The international ITER project, whose objective is to demonstrate the viability of nuclear fusion as a source of energy, has chosen to use Spanish technology for the assembly of its vacuum vessel. The different vacuum vessel components will be assembled at the ITER site in Caradache (France) by the Spanish company Equipos Nucleares (ENSA).
After almost one year of the JET shutdown, the General Planning Meeting (GPM) was held at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) during the 11th to 13th of October. The meeting was followed on-site by three of our fusion group members, Mervi Mantsinen, Shimpei Futatani and Dani Gallart.
Many aspects of the following JET campaigns were discussed at the GPM. More importantly, all the proposals made by the fusion community were evaluated and a slot was assigned accordingly as a main or back-up experiment or, due to lack of time and prioritization criteria, suppressed, a priori, from the campaign. The selection of the proposals was carried out by the team of Task Force Leaders (TFLs) who presented an ambitious plan for the coming campaigns.
The international project JOREK_P, led by our Fusion group member Dr Shimpei Futatani in close collaboration with ITER, has been awarded with computing time amongst the 84 proposals submitted in the 15th Call for PRACE Project Access. PRACE has granted the project 15.0 million core hours on MareNostrum 4 for a period of 12 months (starting October 2017).
La Vanguardia, a Spanish newspaper, has published an interview with Johannes Schwemmer, Fusion for Energy (F4E) Director. F4E is the agency in charge of managing the ITER project (Reactor International Experimental Thermonuclear) with headquarters in Barcelona, where it employs more than 400 people.
The 13th International Symposium on Fusion Nuclear Technology (ISFNT) symposium took place at Kyoto, Japan, from the 25th to the 29th of September. The aim of the conference was to share the current status of fusion world wide. The speakers gave an overview on ITER construction and DEMO design and as well as present status and progress on a wide variety of fusion reactor topics.
The past weeks have been particularly busy for the MSc students Felipe Nathan de Oliveira and Marc Eixarch in our fusion group. That came to an happy end when they both presented and finished their MSc Thesis on the consecutive days, the 7th and the 8th of September. Both theses were given top marks, proving the relevance and originality of both works.