Francesco Romanelli, president of the consortium for the implementation of the Divertor Tokamak Test Project DTT and first Programme Manager of the EUROfusion Consortium, passed away on March 20.
Building on a distinguished career as theorist specialising in transport and stability, Francesco has been a key figure in the development of the Italian and the European fusion programmes for three decades. His ability to understand the trade-offs between physics and engineering, the optimal and the practical, and the national and the international, and to face those trade-offs with an unswerving intellectual honesty, was practically unique. He was certainly not the self-declared “simple theoretical physicist”. Outside of fusion, Francesco was a well-rounded intellectual with a taste for history, as reflected in his knowledge of Italy and the great use that he and Paola made of the National Trust whilst they were in England. Having Francesco as a tour guide was a rare treat indeed.
Francesco received his doctorate in physics in 1980 from the Università di Firenze for a thesis entitled “Teoria del laser ad elettroni liberi”. Thereafter, he began a career in the Fusion Department at ENEA, Frascati. Already during the 1980s, Francesco was an internationalist with several visits to both the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, where he collaborated with Roscoe White, and to JET. Francesco’s work on anomalous transport due to collective micro-instabilities was ground breaking.
In 1996, Francesco was appointed ENEA fusion division deputy director for the physics of magnetic confinement with responsibility for the Magnetic Confinement Physics Section. In that role, he was responsible for the research activities conducted on the FTU tokamak. It was in this period that his responsibilities began to include the management of machine hardware and the integration between engineering and physics.
From 2006 until 2014, Francesco took up roles in the European-wide component of the fusion programme, first as EFDA Associate Leader for JET and subsequently as EFDA Leader and then as the first EUROfusion Programme Manager. During this period, Francesco led the effort to elaborate the Roadmap to the Realisation of Fusion Energy. This document, which describes the research and development activities necessary for the realisation of a fusion demonstration reactor, is the original raison d’etre of EUROfusion.
From 2015 until 2019, Francesco developed and coordinated a masters-level programme at the Università di Roma “Tor Vergata” on Fusion Energy – Science and Engineering. This reflected his belief that the fusion programme must make a transition from experimental to industrial. It is typical that he not only believed but actually acted to make this happen by training the next generation of fusion engineers.
Since 2021, Francesco has been the president of the consortium responsible for the implementation of DTT. In that role, he has developed a project structure and team that is well on the way to realising a device that is a key piece in the Roadmap.
In addition to the contributions above, Francesco was a dedicated servant to the fusion community, serving in many roles such as the UKAEA Programme Advisory Committee, chair of the Satellite Tokamak Programme Project Committee (STP-PC), member of the Coordinating Committee of the International Tokamak Physics Activity (ITPA), expert in the ITER Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee and Editor in Chief of the Nuclear Fusion journal.
Francesco Romanelli will be remembered as a major contributor to the pan-European fusion programme, as a demanding leader who built trust in his staff, and as a visionary who looked at the future of fusion with the practicality of an engineer and the background knowledge of a theoretician.
Our condolences go to his family. Comments and remembrances can be sent to the email address: in-memory-Francesco@euro-fusion.org
