Current Trends in International Fusion Research : Proceedings of the Second Symposium

The first Symposium in this series "Current Trends in International Fusion Research: Review and Assessment" was held in Washington, D.C., U.S.A., in November 1994 and the Proceedings were published in 1997. A full report of the Symposium appeared in a special issue of the Journal of Fusion Energy, 14 (3): 281-327, 1995.

As a continuation of these successful biennial conferences, a second Symposium was held in Washington, D.C., on March 10-14, 1997. A selected number of scientists, whose reputation and stature are renowned, were invited to present review papers in their field of interest in fusion research. Since the gathering was international in nature, scientists from all over the world were invited and the meeting had representatives from the United States, Canada, Mexico, Russia, Japan, Spain, etc. The objectives of the Symposium were to identify, review, and assess the benefits, uncertainties, and potentialities of the conventional, alternative, and exploratory approaches to fusion based research, and to assess industrial spinoffs, and other applications. A Panel of Distinguished Scientists and Engineers, which included Drs. Stirling Colgate, Edward Creutz, Arthur Kantrowitz (Chairman), Joseph E. Lannutti, Hans J. Schneider-Muntau, Glen T. Seaborg (Nobel Prize Winner), and Frederick Seitz were in charge of commenting on the fusion programs presented at the Symposium and to provide recommendations with respect to direction, balance, and synergism of the research.

The Proceedings of the second Symposium contains all the review papers presented at the meeting, as well as the report from the Panel of Distinguished Scientists and Engineers.

After a year at the Polytechnic Institute of New York with a N.A.T.O. Postdoctoral Fellowship, Dr. Emilio Panarella joined the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) in 1964, where he worked in plasma physics and thermonuclear fusion. The fusion concept evolved from his work--the Spherical Pinch--is now recognized as one of the leading contenders in inertial confinement fusion. In 1987 he resigned from his position as Senior Research Officer to found his own company, Advanced Laser and Fusion Technology, Inc., of which he is Principal Scientist. In 1989, while continuing to maintain a working relationship with the NRC, he joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, as an Adjunct Professor.

Dr. Panarella is a Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences, a Senior Member of the IEEE, and a member of Sigma Xi Research Society, the American Physical Society, the European Physical Society, the Italian Physical Society, and the Canadian Nuclear Society. He is the editor of Physics Essays, an international journal dedicated to fundamental problems in physics, as well as co-editor of the N.A.T.O. Advanced Research Workshop Proceedings "Quantum Uncertainties: Recent and Future Experiments and Interpretations." He has published well over 100 papers in archival journals and has been invited to lecture in various institutions, including Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States, Centre de recherches nucleaires in France, Imperial College of Science and Technology in the United Kingdom, and the University of Pisa in Italy.