We are excited to announce that we will host a webinar “Faster Fusion through innovations” by Dr Mikhail Gryaznevich who is the founder, the Chief Scientist and a member of the executive board of Tokamak Energy. Tokamak Energy is a private fusion power research company based in the United Kingdom that has built several tokamaks with the aim of reaching commercial fusion power generation.
Date: September 14th, 2020
Time: 11:00-12:30 (CET); connections enabled from 10:30 am (CET) onwards.
It has been 4 months since the beginning of the confinement. Barcelona was stricken by the CoVid-19 as was the rest of the world. Fortunately, things are getting better and Barcelona ended the confinement the 21st of June together with the rest of Spain. It has been a difficult time for many who have seen their lifestyle seriously affected and their jobs frozen or even worse, cancelled. We still do not know what the economical magnitude of this situation will be or how the world is planning to recover from this.
However, the Fusion Group feels deeply privileged as our work has not been cancelled nor stopped at any point. We have been and are working remotely (from home), following the recommendations of the government. The main European fusion projects under EUROfusion we are working with, JET and AUG, have recently resumed their experimental activities and the modelling efforts have been increased during the confinement. Furthermore, in order to cover all the projects where the Fusion Group is involved, two new researchers have been recruited: Dr. Francisco Fernández and Dr. Julio Gutiérrez. They will work within the Ris3Cat FusionCAT project.
The EUROfusion Work Package Code Development (WPCD) Summer Code Camp, scheduled to be hosted by DIFFER (Dutch Institute for Fundamental Energy Research) in Eindhoven, Netherlands, went finally online due to the COVID-19 crisis during the two weeks from the 8th to 19th June, 2020. The first week of the Code Camp was focused on the Enabling Workflow Exploitation (EWE) programme while during the second week, several working sessions were organized, among others, about the adaptation of workflows in ITER Integrated Modelling & Analysis Suite (IMAS).
I am Eric Planas, and as part of the BSc in Engineering Physics program at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), in February 10th I joined the Fusion Group at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) in order to carry out my Final Degree Thesis. Now that I am finishing the project and my journey as an undergraduate student is coming to an end, I am writing this post to relate my experience in this group.
Last Friday, June 12, our group leader ICREA Prof. Mervi Mantsinen participated as an examiner in the defence of the Habilitation Thesis to Supervise Research by Dr David Zarzoso at Aix Marseille University, France.
Other jury members were Dr Sadruddin Benkadda, Prof. Alain Ghizzo, Dr. Taina Kurki-Suonio, Prof. Jean-Marcelo Rax, Prof. Raúl Sánchez, and Prof. Howard Wilson. The event took place via videoconference due to the present pandemia circumstances with strict social distancing measures which prevented the celebration of this event in person.
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), the European agency Fusion for Energy (F4E) and b_TEC Foundation invite all Secondary and High-school teachers to take part in a live webinar, coordinated by the European Fusion Education Network FuseNet, with connections in Catalan and Spanish from Barcelona and English from several spots in Europe on the 2nd of October 2020.
The webinar will aim at giving teachers the tools and knowledge they need in order to introduce fusion in the classrooms. Such state-of-the-art concepts can certainly be hard to introduce into schools, thus we truly think this is a fantastic opportunity to learn how to do it.