 | |
| Founded | 2014 |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Garching, Germany |
| Website | euro-fusion |
EUROfusion is a consortium of national fusion research institutes located in the European Union, the UK, Switzerland and Ukraine. It was established in 2014 to succeed the European Fusion Development Agreement (EFDA) as the umbrella organisation of Europe's fusion research laboratories. The consortium is currently funded by the Euratom Horizon 2020 programme. [1]
The EUROfusion consortium agreement has been signed by 30 research organisations and universities from 25 European Union countries plus Switzerland, Ukraine and the United Kingdom. [2]
| Country | Participating Laboratory |
|---|---|
| Austria | Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna |
| Belgium | Ecole Royale Militaire-Koninklijke Militaire School, Plasma Physics Laboratory, Brussels |
| Bulgaria | Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Nuclear Research and Nuclear Energy, Sofia |
| Croatia | Ruđer Bošković Institute, Zagreb |
| Cyprus | University of Cyprus, Nicosia |
| Czech Republic | Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Institute of Plasma Physics, Prague |
| Denmark | DTU, Plasma Physics and Fusion Energy, Lyngby |
| Estonia | University of Tartu, Institute of Physics |
| Finland | VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Espoo |
| France | Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives, CEA, Cadarache |
| Germany | Forschungszentrum Jülich, FZJ; Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, KIT; Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics, IPP, Garching and Greifswald |
| Greece | National Center For Scientific Research "DEMOKRITOS", Athens |
| Hungary | Hungarian Academy of Science, Wigner Research Centre for Physics, Budapest |
| Ireland | Dublin City University, Plasma Research Laboratory |
| Italy | Agenzia nazionale per le nuove tecnologie, l’energia e lo sviluppo economico sostenibile, ENEA (Italy), Frascati |
| Latvia | University of Latvia, Institute of Solid State Physics, Riga |
| Lithuania | Lithuanian Energy Institute, Kaunas |
| The Netherlands | FOM, Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter, Utrecht |
| Poland | Institute of Plasma Physics and Laser Microfusion, Warsaw |
| Portugal | Universidade de Lisboa, Instituto Superior Técnico, IPFN |
| Romania | Institutul de Fizica Atomica (IFA), Illfov |
| Slovakia | Comenius University, Department of Experimental Physics, Bratislava |
| Slovenia | JSI Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana |
| Spain | Centro de Investigataciones Energeticas, Medioambientales y Tecnologicas, (CIEMAT), Madrid |
| Sweden | Vetenskapsrådet, Stockholm |
| Switzerland | Swiss Plasma Center (SPC), École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne |
| Ukraine | Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology (KIPT), Kharkiv |
| United Kingdom | Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE), Host to JET |
The EUROfusion's Programme Management Unit offices located in Garching, near Munich (Germany), are hosted by the Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics (IPP). The IPP is also the seat for the co-ordinator of EUROfusion. [3]
EUROfusion funds fusion research activities in accordance with the Roadmap to the realisation of fusion energy. The Roadmap outlines the most efficient way to realise fusion electricity by 2050. Research carried out under the EUROfusion umbrella aims to prepare for ITER experiments and develop concepts for the fusion power demonstration plant DEMO. [4] EUROfusion is in charge of the fusion-related research carried out at JET, the Joint European Torus, which is housed in the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, UK. Other fusion devices in Europe that devote some amount of time towards research under the EUROfusion framework include the following:
| Device | Device type | Institute/Location |
|---|---|---|
| ASDEX Upgrade | Tokamak | IPP Garching, Germany |
| TCV Tokamak | Tokamak | École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland |
| WEST | Tokamak | CEA, France |
| MAST Upgrade | Spherical tokamak | CCFE, United Kingdom |
| Wendelstein 7-X stellarator | Stellarator | IPP at the Greifswald branch |
| TJ-II stellarator | Stellarator | Laboratorio Nacional de Fusión, CIEMAT, Spain |
| Plasma-Wall Interaction in Linear Plasma Devices, PSI-2 | Linear devices | FZJ, Jülich, Germany |
| PILOT-PSI | Linear devices | FOM, DIFFER, The Netherlands |
| MAGNUM-PSI | Linear devices | FOM, DIFFER, The Netherlands |
A tokamak is a device which uses a powerful magnetic field to confine plasma in the shape of a torus. The tokamak is one of several types of magnetic confinement devices being developed to produce controlled thermonuclear fusion power. As of 2016, it was the leading candidate for a practical fusion reactor.
This timeline of nuclear fusion is an incomplete chronological summary of significant events in the study and use of nuclear fusion.
The European School, Culham (ESC) was one of the fourteen European Schools and the only one in the United Kingdom. Located in Culham near Abingdon in Oxfordshire. It was founded in 1978 for the purpose of providing an education to the children of staff working for the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom).
The Joint European Torus, or JET, is an operational magnetically confined plasma physics experiment, located at Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire, UK. Based on a tokamak design, the fusion research facility is a joint European project with a main purpose of opening the way to future nuclear fusion grid energy. At the time of its design JET was larger than any comparable machine.
ITER is an international nuclear fusion research and engineering megaproject aimed at creating energy by replicating, on Earth, the fusion processes of the Sun. Upon completion of construction of the main reactor and first plasma, planned for late 2025, it will be the world's largest magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment and the largest experimental tokamak nuclear fusion reactor. It is being built next to the Cadarache facility in southern France. ITER will be the largest of more than 100 fusion reactors built since the 1950s, with ten times the plasma volume of any other tokamak operating today.
The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority is a UK government research organisation responsible for the development of fusion energy. It is an executive non-departmental public body of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).
The Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics is a physics institute investigating the physical foundations of a fusion power plant. The IPP is an institute of the Max Planck Society, part of the European Atomic Energy Community, and an associated member of the Helmholtz Association.
DEMO refers to a proposed class of nuclear fusion experimental reactors that are intended to demonstrate the net production of electric power from nuclear fusion. Most of the ITER partners have plans for their own DEMO-class reactors. With the possible exception of the EU and Japan, there are no plans for international collaboration as there was with ITER.
EFDA has been followed by EUROfusion, which is a consortium of national fusion research institutes located in the European Union and Switzerland.
Fusion for Energy(F4E) is a joint undertaking of the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) that is responsible for the EU's contribution to the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), the world's largest scientific partnership aiming to demonstrate fusion as a viable and sustainable source of energy. The organisation is officially named European Joint Undertaking for ITER and the Development of Fusion Energy and was created under article 45 of the Treaty establishing the European Atomic Energy Community by the decision of the Council of the European Union on 27 March 2007 for a period of 35 years.
SST-1 is a plasma confinement experimental device in the Institute for Plasma Research (IPR), an autonomous research institute under Department of Atomic Energy, India. It belongs to a new generation of tokamaks with the major objective being steady state operation of an advanced configuration plasma. It has been designed as a medium-sized tokamak with superconducting magnets.
The Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) is the UK's national laboratory for fusion research. It is located at the Culham Science Centre, near Culham, Oxfordshire, and is the site of the Joint European Torus (JET), Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak (MAST) and the now closed Small Tight Aspect Ratio Tokamak (START).
COMPASS, short for Compact Assembly, is a compact tokamak fusion energy device originally completed at the Culham Science Centre in 1989, upgraded in 1992, and operated until 2002. It was designed as a flexible research facility dedicated mostly to plasma physics studies in circular and D-shaped plasmas.
Sir Steven Charles Cowley is a British theoretical physicist and international authority on nuclear fusion and astrophysical plasmas. He has served as director of the United States Department of Energy (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) since 1 July 2018. Previously he served as president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, since October 2016. and head of the EURATOM / CCFE Fusion Association and chief executive officer of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA).
Hartmut Zohm is a German plasma physicist who is known for his work on the ASDEX Upgrade machine. He received the 2014 John Dawson Award and the 2016 Hannes Alfvén Prize for successfully demonstrating that neoclassical tearing modes in tokamaks can be stabilized by electron cyclotron resonance heating, which is an important design consideration for pushing the performance limit of the ITER.
The Wigner fusion research groups are involved in magnetically confined nuclear fusion experiments around the world. Wigner fusion consists of research groups from four different research institutes and universities, 3 if which are located in the Department of Plasma Physics at the Wigner Research Centre for Physics, one in the Institute of Nuclear Techniques (INT) of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics other specialist are involved from the Centre for Energy Research and from the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, in the coordination of the Wigner Research Centre for Physics. Wigner fusion connected to the European fusion research programme through EUROfusion consortium which coordinated fusion research in Europe. At Wigner fusion more than 40 researchers, engineers and technicians work together in these research groups who are involved in more than half a dozen magnetic confinement experiments around the world, such as ITER, JET, Asdex-Upgrade, W7-X, KSTAR, EAST, MAST-Upgrade and COMPASS.
Nuclear Fusion is a peer reviewed international scientific journal that publishes articles, letters and review articles, special issue articles, conferences summaries and book reviews on the theoretical and practical research based on controlled thermonuclear fusion. The journal was first published in September, 1960 by IAEA and its head office was housed at the headquarter of IAEA in Vienna, Austria. Since 2002, the journal has been jointly published by IAEA and IOP Publishing.
Professor Ian Chapman is a British physicist who is the chief executive of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA).
Ambrogio Fasoli is a researcher and professor working in the field of fusion and plasma physics. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, he is Director of the Swiss Plasma Center, located at EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland. Since 1 January 2019, he chairs the European consortium EUROfusion, the umbrella organisation for the development of nuclear fusion power in Europe.
Donato Palumbo was an Italian physicist best known as the leader of the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) fusion research program from its formation in 1958 to his retirement in 1986. He was a key force in the development of the tokamak during the 1970s and 80s, contributing several papers on plasma confinement in these devices and leading the JET fusion reactor program, which as of 2021, retains the record for the closest approach to breakeven, the ratio between the produced fusion power and the power used to heat it. He is referred to as the founding father of the European fusion program.
