CCFE is responsible for operating the facility for fusion researchers and for maintaining and upgrading it. About 350 scientists from EU countries (plus Switzerland, the UK and Ukraine), and more from around the globe, participate in JET experiments each year. The JET facilities located at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy ( CCFE) in Abingdon, Oxfordshire UK, are collectively used by all European fusion laboratories under the EUROfusion consortium. Stay tuned: the results from these experiments will be announced in early February 2022. In 2021, JET carried out a second full-power run of experiments using deuterium and tritium. In 2011 JET was equipped with a new ITER-like inner wall made of beryllium and tungsten metals, enabling scientists to develop plasma scenarios that resemble as closely as possible those planned for ITER, investigate the interaction of the plasma with wall materials, and study the accumulation of tungsten from the wall in the plasma core. In 1997 JET successfully produced a world record 22.5 megajoules of fusion energy and 16 megawatts of fusion power during the first dedicated deuterium-tritium experiments, proving large amounts of power can be produced from fusion. It is the only experiment that can operate with the deuterium-tritium fuel mix that will be used for commercial fusion power (and in ITER). JET, for Joint European Torus, is the focal point of the European fusion research program, designed to study fusion in conditions approaching those needed for a power plant.

On 18 January 2022, the machine ran its 100,000th plasma pulse. Since its inauguration in 1983 in the presence of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, the European tokamak JET has cemented its reputation as 'one of the most important machines in the history of fusion energy research,' according to Ian Chapman, CEO of the UK Atomic Energy Authority.

See the F4E website for more information. At ITER, he was head of the Safety and Security Department.Īlejaldre will act as Chair of the F4E Governing Board, the body that supervises the activities of the European Joint Undertaking for ITER and the development of fusion energy, for an initial period of two years starting on 1 January 2022. Prior to joining ITER, he headed CIEMAT's national fusion laboratory (1992-2004) and was for two years (2004-2006) the director general of technological policy at the Spanish ministry of Education and Science.

Carlos Alejaldre, who was an ITER Organization Deputy-Director-General from 2006 to 2015 and who is the current Director-General of CIEMAT ( Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas, Medioambientales y Tecnológicas), the Spanish public research agency focused on energy and the environment, has been appointed as the new Chair of the Fusion for Energy (F4E) Governing Board.Ī plasma physicist by training, Carlos has held several important positions in fusion research.

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