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​The European Commission has appointed Maria de Aires Soares as the Head of its Representation in Portugal. She will take up office on 16 May 2014.

Mrs Soares brings to her new role proven leadership and management skills, an extensive knowledge and experience of the European institutions, a track-record of working with a variety of stakeholders and a strong background in political analysis and communicating policy.

Since November 2011 Mrs Soares has (as a Commission official seconded in the interest of the service) been the Head of the Finance and Budget Division at the ITER Organization in Saint Paul-lez-Durance, France.

Prior to this appointment she served as Minister-Counselor, Head of the Research, Technology, Innovation and Education Section at the Delegation of the European Union to the United States in Washington DC.

Mrs Soares joined the European Commission in 1989 in the Directorate General for Research and Innovation, holding different management positions in areas ranging from administration and finance to researchers' mobility and energy.

In particular she promoted and developed an energy cooperation strategy between the European Union and Brazil, China, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the US.

She was admitted to the Lisbon Bar in 1980 and started her professional career at a law firm in Lisbon. Immediately before joining the European Commission she held a senior position in the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva.

She is a Law graduate from the University of Lisbon and holds a Ph. D. in Law from the University of Montpellier.

​THE sun has thrown us a fractal surprise. An unexpected pattern has been glimpsed in the solar wind, the turbulent plasma of charged particles that streams from the sun. It offers clues for handling plasmas that roil inside nuclear fusion reactors on Earth.

Composed of charged particles such as protons and electrons, the solar wind streams from the sun and pervades the solar system. Its flow is turbulent, containing eddies and moving at different speeds in different directions. It was thought that this turbulence was similar to that in a fluid, behaving like mixing ocean currents or the air flows that make aeroplane flights bumpy.

Read the whole article on the New Scientist website.

​As climate change becomes a serious national security threat, we must look to the future for a clean, safe and sustainable source of energy for our future. The ITER experiment will be the largest ITERexperimental tokamak nuclear fusion reactor, located at Cadarache, France. Through ITER, we can find solutions to control fusion energy, so that it can be commercialized to provide the world with a sustainable energy source. This project was born in 1985 in hopes of peace through energy cooperation between the superpowers of the Soviet Union and the U.S.

Today, its members include China, the European Union, India, Japan, the Republic of Korea and the United States of America. With recent controversy over the mismanagement of the ITER structure, the U.S. has reevaluated its position in funding the ITER project. If the U.S. withdraws from the project, we will fall behind in energy research and will not be able to reap theITER numerous benefits that ITER offers. Below I state the top ten reasons why ITER is beneficial for the United States.

- By Kathy Duong, Research Assistant at the American Security Project

Read more on the Peak Oil website.

Spaghetti-thin shoelaces, sturdy hawsers, silk cravats — all are routinely tied in knots. So too, physicists believe, are water, air and the liquid iron churning in Earth's outer core. Knots twist and turn in the particle pathways of turbulent fluids, as stable in some cases as a sailor's handiwork. For decades, scientists have suspected the rules governing these knots could offer clues for untangling turbulence — one of the last great unknowns of classical physics — but any order exhibited by the knots was lost in the surrounding chaos.   Now, with deft new tools at their fingertips, physicists are beginning to master the art of tying knots in fluids and other flowable entities, such as electromagnetic fields, enabling controlled study of their behavior. "Now that we have these knots, we can measure the shape of them in 3-D; we can look at the flow field around them," said William Irvine, a physicist at the University of Chicago. "We can really figure out what the rules of the game are."

 

Read more on Quanta Magazine website.

On April 23 the General Assembly of European Fusion Research Units appointed Tony Donné as Programme Manager for the consortium EUROfusion, which is currently being set up. EUROfusion is to succeed the European Fusion Development Agreement (EFDA) as the umbrella organization of Europe's fusion research laboratories. At the moment, Tony Donné is head of the fusion physics theme at the Dutch Institute for Fundamental Energy Research (DIFFER). Starting 2 June, he will manage EUROfusion's execution of the European Fusion Roadmap, which aims to realize commercial energy from fusion.

Read the announcement on DIFFER website.

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The JET experiment in Oxfordshire was opened in 1984 to understand fusion - the process that powers the Sun. Prof Steve Cowley told the BBC a go-ahead to run JET at maximum power would allow scientists to try for the record by the end of the decade. This could bring Jet up to the coveted goal of "breakeven" where fusion yields as much energy as it consumes. Fusion is markedly different from current nuclear power, which operates through splitting atoms - fission - rather than squashing them together as occurs in fusion. "We're hoping to repeat our world record shots and extend them," Prof Cowley, who is director of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy - which hosts JET, told BBC News. "Our world record was from 1997, we think we can improve on it quite considerably and get some really spectacular results. We're winding up to that and by the end of the decade we'll be doing it."   Read more on BBC News website

​For decades, controlled nuclear fusion has held the promise of a safe, clean, sustainable energy source that could help wean the world from fossil fuels. But the challenges of harnessing the power of the sun in an Earth-based nuclear fusion reactor have been many, with much of the progress over the last several years coming in incremental advances.

One of the key technical issues that has puzzled physicists is actually a common occurrence in fusion reactions: plasma turbulence. Turbulence inside a reactor can increase the rate of plasma heat loss, significantly impacting the resulting energy output. So researchers have been working to pinpoint both what causes this turbulence and how to control or even eliminate it. Now simulations run at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have shed light on a central piece of the puzzle: the relationship between fast ion particles in the plasma and plasma microturbulence. Read the whole article on NERSC website.

The 7th ITER International School will be held on 25-29 August 2014 at ITER on the first day and downtown Aix-en-Provence on the second. The focus this year will be on "Highly parallel computing in modelling magnetically confined plasmas for nuclear fusion."

This subject has an interdisciplinary character: high-performance computing is a key-tool for facing problems in different fields of magnetically confined fusion. It is one of the main subjects for achieving the expected results in the future ITER reactor.

The ITER International school aims to prepare young scientists for working in the field of nuclear fusion and in research applications associated with the ITER Project.

The first ITER school was organized during July 2007 in Aix-en-Provence, and was focused on turbulent transport in fusion plasmas. Five different editions have followed: 2008 in Fukuoka, Japan (magnetic confinement); 2009 in Aix-en-Provence (plasma-surface interaction); 2010 in Austin, Texas (Magneto-Hydro-Dynamics); 2011 in Aix-en-Provence (energetic particles); and finally 2012 in Ahmedabad, India (on radio-frequency heating).

More information here.

 

​​In theory, it's possible to shoot some energy at hydrogen and get even more energy back. The process is called thermonuclear fusion, and if we could ever get fusion power to work — a big if — we'd never have to worry about our energy problems again.
It's not a completely crazy notion. Nuclear fusion already takes place in the sun's core, after all. And the promise of fusion power has led researchers to try their best for decades upon decades. Occasionally, they even make some advances — as happened this past winter, when scientists got closer to fusion power than ever.

Trouble is, the scientific and technical hurdles ahead are still enormous — in fact, we still don't have a full grasp on what all the hurdles might be. Still, the potential pay-off is so massive that countries have sunk billions and billions of dollars into fusion research.

So here's a guide to how far humanity has come on thermonuclear fusion — and how far we still have to go.

Read more on Vox website.

On this day in 1984, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II​​ offically inaugurated the JET installation at Culham Center for Fusion Energy. EFDA,  the European Fusion Development Agreement, has just posted a video of the opening, featuring the Queen's address to the guests, among whom French President François Mitterrand and Gaston Thorn, president of the European Commission.