News

DEMO Prospective R&D Workshop looks ahead to opportunities and challenges in fusion industrialization

Source: EUROfusion

In early October, group members Ezequiel Goldberg and Adriana Ghiozzi attended the second biannual DEMO Prospective Research and Development Workshop hosted by EPFL and organized by EUROfusion.

DEMO, or the DEMOnstration fusion power plant, refers to fusion devices to be developed post-ITER which, unlike ITER, will be connected to the electric grid and demonstrate net power production in a closed fuel cycle. Broadly, the goal of the workshop was to identify and discuss the current technical, engineering, and economic gaps between a DEMO device and a future fleet of fully-industrialized electricity-producing fusion devices.

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A Summer Research: Theoretical Investigations of Thermal Properties of Irradiated Tungsten

Figure 1: Top: An Illustration of the Fusion Reaction, with our visitors Dominik Freinberger (left) and Arda Erbasan (right), Bottom: Defected simulation box: red, blue, and purple balls represent interstitials, vacancies, and undamaged tungsten atoms, respectively. Dislocation loops and segments are denoted by continuous green lines.

Hi! We are Arda Erbasan and Dominik Freinberger. Together, we would like to share our experience working in the BSC Fusion group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) in the summer of 2022.

Thanks to the PRACE Summer of HPC (SoHPC) program, we had the opportunity to work on the project Fusion reactor materials: Computational modeling of atomic-scale damage in irradiated metal during July and August. It was a great experience, and in the following, we give more details on who we are, what we did, and how it was, so stay tuned!

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Private fusion industry is growing in both investment and confidence, says FIA’s 2022 Annual Report

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.

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A new global network for gender equity in Fusion

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.

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Main takeaways from the Colloquium “Advancing methods for fusion neutronics: An overview of Workflows and nuclear analysis activities at UKAEA”

Source: Advancing Methods for Fusion Neutronics: An Overview of Workflows and Nuclear Analysis Activities at UKAEA, PPPL Colloquium.

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.

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Webinar: Machine learning interatomic potentials for modelling radiation damage

Professor Kai Nordlund from the University of Helsinki gave a Computational Materials Physics talk about fusion reactor materials.

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.

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