MFE-IM scientists Nathan Howard and Pablo Rodriguez-Fernandez attended the 2023 IAEA Fusion Energy Conference (IAEA-FEC), held in beautiful, rainy London (UK) the week of Oct 16th. Groundbreaking results from the fusion community were shared, from the new JET DT experiments to negative triangularity in DIII-D, and exciting announcements from the UK on their plans to boost commercial fusion initiatives. Around 2,000 participants from all over the world took part in this year’s FEC, for the first time in person since 2018 due to the COVID pandemic. This was the 29th edition of the conference since its inception in 1961.
Pablo and Nathan shared the results from their high-fidelity simulation work using PORTALS-CGYRO. Pablo presented a poster with an overview of the technique and summary of predictive results in SPARC, ITER and JET plasmas. Nathan delivered a plenary talk on DIII-D ITER Baseline Scenario validation of ion-scale gyrokinetics, with comprehensive turbulence and impurity measurements. Nathan’s talk also presented the first-ever core performance predictions of ITER with first-principles simulations.