The Nuclear Fusion Award

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary year of the organisation’s founding, the International Atomic Energy Agency is launching an annual award to recognise outstanding work published in the journal Nuclear Fusion.

In the inaugural year of this award and in appreciation of the scientific work on fusion, the Japan Atomic Energy Agency has made a contribution of $2500 to be presented to the author of this distinguished paper.

The Nuclear Fusion Award will be given to the leading author of a selected distinguished paper among published papers in a particular volume of Nuclear Fusion .

Each year, a shortlist of ten papers will be nominated for the Nuclear Fusion award. These will be papers of the highest scientific standard, published in the journal volume from two years previous to the award year. Nominations will be based on citation record and recommendation by the Board of Editors. The Board will vote by secret ballot to determine which of these papers has made the largest scientific impact.

The selection of a Nuclear Fusion Award winner from among the Nuclear Fusion Award nominees will be made by the confidential voting of the Nuclear Fusion Editorial Board.

This award is also intended to encourage young scientists to submit excellent papers to this journal. But there should be no age limit. Age will only be considered to resolve a tie-break.

Visit the journal website at http://www.iop.org/journals/nf for information on publishing your work with Nuclear Fusion.

The inaugural Nuclear Fusion journal prize 2006

The inaugural Nuclear Fusion Award was presented at the 2006 Fusion Energy Conference in Chengdu, China for a paper that demonstrates how one of primary physics goals of ITER might be more safely realized.

Lead author TC Luce, was awarded the prestigious prize for the paper ‘Stationary high-performance discharges in the DIII-D tokamak’ (Nuclear Fusion 43 (5), pp. 321 - 329). The paper outlines a tokamak scenario that can maintain high fusion performance at reduced plasma current (compared with the conventional tokamak operational scenario), thereby lessening the potential for structural damage in the event of a major disruption. Projections in the paper show that realization of this scenario in ITER could lead to fusion performance at or above an energy gain of 10 for longer duration with reduced risk.


The Award	Dr. Luce receiving the award from Professor W. Burkart (Deputy Director General, Department of Nuclear Sciences and Applications, IAEA), and Dr. M. Kikuchi (Chairman of the Nuclear Fusion journal's Board of Editors) at the IAEA Fusion Energy Conference.