Well, that was surely one of the more flashy and entertaining activities we’ve had in a while! We were visited by Gieljan de Vries of the Dutch institute for nuclear fusion Rijnhuizen, who gave us an excellent show, starting of with some basic thoughts on energy use and ending up talking about current developments in nuclear fusion. We saw Wouter on a bike (taking eleven years of cycling to fill up the energy equivalent of a barrel of oil!), fluorescent lightbulbs in a microwave, floating magnets, and circle smoke rings spontaneously arising from square boxes.
In between al these spectacular demonstrations we learned a lot about how fusion works and how the area is progressing, also discussing the large ITER project in France which is due to be finished in 2019. Although the speaker unsuccessfully tried to skip some slides on the actual nuclear physics involved, the evening was a nice balance between the technical issues involved and the future outlook of nuclear fusion. The lively and broad discussion afterwards was a testimony to a successful fusion roadshow.
You can download a shortened version of the presentation here, and participate in the LinkedIn discussion and poll on nuclear fusion.
All the pictures of the event are posted here.
