The Fusion Industry Association (FIA), a non-profit advocacy organization representing nearly 30 fusion start-ups, released its second annual report on the state of the global fusion industry this July. The report provides an update on the milestones achieved in the last year by each of 33 companies surveyed as well as an aggregated picture of growth in the industry as a whole using data collected from the companies.
Women in Fusion (WiF) is a global platform to inspire and support women in the Fusion field through sharing experiences, promoting leadership, and encouraging greater recognition for women’s contributions to Fusion. Their website, launched earlier this summer, offers information about the platform and participants of all genders are welcome to join. The website provides community forums for discussion which are open to all registered users as well as information about gender discrepancies in the Fusion workforce.
WiF was established in 2021 following a successful webinar at the Fusion Energy Conference (FEC2020) which clearly showed the need to increase the representation of women in Fusion science and research. The organization is the fruit of a collaboration between IAEA, ITER, Fusion for Energy, General Atomics and EUROfusion. The first WiF event is scheduled for 2023.
On 4 August, our Fusion group’s members Ezequiel Goldberg and Martí Circuns i Duxans attended a Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) colloquium entitled “Advancing Methods for Fusion Neutronics: An Overview of Workflows and Nuclear Analysis Activities at UKAEA” with invited speakers Alex Valentine (Senior Nuclear Radiation Analyst) and Jonathan Naish (Lead for STEP Neutronics) from the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA).
Ezequiel and Martí found the Colloquium highly interesting, informative and directly relevant to the activities in our group. In particular, within FusionCAT project, we are developing a high-fidelity deterministic neutron transport solver called NEUTRO (an exhaustive description of the solver can be found in here) which solves the Boltzmann stationary transport equation. The solver was created within the Alya system: a Finite Element, parallel, multi-physics framework created at BSC designed to solve different physical phenomena in a coupled way.
On 27 June, group members Julio Gutiérrez and Mary Kate Chessey attended a Materials Square webinar (#118) titled, “Machine learning interatomic potentials for modelling radiation damage,” with invited speaker Professor Kai Nordlund of Computational Materials Physics from the University of Helsinki, Finland.
On May 30th, our Fusion Group had the pleasure of organizing a training webinar on technology transfer for all the partners of the FusionCAT consortium. After two years of intensive work on several assets within the project, the time to explore collaborations with the industry partners is getting closer. This webinar set the basis for the best exploitation strategies for doing so.
This past week BSC Fusion was well-represented by Adriana Ghiozzi and Tomás Bensadon at the first-ever edition of the European Physical Society (EPS) Forum held in Paris, France. The event sought to promote collaboration and career development among young researchers, and stimulate economic recovery in technical sectors following the Covid-19 pandemic. The Forum featured a two-day lineup of plenary talks, panel discussions and poster sessions relevant to each of the EPS divisions and groups.