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CURRENT ACTIVITY 



Meetings, Workshops, and Personnel Exchanges 



International scientific and technical meetings abound in fusion and 

 fusion technology under the sponsorship of numerous groups. Of the 

 international agencies, the IAEA is particularly active. Its meetings 

 and workshops, especially the biennial meeting on fusion, are one of 

 the few vehicles for significant interaction with the Soviets. 



Currently bilateral agreements exist, which formalize and balance 

 the flow of people, between the United States and the USSR, and 

 between the United States and Japan. In fact, outside of 

 international meetings, nearly all of the U.S. interaction with Japan 

 and the USSR is handled in a formal way, typically by agreeing once a 

 year to a rather detailed agenda of cooperative activities. 

 Additional interactions take place through normal scientific channels. 



One activity that deserves special note is the INTOR workshop, 

 which is a unique form of international cooperation midway between 

 scientific workshop and a joint planning activity. The INTOR activity 

 was originally formed as a consequence of a USSR proposal to look at 

 the technical issues of designing and building the next step beyond 

 the current generation of large tokamaks. 



The cooperation involves teams from the United States, Japan, the 

 EC, and the USSR. The mode of operation is national teeuns working on 

 parallel tasks and meeting two or three times a year for several weeks 

 in Vienna to critically discuss results and to plan future work. The 

 activity was successful in identifying critical issues in both the 

 physics and technology of fusion. Most people believe it is unlikely 

 that the INTOR machine will be built, but a large number of 

 significant insights have come out of the study. The approach is an 

 excellent model for other activities. 



Joint Planning 



Currently, formal joint planning is restricted to an agreement with 

 Japan. The major components are: (1) the program of the Joint 

 Institute for Fusion Theory, a collaboration between the Institute of 

 Fusion Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and the Institute 

 for Controlled Fusion Theory at Hiroshima University; (2) joint 

 planning in each of the principal science areas, ncunely, tandem 

 mirror, stellarator, compact toroid, bumpy torus, and the JT-60 and 

 TFTR experiments; and (3) a cooperative planning activity, which is 

 part of a technology exchange, between the Japanese FER design team 

 and U.S. designers. 



Informally, a great deal of joint planning, currently being 

 formalized under the lEA, goes on between the United States, Japan, 

 and the EC, primarily to coordinate experimental progreuns on the large 



