On 14 October, the Spanish National Fusion Strategy Planning Meeting was held at the CDTI headquarters in Madrid. The meeting brought together most of the fusion stakeholders in the Spanish fusion ecosystem, from research institutions such as CIEMAT or BSC to companies in the fusion sector. With all the relevant advances in fusion that have accelerated the path towards its commercialisation, many countries are either reviewing or creating their own strategy. This was therefore a very timely meeting to define the role that Spain intends to play in the near future, at a time when private investors and industry are closer than ever to fusion.
Artistic image of humanity harnessing the power of the sun. Generated with AI.
The Joint European Torus (JET) already reached the world fusion energy record back in December 2021, but as if that were not enough, it has done it yet again, two years later, during December 2023 with 69 megajoules using a mere 0.2 milligrams of fuel, beating the previous record of 59 megajoules. This is roughly the energy needed for a hairdryer to work for 10 hours nonstop. The importance of this new feat stems from the evident new knowledge that the fusion community has acquired in recent times that has allowed for such a steady advancement in the field.
The FuseNet Teacher Day is an annual event organized by FuseNet which closes the gap between research/industry and high school education. Its main purpose is to motivate students in the rich field of fusion physics and technology. It is typically addressed to professors, who receive a nice set of educational material and a gentle overview of fusion technology on the shoulders of the main research labs in each European country.
We are happy at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) to organize together with Fusion for Energy (F4E) the Catalan session, as done in previous editions (see here). This year the session has been covered by Dr Ferran Albajar (F4E) and Dr Dani Gallart (BSC). The Catalan session, which typically lasts 1 hour, is entirely devoted to the understanding of the key features and advantages that fusion technology has to offer. We also elaborate on the educational materials available and after that we engage in an interesting and enthusiastic discussion with all the audience. We appreciate the interest and the time that professors invest in our talk, and we hope all the material and motivation we try to send during the session is useful and ultimately transferred to the students. The students are the future of our society and so, of fusion technology as well.
On Saturday, June 10, took place the 16a Festa de la ciència in the Rambla of Prim of Barcelona. More than 6000 assistants came to this science dissemination event organized by the Ajuntament of Barcelona and counted with 176 activities and engaged more than 150 city entities related to science and dissemination. As last year, our Fusion Group participated to disseminate Fusion technology among the event participants.
Sky view of the ITER site in Cadarache, south of France.
The ITER organization and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) have signed an Agreement on Academic and Scientific Cooperation early this year. This Agreement underlines the importance of promoting academic and scientific progress between the two institutions. Thus, boosting the training of young researchers and engineers by giving the possibility of joint supervision of PhD students and training and exchange of scientists and engineers. Among other possibilities, the door is also open for joint research projects on nuclear fusion.
The Fusion Group has been working hard to improve our understanding of the deuterium-tritium (D-T) plasmas carried out at JET during late 2021. These experiments broke the world fusion energy record and are providing us with invaluable physical insight in preparation of ITER’s experiments.
Our research has culminated in two recent papers published at Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion. One tackles the optimization of the H and 3He minority heating schemes for D-T, while the other describes a recent upgrade we developed for the calculation of the diffusion operator. A brief overview is given together with their links to the journal version as follows.
