What’s New

The European Fusion Education Network, FuseNet, is organizing its third annual European Fusion Teacher Day on 14 October 2022. Open to all secondary school science and physics teachers in Europe, the fully virtual event aims to introduce educators to nuclear fusion and demonstrate how the subject can be taught in school. The ultimate goal is to increase exposure of students to the subject at the secondary level in order to spark interest and enthusiasm in the field.

Because the event is open to educators across Europe, the half-day program begins with local sessions via Zoom on what is going on in the field of fusion in your geographical zone. After the local sessions, participants will come together for a global livestream with presentations by keynote speakers and the distribution of free educational resources. The ITER Organization is one of the featured participants during the global livestream. 

Participation is free and registration is open now. Register before 1 October here.

On 19 September, the European Commission revealed the winners of the 2022 edition of the SOFT Innovation Prize. This prize, awarded at the 32nd Symposium on Fusion Technology (SOFT2022), gives recognition to outstanding researchers or industries who have found innovative ideas or proposed new solutions in fusion research.

This year's winners are:

First prize (€50,000): GRATUL (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Forschungszentrum Jülich) for the development of plasma sprayed, functionally graded tungsten/EUROFER coating as protective for the first wall of future fusion power plants. This technology was successfully transferred to industry, achieving a new record in coating large first wall mockups. The functional grading, which led to outstanding heat flux resistance, opens up the potential deployment of this innovation in other components of fusion technology, in high-voltage components, and in the concentrated solar power sector.

Second prize (€30,000): D1SUNED (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, UNED) for the development of an improved radiation transport code for dose rate evaluation in fusion application. Due to their high energy, fusion neutrons are penetrating deeply in the facility producing direct and indirect radiation fields whose evaluation is a challenging task. The D1SUNED provides a powerful tool to calculate and analyze these radiation fields required for safety and radioprotection studies that must be addressed properly during the design phase to secure successful licensing.

Third prize (€20,000): Dia Disk (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Diamond Materials GmbH) for the development of diamond window technology in high-power microwave applications as a vacuum barrier and confinement barrier for hazardous materials. The achieved higher disk diameter results in a substantially increased energy efficiency of the deposition process of diamond.

See the full announcement here.

On 15 September 2022, the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources held a "Hearing on the Federal Government's Role in Supporting the Commercialization of Fusion Energy."

The Chairman of the Committee, Senator Joe Manchin, had visited the ITER Project in France in March 2022. He opened the meeting by evoking the visit, saying that it left him "profoundly reflective of the potential of [fusion] technology to transform our energy future." The purpose of the hearing was to hear from a panel of experts on what they are doing to bring this "exciting technology" to fruition and to ask: What can the federal government do to help?

On the witness panel was: Dr Scott Hsu, Lead Fusion Coordinator, Office of the Undersecretary for Science and Innovation, Department of Energy; Professor Steven Cowley, Director, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory; Dr. Tim Luce, Chief Scientist and Head of the Science & Operation Domain at the ITER Organization; Dr. Bob Mumgaard, CEO and Co-Founder, Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

You can watch the archived webcast here.

You can access the testimony of Tim Luce here.