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​Interested in a career in fusion? Want to gain practical experience in a European working environment?

The European Domestic Agency for ITER, Fusion for Energy (F4E), is offering two-to-three month summer internships at its offices in Barcelona, Spain for EU or Swiss nationals aged 18-25 who are following university studies.

Applications can be filled out online at: https://studentships.f4e.europa.eu/. The deadline for submission is 25/04/2014 at midday CET.

​From 22-26 September, a Physics School will be organized by the Germany Physical Society DPG at the Physikzentrum in Bad Honnef, Germany with the theme "The Physics of ITER." The invited speakers and range of subjects will represent the wide range of expertise from the EU Fusion Programme. The Physics School targets young physicists at the early stage of their career but will also attract physicists from all fields and fusion scientists.

The Physics School, strongly supported by the Heraeus Foundation, provides an affordable opportunity to deepen knowledge in fusion-oriented physics with a special concentration on ITER.   More information can be found at the dedicated website.

​The ITER project is truly at the frontier of knowledge, a collective effort to explore the tantalizing future of free, clean and inexhaustible energy offered by nuclear fusion. Where the Large Hadron Collider at CERN pushes the boundaries of physics to find the origins of matter, the ITER Project seeks to give humans an endless stream of power which could have potentially game-changing consequences for the entire planet.

Read the article on Euronews website.

​Director of Agence Iter France, former director of JET (2000-2006) and former head of the European Fusion Development Agreement EFDA (2006-2009), Jérôme Pamela was recently appointed co-president of Eurofusion.

The new consortium, which succeeds EFDA, is the answer of the European fusion community to the new challenges of the "ITER era." It aims at streamlining the fusion programs of the European laboratories and installations in order to contribute to ITER with maximum efficiency.   "We also have to prepare for DEMO, the 'demonstration installation' that will come after ITER," explains Jérôme Pamela,  "and to train a new generation of physicists who will operate ITER and build DEMO."   Jérôme will be co-presiding Eurofusion alongside Sybille Günter, director of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, IPP Garching.   Photo © AIF - V. Paul

​Two recently published books describe the history of nuclear fusion research. Search for the Ultimate Energy Source: A history of the US Fusion Energy Program (Springer, 2013) is written by Stephen Dean, president of Fusion Power Associates, a nonprofit advocacy organization. Dean is also a former administrator of the US Department of Energy's fusion research program. Science magazine deputy news editor Daniel Clery's A Piece of the Sun: The Quest for Fusion Energy (Overlook Press, 2013), provides a more global perspective on the same subject.

Physics Today reviewed both books together in March and recently caught up with the authors to discuss their respective works.
 

Read the interview on physicstoday website.

​The European Domestic Agency, with responsibility for the construction of the 39 buildings of the ITER installation, launched its first video on YouTube four years ago. Since then, over 100,000 viewers have followed its regular postings on site progress, industry collaboration and manufacturing.

Find out more here.

​An exposition on ITER is running from now until 8 June at the Cité des Sciences (Parc de la Villette, Paris). Combining different media—display panels, videos, interviews—the exposition is designed to interest a wide public, including a younger audience.

See the Cité des Sciences website for more information (in French).

​The ITER Project is present at this week's NewGen—Future Energy forum in Moscow, where industry and political actors from Russia and abroad debate innovation in energy. 

Anatoly Krasilnikov, head of ITER Russia, led a round table on 26 March titled "Innovative Discussions in the ITER Project" with participation from the Troitsk Institute for Innovation and Fusion Research (TRINITI) and the Tokamak Physics Institute at the Kurchatov Institute.

One topic of discussion was the readiness to begin designing "fusion-fission" hybrid energetics in Russia. "Today we've got everything to start designing," said the deputy director of the Tokamak Physics Institute, Boris Kuteev. "Together with the ITER Project, the implementation of a hybrid project would significantly contribute to creation of a fusion power plant in future."

​Researchers of the FOM Institute DIFFER have discovered that the wall material of a fusion reactor can shield itself from high energy plasma bursts. The wall material tungsten seems to expel a cloud of cooling hydrogen particles that serves as a protective layer. The research team publishes their results on 24 March 2014 in the journal Applied Physics Letters.

[...] The heart of a fusion reactor like ITER contains an extremely hot plasma, from which short, intense energy bursts rain down on the reactor wall. In ITER, the tungsten wall will face powerful discharges of several gigawatts per square meter, several times per second.  However, researchers at FOM Institute DIFFER discovered that under some conditions less than half of that incoming energy actually hits the surface.

The physicists used their linear plasma experiment Pilot-PSI to show that the tungsten surface shields itself from the blast by expelling a cloud of cooling hydrogen particles. This is the first time that fusion researchers see the energy pulses and the wall react to each other at this level of detail.

Caption: Hydrogen plasma in DIFFER's linear plasma generator Pilot-PSI. Credit: Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM)

Read more on the DIFFER website.

 

 

​With a combined morning and evening circulation of more than 14 million, the Japanese daily Yomiuri Shimbun is number one among the world's biggest selling newspapers.

Last Friday 21 March the Yomiuri dispatched one of its science reporters, Kyoichi Sasazawa, to the ITER site. The reporter met with ITER Director-General Osamu Motojima and ITER DDG Carlos Alejaldre and visited the ITER construction site. "In Japan, knowledge of fusion needs to be improved," he observed.

The article he's preparing will be published in Japan in late April and will also appear in the English edition of the Yomiuri.

Caption: DG Motojima and Yomiuri science writer Kyoichi Sasazawa take in the Tokamak Pit view from the Assembly Hall slab.