News

Overview on MAST Upgrade’s first plasma shot

The MAST-Upgrade tokamak commenced operation with its first plasma at Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, the United Kingdom on 29 October 2020. As a result of the seven-year upgrade programme for the Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak (MAST), essentially a complete new fusion device was built with a stronger magnetic field and higher heating power.

Prof. Ian Chapman, the chief executive of the UK Atomic Energy Authority said: “MAST Upgrade will take us closer to delivering sustainable, clean fusion energy. This experiment will break new ground and test technology that has never been tried before. It will be a vital testing facility on our journey to delivering the STEP fusion power plant.”

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Our Fusion Group’s project on Tungsten modelling by Linear Scaling DFT granted by RES

We are pleased to announce that our group has been awarded a new project at the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES). RES will provide over 2 million CPU/h for the next 4 months (November 2020 – February 2021), with a likely extension for a second 4-month period (until June 2021) making a total of 4,397,000 CPU/h. We will use the RES top-quality resources in MareNostrum 4, equipped with 165,888 Intel Xeon Platinum 8160 cores, 2.10GHz with Intel Omni-Path.

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FusionCAT Annual Meeting 2020

The FusionCAT Annual Meeting 2020 took place today, and it counted with the participation of almost 40 researchers from different backgrounds, institutions and expertise. The main development areas of the project were explained and the current status of the ongoing research was presented. Comments, questions and constructive criticism were exchanged during the discussions, helping reach the overall conclusion that the FusionCAT project is progressing well and according to schedule. Each of the groups in the consortium achieved the technical objectives that were agreed upon, and, at the same time, participated in creating an active nuclear fusion community in Catalunya.

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Barcelona fusion experts collaborate with the FuseNet Teacher Day

The first-ever edition of FuseNet Teacher’s Day, a Europe-wide webinar dedicated to promoting Fusion in high-schools, was held last Friday, October the 2nd. The event brought together teachers from all around Europe, scattered into 18 local sessions across 16 European Countries. Our BSC Fusion group, in cooperation with Fusion for Energy (F4E), the b_TEC Foundation and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), organized the Barcelona local session under the umbrella of the FusionCAT project.

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FUSION CODES II: our new research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation

We are pleased to announce that our group has been awarded a new research project within the State R&D Program Oriented to the Challenges of the Society 2019 in Spain. It was one of the almost 3000 projects financed by the Ministry of Science and Innovation with a total program budget of 363.13 M€.

Our new project FUSION CODES II is a continuation of our earlier FUSION CODES project (2016-2019) by three more years. As its predecessor, it is directed towards contributing to the development of nuclear fusion as a safe, clean, and virtually limitless energy source for future generations. In particular, it is directed towards ITER, an international nuclear fusion R&D project, which is currently building the world’s largest experimental tokamak nuclear fusion reactor in southern France. ITER aims to demonstrate that fusion energy is scientifically and technologically feasible. It is the bridge towards DEMO, a first fusion energy plant that will demonstrate large-scale production of electricity.

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