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The international fusion community lost a major contributor when Dr. David Swain passed away last month. His contributions to the advancement of experimental and theoretical plasma physics and technology spanned more than half a century during which he produced over 150 scientific papers.

For much of his career, Swain's research focused on confining and heating high density plasmas, largely with high power radiowaves. He received his PhD in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969, after receiving a Bachelor of Science from North Carolina State University in 1963. He became a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1985.

His professional career began in 1969 at Sandia Laboratories; in 1975, he joined Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a member of the ORMAK tokamak team. He played a leading role in radiofrequency development activities for at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and Tore Supra in France, plus other ion cyclotron systems for devices around the world including NSTX and KSTAR. Swain was also an early and critical member of the international team that designed ITER's ion cyclotron heating system. He retired from ORNL in 2017, but continued to contribute as a consultant, helping US ITER and the ITER Organization.

In his professional and personal life, Swain possessed a generosity of spirit, good-natured friendliness, and a dry sense of humour that made it a pleasure to work and travel with him. His folksy sayings, rooted in his rural North Carolina upbringing, were legendary. The global ITER community will miss his character and his contributions.

-- US ITER and the ITER Organization

The fusion team at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has introduced a worldwide tracking and information system for fusion devices, located within the IAEA's .

The Fusion Device Information System (FusDIS), developed and maintained by the IAEA, focuses on experimental fusion research devices worldwide. FusDIS contains information on fusion devices public or private that are currently in operation, under construction, closed or being planned. All information is collected by the IAEA and undergoes a process of review involving the International Fusion Research Council.

It currently lists 62 tokamaks, 12 stellarators/heliotrons, 7 laser fusion devices, and 31 innovative/alternate fusion concepts.

The IAEA fusion team is interested in feedback on FusDIS. Please send comments to: Fusion-Physics@iaea.org

From the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory:

The American Nuclear Society has bestowed its distinguished Nuclear Historic Landmark designation on the pioneering Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) that ran from 1982 to 1997 at the US Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL).

The groundbreaking facility laid the foundation for future fusion power plants and set world records for fusion power (10.7 million watts) in 1994 and total fusion energy production (1,500 million joules) from 1993 to 1997.  The achievements marked a major step in fusion history.

The designation, which will be formally announced at the American Nuclear Society's November meeting, recognizes TFTR "for demonstrating significant fusion energy production and tritium technologies for future nuclear fusion power plants and the first detailed exploration of magnetically confined deuterium-tritium fusion plasmas."

Read the full statement by .

Read the original article on the .

Secondary school teachers across Europe are invited to participate virtually in the 2020 European Fusion Teacher Day, hosted by , the European Fusion Education Network.

Registration for the 2 October event closes on 27 September.

The European Fusion Teacher Day will premiere new education materials for the classroom, offer a behind-the-scenes look at international fusion experiments such as ITER, JET and GOLEM, and host a live connection with teachers throughout Europe. At the end of the event you will be able to tell your students all about nuclear fusion: from the cutting-edge research that is going on, to how to make fusion a career.

For the first part of the event, participants will join video calls in the language of their choice, hosted by fusion institutes in Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom. An introductory lecture followed by a presentation of newly developed classroom materials will be the highlights of this part of the program.

Then, all participants will tune into a livestream (in English) with fusion students and scientists located on site at three tokamak facilities: ITER, JET and GOLEM.

For more information on how to participate, see .

On 17 September, the chiller plant in the Site Services Building was turned over to the ITER Science, Controls & Operation Department (SCOD) for commissioning.

This is the first of many handovers to come between the ITER construction and operation teams, and it signals that equipment installation is complete. Now, a commissioning team led by SCOD will start to energize the equipment, fill the pipes, and test the circuits and related control interfaces.

The chiller plant is one element of the chilled water system that is, in turn, part of the overall ITER cooling water system. The tokamak cooling water system, the component cooling water system, the chilled water system and the heat rejection system are together responsible for removing the enormous amounts of heat generated by the tokamak and its auxiliary systems.

On August 28, two upper port extensions procured by the Russian Domestic Agency arrived at the South Korean port of Busan.

Each of the vacuum vessel's 44 openings will have custom-made "extensions" to create the junction to the surrounding cryostat. The first link in the two-part chain—the port stub extension—will be welded to the vacuum vessel sectors before they are shipped from their manufacturing locations; (the second, port extensions, will be added during assembly on site).

Responsible for the 18 upper ports, the Russian Domestic Agency has been delivering upper port stub extensions to vacuum vessel manufacturers in Korea and Europe since 2017. They are procured under the general contracting responsibility of JSC NIIEFA (part of Rosatom State Corporation), and manufactured by MAN Energy Solutions, Germany.

Upper port extensions #14 and #16 were delivered to Korea late August after a one-month sea voyage. The timely delivery of all port stub extensions is critical for the on-time fabrication of vacuum vessel sectors, and thus the overall ITER schedule.

The ITER community was saddened to learn that Vladimir Sergeevich Voitsenya, a Ukrainian physicist, researcher, and Fellow of the Ukrainian Physical Society, passed away in August 2020. 

Trained as a Doctor of Science in Physics and Mathematics, he spent much of his career at the Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology, KhIPT, moving from laboratory head to leading research scientist, head of the plasma diagnostics laboratory, and finally head of the Stellarators Division. Dr Voitsenya's scientific interests included magnetic plasma confinement, plasma-surface interaction, and plasma-facing mirrors for the diagnostics in ITER.

"Vladimir was a key player in the mirror program for ITER diagnostics and indeed his work is the foundation of the current excellent progress in this area," commented Michael Walsh, Head of ITER Diagnostics. Colleagues at the International Tokamak Physics Activity (ITPA*) remember him for his enthusiasm, his visionary papers, his ideas—many of which are now implemented in ITER diagnostics—and his kind and friendly attitude. "For us he was a diagnostic pioneer, one of the founders and strongest proponents of the ITPA."

*The International Tokamak Physics Activity (ITPA) provides a framework for internationally coordinated fusion research activities.

ITER's start-of-assembly celebration on 28 July 2020 generated unprecedented media interest in the project, as evidenced by 3,500 news stories in the printed press in 41 languages (101 countries). A small sampling can be found in Press Clippings (/pressclippings). For full information about the project see the ITER website at /.

In this 16-minute feature on the ITER Project aired by the Seoul-based English language channel Arirang TV on 5 August, the head of ITER Korea, Jung Kijung, explains how South Korea joined ITER in 2003, how Korean expertise has contributed to the science and engineering that underpins the mega-science project, what in-kind components South Korea has contributed to the project, and what milestones have to be realized before the advent of fusion electricity.

Watch the segment of News, In Depth .

The 360° virtual tour of ITER construction has been updated with drone footage from late May 2020. Plunge 30 metres into the ITER Tokamak pit, relive the insertion of the cryostat base, and fly in and out of the ITER plant buildings to see what has changed since the last update in February 2020..

Accessible from the home page of the ITER website (yellow icon) or by clicking on the link below, the 2D tour requires no special equipment to enjoy. (If you do have 3D glasses, click on the yellow goggle symbol at the top of any screen.)

 to enter the latest 360° ITER virtual tour.

Timed to meet worldwide attention on the ITER Project at the launch of its machine assembly phase, a new section of the ITER website has just been released. The ITER assembly pages are the place to go for information, photos, videos, articles and links about the step-by-step process of building the world's largest tokamak.

And, thanks to the skill of ITER CAD technician Kevin Ballant, the pages open to a new video that shows you how the ITER Organization assembly teams will proceed—from installing the cryostat base and lower cryostat components at the bottom of the assembly arena, to the placement of the central column and radial beams of the in-pit assembly tool, the vacuum sector sub-assemblies, the magnets, upper cryostat components, and finally the cryostat lid.

Visit the new ITER assembly pages here.

In a report published this month, the European Domestic Agency for ITER, Fusion for Energy, explains how progress was maintained on the fabrication of five ITER vacuum vessel sectors despite some factory shutdowns due to Covid-19.

"We had to analyze the impact of the pandemic on our production plants, figure out which tasks could be performed in line with the instructions issued by the Italian authorities, and adopt measures of health and safety in line with this new reality. Therefore, we re-arranged the planning of activities, prioritised some critical ones. We put forward a short-term plan to keep up the progress, while ensuring full compliance with protocols," explains Max Febvre, Fusion for Energy Manufacturing Project Manager for the vacuum vessel. As a result, the impact of the pandemic was not as disruptive as expected. 

See a full report plus recent photos .

Secondary school teachers across Europe are invited to participate virtually in the 2020 European Fusion Teacher Day, hosted by , the European Fusion Education Network.

Registration for the event on 2 October is free of charge and open now.

The European Fusion Teacher Day will premiere new education materials for the classroom, offer a behind-the-scenes look at international fusion experiments such as ITER, JET and GOLEM, and host a live connection with teachers throughout Europe. At the end of the event you will be able to tell your students all about nuclear fusion: from the cutting-edge research that is going on, to how to make fusion a career!

For the first part of the event, participants will join video calls in the language of their choice, hosted by fusion institutes in Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom. An introductory lecture followed by a presentation of newly developed classroom materials will be the highlights of this part of the program.

Then, all participants will tune into a livestream (in English) with fusion students and scientists located on site at three tokamak facilities: ITER, JET and GOLEM.

For more information on how to participate, see .

Looking for a new way to explain fusion in your classrooms and boardrooms? Interested in a two-minute summary of what fusion is and how it can change our future?

A new animation from Fusion for Energy, the European Domestic Agency for ITER, uses a fresh visual approach to make fusion accessible to all. Subtitles are available in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

See the video .

Synthetic diamond windows will play a double function in the ITER machine—allowing the microwaves of the electron cyclotron heating system to pass through to reach the plasma while providing an effective leak-proof vacuum barrier.

High-purity CVD (chemical vapour deposition) diamond windows offer unsurpassed hardness, broad band optical transparency, and extremely high thermal conductivity.

The European Domestic Agency, Fusion for Energy, is working with the German firm Diamond Materials for the production of 60 diamond disks (Ø 7 cm) for the electron cyclotron heating system.

See the full story .

A wealth of information about the behaviour and stability of the ITER plasma will be communicated by the return signals of the low-field side reflectometer (LFSR)—a diagnostic that shoots a frequency-modulated (FM) millimetre wave signal (a type of microwave) into the plasma and gathers information about the plasma edge in return.

The LFSR is the first device of its kind to measure the plasma density, and process and report the data to the central tokamak control system in real-time. This allows it to serve as an alert system, as abrupt changes in the steepness of the edge density profile, or gradient, can lead to instabilities known as edge localized modes (ELMs), which release large amounts of energy.

A final design review is planned this summer by the US ITER diagnostics team, which is based out of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. The device will be installed on ITER before its First Plasma.

See the original news on the US ITER  or from the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.

The 28th edition of the IAEA Fusion Energy Conference (FEC 2020) has been postponed.

Originally scheduled to take place from 12 to 17 October 2020 in Nice, France, the conference organizers have announced new dates: 10 to 15 May 2021. The venue for the event has not changed.

The IAEA Fusion Energy Conference is the world's largest conference on fusion energy. Sponsored by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and organized regularly since 1961, it attracted over 1,000 fusion scientists and engineers at its last edition, in 2018. 

The 28th edition of the IAEA Fusion Energy Conference (FEC 2020) will be hosted jointly by the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and the ITER Organization.

For information and important dates, visit  or the dedicated page on the .

The sunrise of fusion startups has also reached Japan. A team from Kyoto University founded its fusion startup in October 2019. Kyoto Fusioneering Co. Ltd. assists private fusion developers through engineering solutions and business-to-business technical assistance to accelerate the practical realization of fusion energy.

Today, there are already many fusion startups around the world, mainly in North America and Europe. Fusion is no longer public-sector-only science; it is a business bringing excitement to the private sector as well. Taka Nagao, CEO of Kyoto Fusioneering, sees a real opportunity. "Even though 'fusion electricity' is quite far away, we're already in the phase of business opportunities." Fusion startups have been raising funds from venture capital funds to develop demo fusion reactors. Some of them look for cooperation with other startups to help their demo development, rather than doing everything by themselves. "So we see the manufacturing of fusion machine components as an already existing need, and it is becoming a fruitful market," he says.

His company focuses especially on critical in-vessel components that will be an important part of every fusion reactor—the blanket, which must be designed to breed tritium and efficiently remove energy for electricity generation, and the divertor, which extracts heat and ash produced by the reaction to minimize plasma contamination.

--Anri Kato

On 14 May 2020, ITER Director-General Bernard Bigot participated virtually in a Highlight Seminar organized by the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment (Princeton University, USA).

The Andlinger Center's stated goal is to translate fundamental knowledge into practical solutions that enable sustainable energy solutions and the protection of the environment. 

In the seminar attended (virtually) by over 500 people, Bernard Bigot reviewed ITER status and fielded questions on upcoming milestones, the short- and longer-term perspectives of fusion energy, and how to get involved.

Listen to the one-hour program on the Princeton University website .

The Chinese television network CGTN has released an episode of its series "Decoding the Future" on hydrogen fusion. What is fusion? How does a tokamak work? What role for ITER? How are researchers in China contributing? Among the (virtual) panelists during the 30-minute episode in English is theortical physicist Alain Bécoulet, head of the ITER Engineering Domain.

Watch the episode on YouTube .