Message from the Editor

Abstract

This last year being an odd numbered year, the pages of Nuclear Fusion saw a large influx of expanded papers from the 2012 Fusion Energy Conference in San Diego. Many papers have focused on the scientific and technical challenges posed by ITER. Contributions are steadily increasing from the new superconducting tokamaks in Asia.The ITER Project continues to move ahead. Construction at the Cadarache site is quite remarkable. Buildings completed include the huge Poloidal Field Coils Winding Facility and the Headquarters building, which has been occupied by the ITER staff. Work is progressing on the Assembly building and the Cryostat Workshop. The base of the tokamak complex is being laid. Besides the construction that is taking place and will take place at the site, components from around the world have to navigate the complex route from Marseilles to the site. A test convoy replicating the dimensions and weights of the most exceptional ITER loads successfully traversed that route in 2013. We are pleased to report that the IAEA and ITER have finalized the agreement for ITER authors to publish papers in Nuclear Fusion .Nuclear Fusion is proud to continue its key role in providing the leading forum for the documentation of scientific progress and exchange of research results internationally toward fusion energy.RefereeingThe Nuclear Fusion editorial office appreciates greatly the effort made by our referees to sustain the high quality of the journal. Since January 2005, we have been offering the most active referees over the past year a personal subscription to Nuclear Fusion with electronic access for one year, free of charge. We have excluded our Board Members, Guest Editors of special editions and those referees who were already listed in previous years.The following people have been selected:J.M. Canik, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USAI.T. Chapman, Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, UKL.-G. Eriksson, Commission of the European Communities, BelgiumT. Evans, General Atomics, USAA. Hassanein, Purdue University, USAY.-M. Jeon, National Fusion Research Institute, SpainS. Kajita, Nagoya University, JapanT.P. Kiviniemi, Aalto University, FinlandR.M. More, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USAF. Sattin, Associazione Euratom-ENEA-CNR, ItalyJ.A. Snipes, ITER Organization, FranceW. Suttrop, Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics-Garching, GermanyF.L. Tabares, Energy Environment and Technology Research Centre, SpainY. Ueda, Osaka University, JapanV.S. Voitsenya, Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology, UkraineG. Xu, Chinese Academy of Sciences-Hefei Institutes of Physical Sciences, People's Republic of ChinaIn addition, there is a group of several hundred referees who have helped us in the past year to maintain the high scientific standard of Nuclear Fusion . At the end of this issue we give the full list of all referees for 2013. Our thanks to them!We also wish to express our thanks to Paul Thomas, who served as Guest Editor for the special issue of the overview and summary reports from the 24th Fusion Energy Conference in San Diego, October 2012. This issue is of great value as a summary of the major developments worldwide in fusion research in the last two years.AuthorsThe winner of the 2013 Nuclear Fusion Award is D.G. Whyte for the paper: I-mode: an H-mode energy confinement regime with L-mode particle transport in Alcator C-Mod [1], and we congratulate him and coauthors on this achievement.We also note special topic papers published in 2013: Technical challenges in the construction of the steady-state stellarator Wendestein 7-X by H.S. Bosch et al [2], Power requirements for electron cyclotron current drive and ion cyclotron resonance heating for sawtooth control in ITER by I.T. Chapman et al [3] and IFMIF: overview of the validation activities by J. Knaster et al [4].The Board of EditorsThe Board of Editors has had a substantial turnover in members. For their great service to the journal, we wish to thank the following outgoing Board Members whose term of service was reached at the end of 2012: Keith Burrell, Atsushi Fukuyama, Guenter Janeschitz, Myeun Kwon, Alberto Loarte, Derek Stork, Tony Taylor and Kazuo Toi. We welcome the new Board Members who have joined the Board from the start of 2013: Pietro Barabaschi, Riccardo Betti, Rich Callis, Wonho Choi, Yasuaki Kishimoto, Joaquin Sánchez, Paul Thomas, Mickey Wade, Howard Wilson, Hiroshi Yamada and Steve Zinkle. We look forward to working with the Board to maintain the high standing of Nuclear Fusion .The Nuclear Fusion office and IOP PublishingJust as the journal depends on the authors, referees, and Board of Editors, so its success is also due to the tireless and largely unsung efforts of the IAEA Nuclear Fusion office in Vienna and IOP Publishing in Bristol. I would like to express my personal thanks to the team for the support that they have given to me, the authors and the referees.Season's greetingsI would like to wish our readers, authors, referees, Board of Editors, and Vienna and Bristol office staff season's greetings and thank them for their contributions to Nuclear Fusion in 2013.