 Well, it isn't very often a scientist gets the chance to work on a project that can change the world. So the expectation was that again this will be a rather dull experimental day. And I was actually the chauffeur of Atsimovic who was driving him. I think that this is sufficient to say that the role of Fusion Energy Conference in my career is very remarkable. Because of the limited communication pre-internet days, a lot of the results were shown for the first time at that meeting. No energy is more expensive than no energy. It is the year 1958. For the second time, the United Nations have invited the nuclear community to discuss the peaceful use of the atom. And it's during this week of September that history is written. After decades of research carried out in top secrecy behind both sides of the iron curtain, the status of work on controlled nuclear fusion is disclosed to the world at large. From now on, scientists are free to compare their results and share their doubts and expectations. This second Atoms for Peace Conference marked the beginning of global cooperation and the starting point of the International Atomic Energy Agency's activities in support of nuclear fusion. Well, you know, in the early days, in the 50s, you had these big Geneva conferences on the peaceful uses of nuclear energy after Eisenhower had announced this program of Atoms for Peace. And in those days, early days, it was more science. And we had something called the Scientific Advisory Committee, which consisted of very prominent scientists. Homi Baba from India was one of them. There were others. And it was natural for them to recommend that the agency be helpful in also promoting the emergence of fusion. So that was the background why the agency came to be sort of framework for this work and helping the fusion community. Soon after the Geneva Monster Conference in 1961, the IAEA convened an international conference on plasma physics and controlled nuclear fusion research in Salzburg, Austria. More than 500 scientists representing 29 nations and six international organizations participated in the first FEC. More than 100 papers were presented over the six days and informal discussions lasted long into the night. I guess I started to my fusion career by your one month internship in the CEA. So the thing you do at towards the end of your studies. And this was in a fusion group in CEA. And I saw the people coming back from actually a conference in Salzburg, which I think was the first one if I'm not mistaken. And I saw the scientists coming back very excited from what they had heard in Salzburg. And certainly that pushed me to try to know more about this. From now on, the international fusion community would meet in a different city, in a different country, every three years. At that time, this is before today's the internet. And so the fusion energy conference was a mechanism for people in the community to find out what the latest and greatest results were from experiments around the world. And there was a healthy sense of competition where people would take their latest results, sometimes literally from experiments done the day or the week before the meeting, and present it at the meeting. And so it was a very informative meeting. I remember all of us taking copies of the papers that were presented at that meeting, sticking in our suitcases so we could step in in detail when we got home. Then came 1968. The third fusion energy conference was held in Akadem-Gorodok, close to Novosibirsk in far out Siberia, a conference that changed the course of fusion research. And it so happened that this conference in Novosibirsk is actually one of the most important ones. For what reason? Well, it's because it was the conference where the Russian team in Kochatov, headed by Lev Artsimovich, actually gave very convincing details on the results they had obtained with their tokamak. For the first time they had obtained one millisecond, which was nearly a factor of 10, better than anyone else, and obtained a kilovolt, which looked small these days, but was also a lot more than what had been obtained before. So we were all actually impressed by this. And I should say that Lev Artsimovich was a wonderful man. He had a great wisdom and like international collaboration, and he pushed international collaboration and gave all sorts of details. In fact, he did even better than that, because he was invited by CEA at the time at Saclay, which is 20 kilometers south of Paris, and was giving a series of lecture. I still have a book of this lecture, and I attended this lecture. There were about 20 of us, I guess, listening to during one week, if I remember well, these lectures of Artsimovich, and here he told us the fundamental aspects, which we remembered vividly, and they were extremely important at the time. It follows from the formula that in a device designed for obtaining a very high temperature plasma, one can reach very high values of tau, only if increasing the radius of a toroidal chamber in closing the plasma ring ends the strength of both magnetic fields, HZ and HI. As amusing anecdotes, actually Artsimovich came to France, he came twice to France. One of these time was in May 68, and you may remember that May 68 was also the time of the student riots, which actually paralyzed nearly all friends for a month. But still these lectures went on, and that was actually the chauffeur of Artsimovich who was driving him from Saclay back to the Latin district in Paris, where he had a hotel. It was at the time where the street in Paris were actually barricaded with street cobbles, so I had to move Artsimovich toward this hotel at this time, and he turned to me and said, Luke Jean, for me it's a great pleasure to see what a real revolution is. This is actually an absolutely true anecdote. So the lectures and the papers published by the Russian group at the time impressed so much the international community that it was a major change of the research programs around the world. So essentially the American, the first to react actually were the French group in TFR for a reason that with the student revolution there has been a big change in management. Actually the scientists there were called to express their opinion and to see how the program should change. So actually the French group was the first one to actually convert all their activities to Tokomak activities and decided to construct TFR, which for a while was the largest Tokomak. But the other labs did in a slow way, did the same thing. In Princeton, for instance, they turned a sterrator into the ST Tokomak. The Germans built Tokomak as well. Essentially everyone built Tokomak starting after this 68th conference. So this was a major milestone for which we are still continuing into the same lines. Another anecdote, I think, which actually happened in the corridors of the conference in Novosibirsk, is the fact that the Americans had built a larger sterrator and the sterrator was not giving very good results. At the time they didn't know why. Now we know why. But so the director of the Princeton lab was Merville Gottlieb, if I remember well. He has been the director there for nearly 20 years in Princeton and he followed actually Leman Spitzer. He's very famous. So Gottlieb, I remember because I was sitting actually with them and I remember Gottlieb challenging Artsy Bovic and say, look, I think what you think is one kilovolt temperature are only runaways. I challenge you to just put a wire in your Tokomak and all your runaways will disappear and your result will not be as good. And I remember there was a very lively discussion there at the time and actually the Brits from Cullum said, well, look, we have a new diagnostic which is Thompson scattering. They were the first one, the Cullum group to use Thompson scattering and say, look, we propose that we will measure by Thompson scattering the temperature, the electron temperature in the Russian Tokomak. And so they did. So it was during this conference actually in the lobby that it was agreed that a British team headed by, if I remember well, by Neil Peacock and Derek Robinson, I think was part of that team as well, that this team would come and measure independently the electron temperature using Thompson scattering. So they did. And I guess a year after, they did confirm that the Russian had obtained the one kilovolt. And this contributed, by the way, a lot to the new mood of turning to Tokomak, which was called the Tokomak mania at the time. Well, the fusion world is an adulteram's a bit on fusion. But then the Russians claimed that they were making big advances. And a lot of the Western scientists didn't believe their results because they're such a jump. In fact, order of magnitude better results than anybody in the West was getting. And as a result of this, there was a Pugwash conference. It was held every few years where top scientists meet and try and get the world to be more peaceful. And Baz Piz, the Cullum director, was talking to Artzimovich, who was the chief Russian scientist. And Artzimovich asked Baz Piz, well, he's talking to Baz Piz, and he says he was impressed by our diagnostics and would Cullum send a team to Moscow to confirm the results as the rest of the world tends not to believe them. Anyway, Baz Piz agreed to this. It took us three months to actually, it was quite incredible, to build up the whole equipment. We had the full resources of the Tom Genji authority, which in those days includes the weapons people. In fact, the weapons people built most of the equipment for us, which was great help. And again, we had the carp launch for this, the expense didn't come into it. And also, the Americans chipped in and they let us have the latest photo detectors, which were still classified in those days, which we shouldn't have really taken to Russia, but nobly knew. And then on March the 16th, in 1969, we, I had to fly first of all with the equipment, it actually was five tons of equipment, but some of the equipment was very bulky, particularly the screen room. And we found that there's only one plane flying to Moscow that could accommodate this, and this belonged to Pakistan Airlines. They were very helpful, they agreed to lay on. They just asked, when do you want to fly? And they laid on the special plane for us with the special door. So that was quite a big exercise. So then we were off to Moscow. Anyway, it took a few weeks to get all the equipment assembled. And then we had to fire up a laser. We had to do this in the evening, because we had to fire the laser in open air, so to speak. So we had to go back in the evenings to fire the laser, and we had laser goggles on, and they wouldn't let any people in. And the scourgy staff were frightened to come in anyway, so they left us alone. After a few weeks, we started firing the plasma, and we checked, there was no background noise, and things like this, basic checks. And then when it came to July, we had the first scattering results, loading clear. And you will see from Derek Robinson's notebook, it says, it indicates 1K EV, and that was the first indication that we had really succeeded. The first thing, well, there were two things. First of all, Brad's piece of direct had to tell Harold Firth, who's the head of the American effort. He was waiting to hear the news, and as soon as the Americans heard our news, they changed their, all their machines, well, the main machines, to a Tokamak. And they did this within four months, they gathered. In fact, the whole world, they were swimming around behind Tokamaks. So that was the main effect of our trip. And also it led to the West doing the jet, obviously, and eventually, ETA. And also, I think, the other important things, we led the first of international collaboration against all the odds, so to speak. Perhaps these men will find a way to make the fusion fire burn longer. Perhaps they will find a way to make nuclear fusion a new source of energy for mankind. Well, it was a time where both the theory and the experiments learned their trade. It was a time where a new instability was being discovered every year, or 203, by the way. And it was a time of great disillusion on the performance of the machines that were being constructed. You know pretty well that the expectation at the time was that due to the Coulomb collision, then we could have an energy confinement time, rather big, with fairly modest size of machines. And that was at the time what was coming from the first cut of theory. But then came all the instabilities. And soon the mirror machines suffered from so-called anisotropy-driven instabilities. Actually, it was the talk I gave at the Novosibirsk conference anisotropy-driven instabilities and how they were observed. And they actually killed the so-called mirror machines. And that's the reason why toroidal machines actually survived. It was a time where fundamental discoveries on essentially the stability of the plasma, the collective stability of the plasma, was being discovered both experimentally and theoretically. And a major breakthrough is the fact that actually Kuskal-Schafranoff, you know, actually discovered how to stabilize the large-scale instabilities, MHD instabilities. And that was actually why the Tokamak performed so well, because essentially they had discovered that one should not increase the current in this toroidal machine too much, otherwise you had large-scale instabilities that would totally destroy the plasma. This is what's happening in Zeta. Zeta has far too much current and the results were disappointing. But the Tokamak, they had now a formula which is the Schafranoff limit, as you must know, and of course all Tokamaks now respect the Schafranoff limit that you know probably by having a Q greater than 3 at the edge or to prevent the large-scale instabilities. In the mid-70s you had the high ion temperature results from PLT which showed that some of the theoretical concerns that instabilities would limit the ion temperature were unfounded and we could actually get the high ion temperatures that we needed for fusion reactions. So there's been a series of events that have occurred in the Fusion Energy Conference that have created moments of intense excitement. My opinion is that transition from dreams to reality requires friendly discussions and knowledge exchange between the best professionals in the field of the activity. Well, generally of course the FEC conference has always been a milestone where major results have been reported and were sort of confirmed by the discussions. I remember say half a dozen of them, more than the others. After Novosibirsk I remember the Brussels conference in 1980. Well essentially because TFR had for the first time developed powerful additional heating, both with beams and RF and at the time we reported bad news which was the degradation of energy confinement. So I remember that, so we were actually the first one to show that in L mode the confinement degrades and of course that was pretty worrying. Of course soon after the H mode came and the confinement recovered. It just came without any expectations. So this was a Thursday and Thursdays were regular experimental days on Aztecs, the old Aztecs, not Aztecs upgrades, the predecessor of Aztecs upgrade and we always discussed the program on the Monday before and for this Thursday there was the plan to explore again Newton beam heated discharges. And this was my program. I was in charge of Newton beam heated plasma physics on Aztecs and nobody was very excited about this program because of course we had already done a lot there and more or less always encountered the same. So the expectation was that again this will be a rather dull experimental day where we ultimately recognize and confirm once and again that the confinement under these circumstances degrades. These plasmas were extremely reproducible and this was their only advantage. The negative aspect of course was the degradation of confinement and this reproducibility was so extreme that for example when we followed the saw teeth and compared saw teeth then in the next discharge then they were basically the same. So you could nearly predict like with a clock that now a saw tooth comes how long it is, what the amplitude is, so higher reproducibility but nothing else. And then suddenly there was a drastic change and this change was so strong in all plasma parameters that everybody in the control room noticed this. So the first direction was these are dirty discharges which have a lot of saw teeth. We mixed up the elms, later we called them elms, so the edge localized molds with the saw teeth in the plasma core but this was the first response. My advantage was maybe that I was still fairly new in fusion so that I did not have for each argument a counter argument. And what I was surprised by the aspect that the loop voltage decreased after this transition in a period where otherwise the density increased and specifically also the impurity radiation as we saw it in the soft extra radiation also increased. So this I felt was something new. I had analyzed these discharges then during the weekend and then for the next meeting on Monday presented the results and then it became clear to everybody that we have something new, something we have not yet seen. And we originally called these discharges, Thursday discharges because they came up on Thursday. The next day we also operated, this was Friday, we tried to reproduce it but this was not successful so the alternative then was called Friday discharges. Then on the next Tuesday, next week, we again continued and again we found the Thursday discharge. So we had the Thursday discharge now on Tuesday so this was not a very clever name and therefore we changed it then and the next step to A and B discharges. But then we recognized that this is not so clever either because we spent a lot of time to find out whether now the A type is the good or the bad one or whether the B type is the good one. So it became clear that we needed something which is nemotechnically more elegant and we called it then H and L discharges, H mode, high confinement, L mode, low confinement and this is the nomenclature which is still used today. The first international forum to report on those results was in June 1982 and this was during the Varena Summer School and I'm afraid I did not do a very good job and was able to convince the participants because I have heard then later that specifically American colleagues went back after our summer school and reported that the Aztecs team obviously measures the plasma current incorrectly. This of course was not the situation we were able to measure the plasma current as everybody else was. The next meeting then was in Baltimore, 1982 in September and I had an oral presentation but it was the custom at the IAEA meeting because they had too many talks, too many topics that one has one's talk on one side and then also has to rapporteur on other findings of the machine. So in my case I had reported on the H mode physics and I also reported now on behalf of other members of our team on specific neutron measurements on Aztecs. So the time was not sufficient now to satisfy let me say the curiosity of all the participants there and therefore it was Paul Rutherford from the Princeton Laboratory who proposed whether we should not have a separate meeting in the evening and this is what then actually happened and when the history says I was grilled this was maybe my feeling so we had a couple of hours joint discussion which I remember was highly interesting and I forgot maybe I was too nervous whether I enjoyed this phase but it was a phase to indeed enjoy and at the end now of our discussion Rich Horiluck another member from the Princeton University came up, congratulated, shook my hands this was possible, these days and from there on the H mode was acknowledged and was now a player in the fusion community because shortly after this the Princeton device PDX and also the device in San Diego they both found the H mode also and then shortly after this also Jet the largest device was able to operate in the H mode. I remember in 1982 before we turned on those large experiments that we were facing L mode scaling which was adverse we also were dealing with low beta limits on number experiments and we were just discussing those results in the Baltimore meeting and that is an evening session that year when Fritz Wagner presented the H mode results for the first time in the more detailed that was presented in the oral presentation and we all saw there's a path forward to increase confinement time there was something so new people had lots and lots of questions and I remember going up to Fritz after the evening presentation and said he did a great job presenting the results that I was convinced and I told him that time that this was a new mode of operation that had promise and he actually made a very strong case that was enhanced confinement but the people were skeptical and trying to understand what this all meant frankly the nature of science well in 1985 there was a famous meeting between Gorbachev and Reagan and that was the beginning of the early phase of the detente actually and then they then agreed upon the project on fusion so that was one feature of it but for our part even more important was then the decision the determination to come up with a huge project of fusion perhaps one that didn't realize at the time how big it was but there it was and it has worked ever since Good morning Excellencies Good morning ladies and gentlemen I would like to welcome you all to this meeting of the ITER Council and in fact the first ITER associated meeting since the formal acceptance by the four parties of the Director General's invitation to participate in ITER Well in those days when the ITER was started in the agency there were many interesting personalities of course who played a part in this and I met some of them I remember distinctly Gelikov who was the Deputy President of the Soviet Academy of Science Fusion is not achieved the commercial step and in such case we have in very proper time to cooperate together because I hope after our cooperation the result was the commercialization of fusion Gelikov were very much part of that and another person who was part of it and who really was responsible within the agency was Moritsu Sifiriro who was the Deputy Director General Head of the Department of Research and ITER and he also had another quality that made him exceptional he was a very good manager he managed people very well and that's not always present but it's very important I can tell you in international relations so I stand him great gratitude to Moritsu Sifiriro who passed away a number of years ago nevertheless this occasion is an important milestone in the progress of the ITER project and it is appropriate for me to express perhaps from a different perspective the agency's views on fusion research in general on the importance of this subject then of course I remember Kyoto in 1986 because in Kyoto in 1986 it was the one jet showed that they had reached an H-Mode for the first time so it was a demonstration that the H-Mode was a universal sort of a universal and very beneficial transition so I remember this one and it was certainly the basis for pursuing the tokomak research to a larger scale then I remember Würzburg in Germany in 1992 because it was when jet announced the result of the first DT conference this is the first time then a fusion machine produced fusion power by putting a little bit of tritium in addition to deuterium then I remember Yokohama and Yokohama of course this was in 1998 where jet then discussed the DT2 so the full DT phase of jet where we reached 16 megawatts and where we showed a number of very important things on the physics that actually with tritium things were working at least as well as with deuterium maybe somewhat better and of course I had carried the half of these experiments myself as an associate director and that was something very very important for me and I guess for the fusion community as well jet and TFTR were working on similar goals in particular trying to do deuterium trading experiments we got eventually the 10 megawatts in 1995 and jet in 1997 we got up to 16 megawatts during 1994 to 1998 while the crews of TFTR and jet achieved record breaking results operating with deuterium tritium fuel JT60U achieved a performance with deuterium fuel equivalent in a simulation with deuterium tritium fuel to a fusion gain above one the important part of that was not just the numbers in terms of how many megawatts which group prepared but was the science that we got and the fact that we motivated each other on the science where there was studying the ion induced alpha modes looking at the confinement time looking at how it projected eventually to future machines at the eater and all of that was a critical knowledge which we did not have going into the era of the large tokamak experiments in the 90s then of course in 2002 this was the the fusion conference was in Lyon and actually I was the organizer of this conference as the director of the director of the CEA laboratory and it was also a time where the French machine called Torsupra now it's called West where it actually broke the record of duration of the tokamak plasma to six minutes so I reported at this time also this thing well when we went to the Chengdu meeting that was the time for the first time we saw results from East and they were able to get the machine online so rapidly then finally I remember well so Geneva 2008 because it was a conference where we celebrated 50 years in fusion and this was actually moving to see that after the big conference of Atom for Peace then we could we could summarize the progress which had been made since that time subsequently we had the meeting in Korea and we saw the first results from KSTAR so it was really great to see these new super guillotine machines coming online following in the footsteps of Torsupra but now also including super guillotine PF coils and in addition to that we were getting in the 2000s results both NSDXU and MAS both looking to study the science with low aspect ratio to get the higher beta and hopefully to take advantage of that to get to a more economical fusion reactor so there's been progress in a number of fronts in recent years and all of it is needed to eventually address the issues of fusion energy and another thing that has been going on we heard the last meeting was the wonderful results from W7X and also from LHD and starting in the Yokohama meeting in 1998 and then in all the subsequent meetings and the progress of the Stelbrator committee has made and both of these machines have really shown that there's a new pathway to optimizing fusion with the three-dimensional systems and finally at the 28th Fusion Energy Conference in 2021 another important milestone was the announcement of the JT-60 SA Tokamak in Japan entering its integrated commissioning phase this project which started in 2007 as a collaboration between Japan and Europe is presently the largest Tokamak ever built it will soon begin addressing key physics and engineering issues in support of ETA and next step devices while magnetic confinement fusion research continues to progress important breakthroughs continue to be made in other confinement technologies including inertial fusion and alternative concepts with some of these efforts spearheaded by an increasing number of private companies and public private partnerships as of May 2021 120 fusion devices are operating under construction or being planned around the world of course the most important next step is the operation of ETA so first there is the need to succeed in ETA it's an absolute must but I'm very confident that it will be a success but we should remind all the participants that they should do all their best for this to be to be a success the Fusion Energy Conference has traditionally been an extremely important venue for people not just to discuss the science because there are many other conferences that can provide venues for discussing the science but to discuss the future directions of the Fusion Energy Program both in terms of the overview talks and the side discussions and satellite meetings to really map out where we as a community need to go to develop fusion energy and it's thanks to this collaboration culture that we have in fusion which was actually started by Radzimovich we should remember that thanks to this culture that we can progress much faster that if we were each doing this research alone and I would say by a long way at its 60 years age Fusion Energy Conference remains the greatest tool for organization of fusion community in solving very important environmental and energy problems of mankind I wish it intrinsically a long life and happy life thank you now that the stage has been set and we all know the common challenge is to decarbonize and to do it fast we need all viable technologies and fusion power holds the promise of providing us with infinite clean and safe energy so let's continue to work together towards this grand engineering challenge of the 21st century achieving energy production from nuclear fusion this is possible thank you for your attention