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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 ����ר�� 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 (@email), 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 ����ר�� 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 ����ר�� 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 ����ר�� Council Chair during the technical design phase for ����ר�� and again at the start of ����ר�� 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 ����ר��) presenting him with 3D glasses loaded with the most recent video images from the ����ר�� worksite.

In the third installment of ����ר�� Japan's manga series on the project, our hero Taiyô Tenno visits the factory where the first ����ר�� 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 ����ר�� 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 ����ר��. 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 ����ר�� operation" and ones that require "an intensive, concentrated computing effort using extreme-scale supercomputers."

The multi-year project studies three high-priority ����ר�� edge-plasma challenges: gauging the heat-load that will strike the material surrounding the plasma in ����ר��; understanding the physics behind the transition from low-to-high ����ר�� plasmas; and, studying turbulence at the edge of ����ר�� 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 ����ר�� 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 ����ר�� Project, as some of ����ר��'s largest components arrive on site and the carefully orchestrated assembly phase for the ����ר�� machine and plant officially kicks off.

Newsline will continue to cover every aspect of ����ר�� 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 ����ר��'s e-card .

From Wednesday 4 December 2019 through 28 January 2020 a public service announcement on ����ר�� 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 ����ר�� 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 ����ר�� YouTube page in , , , or .

The 360° virtual tour of ����ר�� construction has been updated with drone footage from October 2019. Fly in, out and over the principal buildings of the ����ר�� 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 ����ר�� 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° ����ר�� virtual tour.

In the December 2019 issue of Physics Today (Volume 72, Issue 12), two physicists explore the ways in which ����ר�� 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 ����ר�� experimentation—heat and particle transport in the plasma core, stability of the edge region, plasma-boundary interactions, and alpha particle heating. "Experiments [at ����ר��] 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).

����ר��—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 ����ר�� 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 ����ר��" 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 ����ר�� partner countries, from any third party country that has a bilateral fusion cooperation agreement with Euratom, and to industrial participants in the ����ר�� 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 .

In November, record neutral beam power of 30.8 MW were injected into a plasma on the JET tokamak at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE).

The new record was achieved during tests preparing the plasma scenarios required for JET's deuterium-tritium experiments in 2020, which aim to achieve high fusion power for a stable five seconds. Increased heating powers are crucial to achieving this target.

Beams of neutral particles (known as neutral beam injection) are one of the main plasma heating schemes on fusion machines such as JET and ����ר��. As well as supplying most of the heating power, the injection of energetic particles also provides useful diagnostic data for physicists.

CCFE's engineering team, which operates JET on behalf of European scientists under the EUROfusion consortium, has upgraded the neutral beam system from its previous capacity of 23 MW to a potential maximum of 34 MW. The extra power will support researchers using JET to simulate plasmas for the ����ר�� Tokamak.

Read the full article on the CCFE website .

"The world's great powers can't agree on small steps to tackle climate change, but they're cooperating on a huge leap of faith in Provence." So begins a recent article in Bloomberg on the ����ר�� fusion project. Describing ����ר�� both as one of the world's biggest scientific puzzles as well as a trade puzzle, author Jonathan Tirone explains how a 35-country network is sharing intellectual property, collaborating to bypass difficulties, and ultimately—if ����ר�� succeeds—providing a template for world powers to develop fusion reactors or their own.

Read the article . (Photographs by Alastair Philip Wiper)

Next month, ����ר�� Director-General Bernard Bigot will be presiding over a major public event in Marseille: L'Usine Extraordinaire (Extraordinary Factories). The three-day exhibition, organized from 14 to 16 November 2019, brings together more than 50 industrial actors and aims to change the public's perception of "big industry" by highlighting technological innovation, excellence, discovery, and ... the possibility of exciting careers.

More information (in French) at

In a few decades, when dozen of fusion plants operate throughout the world and the first signs of alien life are detected in a faraway system, one will realize that it all started here, in a small corner of southern France, amidst the rolling hills of Haute-Provence.

The ����ר�� site and the are only 45 kilometres distant.

In 1995, two Swiss astronomers, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, coupled a highly sophisticated spectroscope to the Observatory's old 1.93-metre telescope (it was installed in 1958!) and discovered the first exoplanet—a "hot Jupiter" body orbiting the sun-like star 51 Pegasi, 42 light years distant from the Earth.

Last week, both Mayor and Queloz (along with astrophysicist James Peebles) were in Physics for "forever changing our conceptions of the world."

By the time the first ����ר�� buildings were coming out of the ground, close to 1,000 exoplanets had been detected. As of today, their number exceeds 4,500. Some of these worlds, made of solid rock like Earth, are orbiting the "habitable zone" of their star, where temperature allows water to be liquid and where life, whatever its form, is a possibility.

At an interval of a few years, on the ����ר�� site and at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence, the seeds were sown for two momentous, game-changing pursuits: the harnessing of fusion energy and the quest for life outside our solar system.

In order to generate large amounts of fusion power, there needs to be a combination of two heavy hydrogen nuclei such as deuterium and tritium. But because of the radioactive nature of tritium—and also its scarcity—most experimental plasmas consist of deuterium only.

Although scientists are able to scale up the predicted performance of deuterium-tritium (DT) plasmas, there is nothing like using the real DT mix itself.

Next year, the European tokamak JET will be re-introducing tritium into its vacuum vessel for the first time since 1997.

The importance of its DT experimental campaign cannot be overstated for ����ר��. Until ����ר�� starts operation with tritium in 2035, JET tritium and deuterium-tritium experiments will offer fusion scientists the opportunity to investigate physics relevant to high-fusion-power DT plasmas.

Read more about the planned campaign on the website of the .

Roundtable, from TRT World, describes itself as a discussion program with an edge. Broadcast out of London, it's about "bringing people to the table, listening to every opinion, and analyzing every point of view." In September 2019, host David Foster invited an illustrious panel to discuss the potential of hydrogen fusion: ����ר�� Director-General Bernard Bigot; Steven Cowley, director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and former CEO of the UK Atomic Energy Authority; Mark Wenman, Imperial College London; and Colin Walters, current director of the UK Atomic Energy Authority.

to watch the 25-minute program.

, a popular Hungarian video blogger, has created a fast-paced and jaunty feature on ����ר��.

Travelling between experts at the Wigner Research Centre for Physics in Budapest and Hungarian staff at ����ר��, he introduces his followers to the principles of fusion before diving into ����ר��, literally, as his camera follows him in and out of buildings under construction, stairwells, offices, eateries, and even the equipment room for worksite visitors. 

His program, posted to YouTube on 13 September, has passed 190K views in the first two months.

Watch the 33-minute video (in Hungarian, with English subtitles) .

In September, the US House Science Committee invited the ����ר�� to hold a mini "����ר�� Business Forum" in its chambers in Washington D.C. to inform US companies about upcoming business opportunities at ����ר��. Approximately 90 businesses attended the event, which was opened by ����ר�� Director-General Bernard Bigot. The next round of planned tender offers was described, and Skype links were made available for direct question and answer sessions with managers and department heads on site at ����ר��.

See this page on the ����ר�� website for more on current and forthcoming tender offers.