The IAEA Fusion Energy Conference (FEC) is a major biennial event that brings together around one thousand leading scientists and engineers to discuss key scientific and technological advancements in the field. The 28th edition of the conference, initially planned to take place in October this year, has been postponed to 10-15 May 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The event is organized in cooperation with the French Alternative Energies, the Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and the ITER International Fusion Energy Organization, and will take place in Nice, France.
“This is an exciting time for fusion research and the topics we are discussing will be just as relevant next spring as they would have been this autumn,” said Danas Ridikas, Head of the Physics Section at the IAEA.
Nuclear fusion has been heralded as a technology with the potential to provide the world with clean, safe, and sustainable energy. After decades of steady progress, fusion research is entering a new era. Cutting-edge fusion devices around the world are producing new experimental data to investigate how best to design future fusion power plants. ITER, the world's largest fusion experiment, involving 35 different countries, is being prepared for assembly and commissioning, and fusion enterprises that aim for faster commercialization are now attracting investors globally. The fusion community is now seeking to demonstrate the technical and economic feasibility of this technology as a viable energy source, Ridikas said.
The IAEA and its organizing partners have now released the programme of the conference, which can be found here. The event will feature a wide range of cutting-edge advances in nuclear fusion science. There will be 22 overview presentations delivered by various stakeholders in the field, including:
- Bernard Bigot, Director General of the ITER organization, who will discuss the preparation for assembly and commissioning of ITER;
- Jerome Bucalossi, WEST Project Leader at the CEA, who will present an overview of the first phase of operation of WEST, a tokamak device in France;
- Yutaka Kamada, Deputy Director General of QST, will report on the progress of the construction of JT-60SA, the Japan-EU joint fusion device;
- Yuichi Takase, Professor at the University of Tokyo, will discuss the spherical tokamak devices around the world, including NSTX-U in the US, Globus-M2 in Russia, and ST40 in the UK.
