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COMPASS, a small tokamak located at the Institute of Plasma Physics (Czech Academy of Sciences) in Prague, will soon become COMPASS-U—a high magnetic field device with an enlarged operational space and improved performance—to serve the research programs supporting ITER and the next-phase device DEMO.

A preliminary design review of the new COMPASS-U tokamak was held remotely from 31 March to 3 April with over 60 international and domestic scientists in attendance.

See the news .

The 360° virtual tour of ITER construction has been updated with drone footage from late February 2020. Fly in, out and over the principal buildings of the ITER worksite by clicking on the teardrop-shaped markers.

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.

The Wendelstein 7-X stellarator facility at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald, Germany, is preparing for higher heating power and longer plasma pulses.

After a that ended in late 2018—during which operators were able to achieve discharge times of up to 100 seconds (2 MW of input heating power) or 30 seconds at 6 MW—the Wendelstein 7-X team is now preparing to install actively water-cooled components inside the vacuum vessel that will allow the next round of experiments to generate plasma pulses of up to 30 minutes.

The previous cladding made of carbon tiles has now been removed, and the vessel is ready for the installation of the new water-cooled protective elements. Chief among them is the new divertor, a highly technical component made of plasma-facing front tiles mounted on water-cooled back plates—assemblies made of nearly 500,000 parts, which were the object of more than 15 years of development, fabrication and testing.

Commissioning of the upgraded facility is expected to begin early next year.

Read the full article on the IPP Greifswald .

--Cooling elements on the back side of a divertor plate. Photo: IPP, Michael Herdlein

ITER science and technology was one of the topics that more than 80 students from across southeast Asia explored at the sixth ASEAN School on Plasma and Nuclear Fusion and Sokendai Winter School in Thailand in late January.

The school—which is organized by Sokendai University, the Thailand Institute of Nuclear Technology (TINT), and Walailak University with the support the IAEA and ITER—is part of Thailand's initiative to intensify its fusion research program and aims at promoting interaction between young talent in southeast Asian countries and leading researchers from around the world.

"The ITER Director-General gives his full support to the school by sharing the latest developments on ITER as well as the background and rationale of its science and advanced technology," said Jean Jacquinot, Senior Adviser to the Director-General of the ITER Organization, and one of the lecturers at the school.

Read the on the IAEA website. 

In a rare moment off the playing field, 100 of France's top under 17 rugby players visited the ITER site last week, taking advantage of a selection camp organized locally to learn more about fusion and the ITER Project. 

The ITER visits team tailors its guided tours to groups of all sizes—from individuals to buses of 50 people. Since work began on the construction platform in 2007, 158,000 members of the public have passed through the gate, including 16,000 in 2019. Among the visitors last year were 7,000 French schoolchildren.

See more on ITER visits here.

When there is no off-the-shelf solution, develop your own!

This was the mind-set of the European contractor that—because no available solution was accurate enough—invented a specialized metrology tool that is capable of measuring the diameter of cylindrical components to within an accuracy of 0.004 mm.

Working closely with the European Domestic Agency Fusion for Energy, the Spanish firm Tekniker has developed a tool that will be used to inspect the diameter of the "multi-link" connectors between the ITER divertor and its plasma-facing components and assess whether they have been manufactured to within the required 20 microns of tolerance.

Read the full story .

If your PhD was awarded after 1 January 2017—or you are about to obtain one—you are eligible to apply for a Monaco-ITER Postdoctoral Fellowship.

The Fellowship Program is recruiting now for two-year terms beginning autumn 2020.

Since 2008, 30 young scientists and engineers have been able to participate directly in ITER, working on cutting-edge issues in science and technology with some of the leading scientists and engineers in each domain. The principal aim of the Research Fellowships, which are funded by the Principality of Monaco under a Partnership Agreement that was renewed in early 2018, is the development of excellence in research in fusion science and technology within the ITER framework.

The deadline for application is 1 March 2020. 

Led by the European Space Agency (ESA) with strong NASA participation, the Solar Orbiter mission, which lifted off from Cape Canaveral on 10 February, will provide the first views of the Sun's uncharted polar regions, giving unprecedented insight into the workings of our familiar star.

Solar Orbiter will also investigate how intense radiation and energetic particles being blasted out from the Sun and carried by the solar wind impact our home planet, to better understand and predict periods of stormy "space weather."

Find out more at or .

In a context of new momentum in fusion research—as the ITER Organization begins assembling its machine, a number of upgraded tokamaks return to operation, and private investors fund fusion startups—what does the near future hold for the development of fusion energy?

This was the question the Andlinger Center for Energy and Environment at Princeton University asked Steve Cowley (left), director of the US Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and Princeton University professor of astrophysical sciences, and Egemen Kolemen (right), a PPPL physicist and assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the Andlinger Center, during a Highlight Seminar event in January.

You can read their replies .

Princeton University's Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment is a multidisciplinary research and education centre, whose mission is to the develop technologies and solutions of the future.

During the next Symposium on Fusion Engineering (), Fusion Technology Awards will be presented for the years 2020 and 2021 to individuals who have made outstanding and widely recognized contributions to research and development in the field of fusion technology, or for technical contributions that have had a major impact in fusion technology and/or leadership and service within the community.

The Awards each consist of a USD 3,000 cash prize and a plaque. Any person, regardless of nationality or Society affiliation, is eligible for the award, with the exception that no current member of the IEEE/NPSS Standing Committee on Fusion Technology may be nominated. The nomination package should be sent to the Fusion Technology Committee Awards Chair, Carl Pawley (drcpawley@ieee.org), and it should consist of a nomination letter describing the technical and/or leadership contributions on which the nomination is recommended and a resume of the candidate.

The nomination period for the 2020 Fusion Technology Award is 4 February to 10 March 2020.

For more detailed information on eligibility, basis for judging, nomination process and a list of past Award recipients, please visit the  and go to the "Fusion Technology Awards" section.

Academician Evgeny Velikhov, who was Mikhail Gorbachev's scientific adviser in the mid-1980s, is considered as the "godfather" of the ITER Project. The veteran fusion physicist who celebrated his 85th birthday on 2 February in Moscow, was instrumental in gathering support for what was to become ITER in both the Soviet Union and within the Reagan administration, where he had several high-level contacts.

At the head of the nation's fusion program since 1973 when he succeeded Lev Artsimovitch, President of the Kurchatov Institute from 1992 to 2015 (and current Honorary President), and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Velikhov has received numerous national and international distinctions for his work. A key driving force for international collaboration on fusion, he served as ITER Council Chair during the technical design phase for ITER and again at the start of ITER construction from 2011-2012.

Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated the outstanding scientist on his birthday and noted his fruitful personal contribution to the development of the national Academy of Sciences and the Kurchatov Institute.

Photo: Anatoly Krasilnikov and Vladimir Vlasenkov (Head and Deputy Head of the Russian Domestic Agency for ITER) presenting him with 3D glasses loaded with the most recent video images from the ITER worksite.

In the third installment of ITER Japan's manga series on the project, our hero Taiyô Tenno visits the factory where the first ITER toroidal field coil was completed and learns about the multiple challenges (including tooling, welding, testing, level of precision, and materials) that had to be overcome.

A timely addition to the series, which can be downloaded from the  here or directly from the ITER Publications gallery (comics).

Researchers led by CS Chang of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have been awarded major supercomputer time to address key issues for ITER. The award, from the DOE's INCITE* program, renews the third and final year of the team's supercomputer allocation for the current round.

The third-year allotment consists of 1.5 million node hours on the Theta supercomputer at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, and 0.97 million node hours on Summit, the world's most powerful supercomputer, at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. Since every computer node has thousands of processing cores, or data processors, a single node hour equals thousands of core hours.

The INCITE announcement of the renewal called the studies "time-urgent for the successful planning of ITER operation" and ones that require "an intensive, concentrated computing effort using extreme-scale supercomputers."

The multi-year project studies three high-priority ITER edge-plasma challenges: gauging the heat-load that will strike the material surrounding the plasma in ITER; understanding the physics behind the transition from low-to-high ITER plasmas; and, studying turbulence at the edge of ITER plasmas that could damage the interior of the fusion facility.

Read the full article at .

*Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment ()

The offices of the ITER Organization will be closed from 23 December through 3 January included, although work will be proceeding on the construction site.

The year 2020 promises to be a special one for the ITER Project, as some of ITER's largest components arrive on site and the carefully orchestrated assembly phase for the ITER machine and plant officially kicks off.

Newsline will continue to cover every aspect of ITER and the fusion world, from progress on the construction site in southern France and in component manufacturing in factories and laboratories on three continents ... to meetings, conferences and scientific breakthroughs throughout the world.

See you in January.

We shot a similar end-of-year photo in 2017: click here to compare the two images.

View the ITER Organization's e-card .

From Wednesday 4 December 2019 through 28 January 2020 a public service announcement on ITER will be a regular feature on the Euronews network, which has a global reach of 430 million households (including 170 million European households) in 166 countries.

The goal is to raise awareness of the ITER Project, the promise of fusion, and Europe's leadership as the host Member—working together with China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, and the USA—to bring to reality the most complex science experiment ever attempted.

The 20-second promotional spot has been filmed in five languages (English, French, German, Spanish, and Italian). It is scheduled to air two- to three-times daily, or approximately 70 times in December and another 70 in January.

You can watch the public service announcementson the ITER YouTube page in , , , or .

The 360° virtual tour of ITER construction has been updated with drone footage from October 2019. Fly in, out and over the principal buildings of the ITER worksite by clicking on the coloured teardrop-shaped markers: red to follow a drone inside the buildings, yellow for a tour at ground level, or blue if you prefer to stay at bird's eye view.

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 bottom left of your screen.) Make sure you don't miss out on the "Tokamak 3d/Pit" button (blue site map, blue teardrop). It's a spectacular virtual visit of the completed plasma chamber.

 to enter the latest 360° ITER virtual tour.

In the December 2019 issue of Physics Today (Volume 72, Issue 12), two physicists explore the ways in which ITER will be a major step in "bridging the gap between current understanding and the knowledge needed to design and operate fusion power plants as safe, sustainable energy sources."

Richard J. Hawryluk* (Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory's associate director for fusion) and Hartmut Zohm (director at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, Garching) enumerate the open questions that are expected to be answered or clarified during ITER experimentation—heat and particle transport in the plasma core, stability of the edge region, plasma-boundary interactions, and alpha particle heating. "Experiments [at ITER] will be a unique opportunity to study burning plasmas, develop the tools needed to better understand them, and validate outstanding predictions. The experiments will provide seminal answers to questions that are central to the prospects for fusion."

Significant fusion power has only ever been achieved in two devices—and only for a little less than one second: up to 10 MW in the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (US), and up to 16 MW in the Joint European Torus (UK).

ITER—with the capability to produce 500 MW of power for more than 300 seconds—will enable "the first in-depth study of burning plasmas in a magnetic confinement configuration."

Read the full article here: "," Physics Today 72, 12, 34 (2019); doi: 10.1063/PT.3.4363. 

*Richard Hawryluk was also the ITER Deputy Director-General for Administration from 2011 to 2013.

Fusion science and technology are complex matters that are difficult to explain to non-specialists. In its fall edition, Fusion in Europe (published by the EUROfusion network) asked a dozen "fusioneers" to write about the challenges they face in their daily practice. Whether hard-core scientists working in European laboratories and institutions, teachers or PhD students, they all volunteer their time to "entertain, enthral and educate" the general public.

"How do we teach ten-year-old students a complex topic like fusion?" asks Patricia Raposo-Weinberger, who teaches at Graz International Bilingual School in Graz, Austria. "For me, the best approaches are experiment and storytelling," she writes. "Never underestimate the power of a good, simple and enthusiastic story and its effect on students' interest in physics."

Jack Davies Hare, who currently works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics in Garching, Germany, summarizes the challenges of "surviving the maelstrom inside ITER" in a striking manner. He too begins with a question: "How do you build something that can survive for twenty years in the harshest conditions ever created on Earth, with no chance of replacement or repair, and with no test facility to replicate this environment?"

Like Patricia and Jack, the contributors to this "fusion writers edition" of Fusion in Europe share a common passion to communicate not only their enthusiasm but also their awe at what they uncover when exploring the bewildering world of fusion.

The "fusion writers edition" of Fusion in Europe can be downloaded .

Applications have opened for the 2020 SOFT Innovation Prize.

Building on the success of the SOFT Innovation Prize in 2014, 2016 and 2018, the European Commission has launched the contest's fourth edition under Euratom's 2019-20 Work Programme 2019-20. The prize seeks to highlight and reward excellence in research and technology innovation in the domain of fusion.

The contest is open to fusion researchers or research teams from all ITER partner countries, from any third party country that has a bilateral fusion cooperation agreement with Euratom, and to industrial participants in the ITER Project. Prizes will be awarded at the 31st Symposium on Fusion Technology (SOFT2020) in Dubrovnik, Croatia, held from 20 to 25 September 2020.

The application period runs from 19 November 2019 to 5 March 2020. For more information, visit .