EUROfusion recently held a key event, bringing together Project Leaders, STAC members & ITER representatives to develop the plans for addressing fusion R&D needs in the next coming years.
Projects with special focus on ITER’s R&D requirements were prioritised, in areas of power exhaust and plasma-wall interactions under full metal wall conditions with emphasis on further advancing our understanding on Tritium fuel retention, wall erosions and long pulse operation.
The scientific exploitation of the European devices will gear up to address these issues, as 4 devices: ASDEX-Upgrade, WEST, TCV and MAST-U will operate in parallel in 2025. The stellarator programme with W7-X as the largest opeating device of its kind will address scientific gaps towards a Stellarator reactor concept. On the area of modelling and simulations, the emphasis will be on further dissemination of matured software’s and computational tools for interpretative modelling of the experiments and predictions towards ITER and DEMO.
As the JT-60SA tokamak device becomes ready for scientific exploitation, European interest in participation is increasing and in the next two years a detailed experimental programme will be defined together with our Japanese partners.
EUROfusion is also engaging in developing a Research Plan for Scientific exploitation of the BEST device in collaboration with our Chinese counterparts and a team of experts from Europe have been nominated to coordinate these activities and will meet at the end of this year in Hefei for a kick off meeting.