free Google Earth.  Get help playing tours in Google Earth here.  Some tips for getting images to appear in the embedded tour above are to pause the tour to allow all the assets to load, or even move the cursor back slightly to rewind to where the image should appear; see also the comments below.

Thank you to Torulf Greek for his animations, the Iter organization for Iter-related media, and thanks especially to all the fusioneers around the world trying to make a new source of clean energy happen!

;-Derek

[An earlier version of this page has been archived here.]