From the 10th of April to the 13th of May, one of the members of our Fusion group, Tomas Bensadon, went on a research stay to the ITER Organization (IO) Headquarters in Cadarache, France. The research stay took place as an internship, under the 2022- INTERN-SCOP06- ICRH modelling in various scenarios of the ITER Research Plan program. This internship was made possible by the BSC Mobility Program, which was awarded to Tomas Bensadon on August 2022.
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.
On 14th of March, our group attended an AI for Good webinar organized by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) entitled “AI for advancing fusion energy through enhancing simulation”. The talk was delivered by Dr. Michael Churchill from the Princeton’s Plasma Physics Laboratory. The main scope of the webinar was focused on the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in advancing sustainable development goals, specifically towards fusion energy as well as the potential of AI in enhancing simulation and accelerating research and development (R&D) in nuclear fusion.
On 14 March we welcomed two high school students to visit our group to learn about computational fusion research! Jana and Carlota were participants in the Escola Garbí Vergés Esplugues – Estada a Empresa (Company Visit) program, which connects students with local companies to learn more about professional skills and careers.
In the week of 13th of March 2023, the 2023-03 JOREK Meeting took place at ITER. The JOREK code is one MHD code capable of modeling the plasma evolution and instabilities inside a Tokamak, and it is currently developed by a large community interested in plasma physics and actively used inside the ITER project.
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.