On April 23rd, Catalonia celebrates “La Diada de Sant Jordi,” or Saint Jordi’s Day, a deeply ingrained tradition and one of the region’s most cherished occasions. While the original custom involved men presenting women with a red rose and women gifting men a book, it has evolved, allowing anyone to give a book, a rose, or both to anyone they choose.
The International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility – Demo Oriented NEutron Source (IFMIF-DONES) has officially started its construction phase in Granada, Spain. On 16 March, the official DONES Steering Committee met for its first meeting in Granada and to celebrate the formal start of construction.
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.
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.
In celebration of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science on 11 Feb, the Fusion Group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center highlights the past women speakers at the Fusion HPC Workshop, held virtually each year since 2020. This workshop covers all computer applications using High Performance Computing (HPC) in the field of fusion research.
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.