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USBPO Mission Statement: Advance the scientific understanding of burning plasmas and ensure the greatest benefit from a burning plasma experiment by coordinating relevant U.S. fusion research with broad community participation.

CONTENTS

Announcements
Director’s Corner	C.M. Greenfield
Announcements for APS-DPP Community Planning Program
Contact and Contribution Information

Web seminars (Amanda Hubbard, USBPO Deputy Director)

We would like to thank Xavier Litaudon (EUROfusion) for an excellent and well attended seminar on the JET programme on May 2. His slides are now available on the USBPO home page:

/index.php.

To support the ongoing APS-DPP Community Planning Process (DPP-CPP, see additional information in this issue), the USBPO will host an upcoming webinar on:

Date: Wednesday, May 15, 2 PM ET (11 AM PT)

Topic: The Community Planning Process for Magnetic Fusion Energy: How to Get Involved

Speaker: Dr. Nathan Howard, MIT (DPP-CPP co-chair)

Nathan Howard will give a short description of the planning process and an update on current and upcoming events. After the presentation, he and the other MFE co-chairs will be available to answer questions from participants.

Since this seminar aims to engage the US Magnetic Fusion Energy research community, connection details will be sent to the USBPO members list. If you are eligible but not yet a member, we encourage you to join.

 

Research in Support of ITER contributed oral session at the Fort Lauderdale APS-DPP Conference

For the eleventh time, last year’s APS Division of Plasma Physics annual meeting included a contributed oral session on Research in Support of ITER, which included talks from US and international participants. These sessions have become quite popular and are always well attended.

The US Burning Plasma Organization is organizing a similar session for the 61^st Annual Meeting of the Division of Plasma Physics, which will take place in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on October 21-25. Once again, we are looking for talks on research that has been done specifically to address ITER design, operation, or physics issues. These brief talks are “standard” contributed orals: 10 minutes in duration, followed by a 2-minute discussion period. We hope to have broad participation once again, so we can highlight the breadth of this work and the institutions performing it, both US and international.

The abstract submission deadline for this year’s meeting is July 12, so we need to get started with this year’s process. If you or a colleague are interested in making a presentation in this session, please send a title, brief synopsis (one paragraph is sufficient), and speaker’s contact information as soon as possible (but no later than June 12) to me (Chuck Greenfield, greenfield@fusion.gat.com). The brief synopsis should provide a sufficient description to understand the work and its importance to ITER.

Note that space is limited to 15 talks, so we almost certainly won’t be able to include all talks nominated. We will inform speakers by June 28, giving time for any not selected for the ITER session to indicate a preference for other sessions, or allow the conference program committee to select an appropriate session.

Last year we ran into an issue where many of you were still waiting at our deadline to find out if you had an invited talk. Even if you are waiting, I encourage you to put in a request for a slot in this session. If you are offered a spot on June 28 and you feel you need to decline because you have an invited talk (APS rules do not preclude your doing both, but that is a lot of work), we will understand.

A full abstract would still need to be submitted via the conference website no later than 5:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time on July 12. If your talk is accepted for this session, please indicate “Research in Support of ITER” in the placement requests box on your abstract submission.

DPP-CPP is ramping up

Please see the announcements of upcoming activities elsewhere in this issue of the eNews. This should be a large community effort and I hope all US participants in burning plasma research will contribute. This process has the potential to shape what we do in our field in the coming decades.

In discussions with the organizers of the Community Planning Process, they indicated that it is desirable to have strong advocacy for existing facilities and projects to sustain support for them. It probably won’t surprise anybody that I believe our long-term goal should be fusion energy, the next step on the path to get there is a burning plasma, and ITER is our best chance to obtain and study that first burning plasma. So as this process moves along, I will be attempting to organize an advocacy group for activities in the US Fusion Energy Sciences program to prepare now for a successful research program in ITER, for the US to participate in that successful research program, and for the results to be brought back for use in planning the remaining steps to fusion energy. You may hear more about this in coming weeks.

Jobs openings at ITER

Just a reminder that several important scientific positions are open at ITER, including two with application periods closing in the next few days (May 12):

·         Experiments and Plasma Operations Section Leader (Section Leader SCOD-100)

·         Plasma Modeling and Analysis Section Leader (Section Leader SCOD-040)

Please see my column from last month for more information. Additional positions of potential interest to our readers have already been posted in recent weeks.

Jobs at ITER are generally open for only a short time so if you are interested, please don’t wait. These and other positions at ITER can always be found at https://www.iter.org/jobs… if you’d like to work at ITER you should keep checking back as new positions appear frequently.

The APS-DPP Community Planning Process (DPP-CPP) is the community-input phase in addressing a strategic planning charge to DOE Office of Fusion Energy Science Advisory Committee (FESAC). The website https://sites.google.com/pppl.gov/dpp-cpp/home has been established as a repository for information about the process, organization, workshops and meetings, and resources. Broad community participation is critical for the success of this process. Please share these announcements with your colleagues.

Workshop for Magnetic Fusion Energy (MFE) and Fusion Materials and Technology (FM&T)

We are pleased to announce that a joint workshop of the Magnetic Fusion Energy and Fusion Materials and Technology topical areas will be held at the University of Wisconsin, Madison from July 22–26, 2019. This workshop will include presentations by advocacy groups on proposed FES initiatives, breakout sessions by expert groups for discussing and evaluating these proposals, and forums on cross-cutting issues that affect all topical areas within FES. Additional details, including the agenda and how to register, will be added to the DPP-CPP website (https://sites.google.com/pppl.gov/dpp-cpp) and announced as they become available. Broad participation in this workshop is encouraged.

If your advocacy group would like to request a plenary presentation at this workshop, please submit an initiative white paper at the DPP-CPP website by June 14 (https://sites.google.com/pppl.gov/dpp-cpp/home/input-and-feedback).  Please note that we will continue to accept white papers and initiative proposals after this date, and revisions or updates can be submitted at any time.

Call for White Papers

At this time, we are accepting white papers for the DPP-CPP.  Both informational white papers and white papers advocating specific FES initiatives will be accepted.

For white papers advocating specific FES initiatives, we require that these white papers adhere to a template. This template is now available on the DPP-CPP website at https://sites.google.com/pppl.gov/dpp-cpp/home/input-and-feedback. The purpose of this template is to ensure that the community and expert groups have sufficient information about the initiative proposal to determine the role of that initiative in the overall strategic plan for FES. White papers will be made publicly available for review and comment.

For more information about the process, organization, and how to get involved, please visit the DPP-CPP website (https://sites.google.com/pppl.gov/dpp-cpp).

2019

June 2-6	28th IEEE/NPSS Symposium on Fusion Engineering (SOFE)	Jacksonville, FL
July 8-12	46th European Physical Society Conference on Plasma Physics (EPS)	Milan, Italy
August 19-21	17th International Workshop on Plasma Edge Theory in Fusion Devices	UCSD, CA
Sept 3-6	16th IAEA Technical Meeting on Energetic Particles – Theory of Plasma Instabilities	Shizuoka City, Japan
Sept 9-11	10th IAEA Technical Meeting on Steady State Operation of Magnetic Fusion Devices	Hefei, China
Sept 30 – Oct 3	6th International Symposium on Liquid Metals Applications for Fusion (ISLA-6)	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, IL
October 9-11	17th International H-mode workshop	Shanghai, China
October 21-25	61st Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics	Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Oct 27 – Nov 1	19th International Conference on Fusion Reactor Materials	La Jolla, CA
November 4-7	Third IAEA Technical Meeting on Divertor Concepts	IAEA HQ, Vienna, Austria
November 4-8	Asia-Pacific DPP	Hefei, China
December 3-4	40th Fusion Power Associates (FPA) Annual Meeting and Symposium	Washington DC

2020

JET DT-campaign (/resources/ref/Web_Seminars/Litaudon-JET-%202019-05-02-vf.pdf)

JT60-SA First Plasma (http://jt60sa.org/)

Editor: Walter Guttenfelder (wgutten@pppl.gov)