AIEA

As part of Agency activities to assist Member States in nuclear fusion research, three Technical Committee meetings were held during 1995. The first meeting, on alpha particles in fusion research, was held at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, USA, in April. The proceedings were published in the 35th anniversary special issue of the journal Nuclear Fusion. The second meeting, on H mode physics and also held at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, reviewed H mode transition physics, theory, scaling, edge localized modes, active control, and the potential benefits of H mode operations for reactors. The third meeting, on research using small tokamaks, was held in Ahmedabad, India, in December. The topics reviewed included plasma theory, heating, energy confinement, MHD activity and diagnostics in 14 tokamaks.

The final Research Co-ordination meeting for a CRP on the development of software for numerical simulation and data processing in fusion energy was held in Vienna in November. As a result of this CRP, better numerical simulation techniques and computer codes are now available which will help guide future plasma physics research. Many of the newly developed codes are already running in institutes that did not participate in this CRP.

A report on the interim design, cost review and safety analysis for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) was produced. This document comes at the mid-point in activities concerned with ITER engineering design. The Agency provided an atomic and molecular physics database to the ITER project and published various administrative and technical documents, including the ITER Monthly Newsletter.