Spain and Croatia push the candidature of Granada for IFMIF-DONES

Pedro Duque and Blazenka Divjak after signing the agreement on IFMIF-DONES. Photo: CIEMAT news.

Science and Research Ministers from Spain and Croatia, Pedro Duque and Blazenka Divjak, have signed a cooperation agreement pushing the candidature of Granada (Spain) for IFMIF-DONES facility.

Spain and Croatia presented initially independent candidatures but they joined their efforts in order to present a common European candidature. IFMIF-DONES aims to study the extreme conditions of fusion materials under energy production and particularly research on irradiation for DEMO operation. The estimated budget for the construction is between 400 and 600 million euros and the construction will take 10 years and it will be operating at least 20 years.

Read more

Join us! We are looking for a Junior Developer on Computational Modeling for Fusion

The Fusion Group at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) is looking for a Junior Developer on Computational Modeling for Fusion with a degree in computer science or similar. The position supports the participation in the development of applications: coding, debugging and testing as well as analysis and optimization of applications to be used on supercomputers.

Read more

BSC Fusion Group Member wins prestigious EUROfusion Engineering Grant

We are very pleased to announce that Albert Gutiérrez from our Fusion Group has been awarded with a prestigious EUROfusion Engineering Grant (EEG) for his project entitled Software Engineering: Development of High Performance Computing capability for fusion workflows, integrated to the ITER Modelling framework. The grant starts on January 1st 2018 and will have a duration of three years.

Read more

ICREA and ERC contribute to top research in Catalonia

Nature published last Thursday an article on how Catalonia has succeed keeping a high research level getting over budget cuts of 39%. The article, titled “Staying a steady course through the storm“, explains the keys for this success.

Arcadi Navarro, Secretary for Universities and Research, describes the secret for this success: “The crucial thing that guaranteed resilience was to focus policies on people, not on projects.”. Catalonia focused on attracting top researchers with European competitive salaries through an institution devoted to this goal: ICREA. The institute contracts top researcher making them professors for life with internationally competitive salaries.

Read more

MIT researchers discover an explanation to heat loss

[source: MIT news]

One of the biggest obstacles to making fusion power practical — and realizing its promise of virtually limitless and relatively clean energy — has been that computer models have been unable to predict how the hot, electrically charged gas inside a fusion reactor behaves under the intense heat and pressure required to make atoms stick together.

Now, researchers at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, in collaboration with others at the University of California at San Diego, General Atomics, and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, say that they have found the key.

Read more