Reply To: Translation to Portuguese language

[Dr_Barnowl]

Star Trek is rife with fusion – they just consider it so commonplace it rarely takes centre stage. The reactors only get mentioned in passing, but they are present in most facilities including starships. Starships only use matter-antimatter reactors because i) it’s a useful plot device and ii) the justification is that you can’t make a compact fusion reactor that emits enough power to run a warp drive well enough for modern interstellar flight. DS9 runs on fusion (two of 6 reactors that originally powered the ore processing operations on board, if you believe the extended fiction).

The “arc reactor” in Iron Man is probably supposed to be fusion. Tony Stark uses a palladium wire when constructing his prototype in a cave, which is a nod to “cold fusion” which uses palladium electrodes. It must convert energy to electricity incredibly efficiently or it would barbecue Tony from the inside from waste heat… and if it’s running on hydrogen it must get it’s fuel from electrolysing atmospheric water. Lots of impossible engineering, but great fun.

If people are going to parody fusion in film … the archetypical use of fusion reactors in film is to provide something that goes “bang” very impressively.

e.g. – The exploding hydrogen from the sonofusion reactor in Chain Reaction, the terraforming station in Aliens which is noted to be “a big fusion reactor”, the self sustaining fusion reaction in Spiderman 2 that threatens to eat New York.

Perhaps it’s worthwhile to point out that fusion is almost certainly going to be really safe, because it’s so easy to interrupt the reaction. Maybe just have a lab-coated geek flip a switch to avert disaster… not that disaster would be imminent in real reactors. The first thing many people are going to say if you propose a fusion reactor in their neighbourhood (hopefully just before “Really? That cheap?”) is “Nukular! Eeeeek!”. Eroding the perception of danger that real-life fission accidents, fusion weapons and Hollywood have attached to fusion would be useful.

Star Trek is a positive image of fusion as a depiction of a future where it’s so commonplace and accepted that it’s rarely mentioned. So is the Mr Fusion in Back to the Future. Chain Reaction puts forward the energy message well, right at the beginning, with a great speech (albeit focussing too much on electrolysing hydrogen and not enough on the fusion) – what a shame it then spoils it by blowing up a few city blocks. Maybe we should be lobbying well-known scriptwriters to put sensible, practical, reliable, everyday fusion reactors into their scripts….