After almost one year of the JET shutdown, the General Planning Meeting (GPM) was held at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) during the 11th to 13th of October. The meeting was followed on-site by three of our fusion group members, Mervi Mantsinen, Shimpei Futatani and Dani Gallart.
Many aspects of the following JET campaigns were discussed at the GPM. More importantly, all the proposals made by the fusion community were evaluated and a slot was assigned accordingly as a main or back-up experiment or, due to lack of time and prioritization criteria, suppressed, a priori, from the campaign. The selection of the proposals was carried out by the team of Task Force Leaders (TFLs) who presented an ambitious plan for the coming campaigns.
JET is getting ready for its second D-T campaign and, consequently, the cornerstone of the forthcoming experiments is the optimisation of the scenarios for the D-T plasma. The D-T plasma is the fuel mixture needed to show the feasibility of fusion as an energy source in ITER, the experimental fusion reactor that is being built in the south of France (Cadarache). Operational scenarios in D-T plasma are thus among the most important scenarios to be tested and modelled before ITER starts its operation.