Workshop on Nuclear Fusion: initiatives towards DEMO

Presentation of the BSC Fusion Group in the CIEMAT workshop.

On February 29, in the CIEMAT headquarters in Madrid (Spain), a Workshop entitled “Fusión nuclear: iniciativas hacia DEMO” was organized by CIEMAT, CDTI, and Ineustar/Induciencia in close collaboration with IFMIF-DONES, UNED, University of Sevilla (US) and Technical University of Madrid (UPM). Alejandro Soba and Dani Gallart from our research group attended this event.

The main objectives of the workshop were to encourage public-private collaboration initiatives in the field, analyze Spain’s strengths in the different key technologies and discuss the plans for the future DEMO reactor.

Read more

JOREK code meeting at EPFL with a visit to Swiss Plasma Center

Group picture of in-person attendees at the EPFL site

From 12/02/2024 to 16/02/2024, the 2024 JOREK code meeting was held at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, organized with the support of Cristian Sommariva and Mengdi Kong from the Swiss Plasma Center (SPC), adopting a hybrid format. The meeting was greatly appreciated by the large community of code users and developers, with over 60 registered people, of which 30 were in-person.

Read more

4th Fusion HPC Workshop

On 29 and 30 November 2023, the Fusion Group at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) actively participated in the yearly workshop regarding research in HPC for Fusion, which has now arrived at its 4th edition.

The Workshop is meant to be a gathering appointment for experts in HPC in the research field of Nuclear Fusion. The covered topics were related to the different ways in which HPC methods and algorithms, spanning across Monte-Carlo methods, Neural Networks, and Parallelization Exploitation, can be extremely valuable for applications, going from the simulation of MHD instabilities to System Analysis, to reach efficient ways of energy production through Nuclear Fusion.

A total of 31 talks have been organized in 11 Zoom Sessions, giving life to an exhaustive program covering all the relevant topics. The 5 keynote talks, of great inspiration for the audience, were:

Read more

FuseNet Teacher Day 2023

Teacher Day 2023 announcement

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. 

Read more

Disseminating our research in Fusion at the 16a Festa de la Ciència

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.

Read more

Breaking Barriers: Launch of OECD-NEA Report on Improving Gender Balance in Nuclear Sector

Credit: OECD/NEA

On March 8, coinciding with the International Women’s Day, our group attended the webinar “Improving gender balance in the nuclear sector: Report launch organized by the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The nuclear industry is a crucial part of our energy infrastructure, providing a significant portion of the world’s electricity. However, the sector has traditionally been male-dominated, with women making up only a small fraction (less than 25%) of the workforce. The same applies to its sub-sectors including fusion where our group belongs.

In the webinar on March 8, a report was launched to address the issue of gender imbalance in the nuclear sector. The report provides insights and recommendations based on the first publicly available international data on gender balance in the nuclear sector. The data was collected from over 8 000 women in the nuclear workforce in 32 countries, as well as human resources data from 96 nuclear organisations in 17 countries. Based on the findings, a comprehensive, evidence-driven policy framework is proposed with practical recommendations.

Read more