Commission of the European Communities, headquartered in Brussels. 

 The work on JET and some smaller scale studies at the Joint Research 

 Center of the EC, at Ispra, Italy, are joint activities of the member 

 countries. (See Commission of the European Communities, 1984b.) 



The broad intent of the EC program is to obtain from JET as much 

 information as is possible about a plasma near the reacting level. 

 Discussion and study is currently under way on the design of a machine 

 called the Next European Torus (NET) , which will use a 

 deuterium-tritium (D-T) plasma reacting for a duration of more than 

 100 seconds per observation and which will test reactor-relevant 

 technologies (NET Team, 1934) . Finally a demonstration machine is 

 contemplated to prove engineering feasibility. 



The main line of the Japanese program is carried out by the Japan 

 Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI) , under the Science and 

 Technology Agency (STA) . It is this organization that is constructing 

 and will operate the large JT-60 tokamak and investigate the 

 associated technoli ly (Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute, 1982) . 

 The Ministry of Educ ^tion. Science and Culture (Monbusho, after its 

 Japanese acronym) cor.L'icts a program of basic scientific and 

 technological research :n universities (Uchida, 1983). This program 

 has funding comparable to the program of JAERI. The program 

 investigates several confinement concepts incluaing tokamak, tandem 

 mirror, stellarator, reversed-f ield pinch, compact toroid, and bumpy 

 torus. The Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) is 

 observing progress with interest, but so far MITI is not so heavily 

 involved as the other two agencies. The program is coordinated 

 through an advisory body, the Nuclear Fusion Council, reporting 

 through the Atomic Energy Commission to the Prime Minister's office. 



The long-term Japanese plans are to verify, using JT-60, the 

 physics of confinement and the attainability of the necessary 

 conditions of density and temperature in a hydrogen plasma for fusion 

 to occur. Dependent on favorable results, planning is underway for a 

 device called the Fusion Experimental Reactor (FER) , to be constructed 

 to study the operation and the technology associated with a fully 

 reacting D-T plasma. Presumably some sort of prototype or 

 demonstration will follow FER, but such plans are not definite at this 

 time. 



PRIOR C(X)PERATION 



Research in the early days of fusion was classified, in the mistaken 

 belief that success would come easily and great advantages would 

 accrue to the first country to harness fusion power. The first major 

 open exchange of information came in 1958 at a conference on the 

 peaceful uses of atomic energy in Geneva. Following that conference, 

 more normal kinds of scientific interaction appeared in the fusion 



