Controlling the World's Largest Fusion Reactor [Mikel Rojo, Cosylab]

The energy needs of the world are rapidly increasing and the current energy sources available soon will not be able to handle the job. We also live in a world that is more polluted now than it ever has been before, and is only getting more polluted each day. Fusion energy, which we have known about for almost a century now, seems like an ideal alternative: clean, unlimited, intrinsically safe... But if it is so ideal, then why has it always been, and continues to be, a possibility reserved for 50 years in the future?

The ITER project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER) unites the world's strongest economies to tackle this challenge and aim to make fusion, this time for good, a reality 50 years from today. Apart from the physical challenges, we will take a look at the technical challenges behind a project of this magnitude, particularly how to control a machine of this size, arguably the largest machine conceived in terms of number of devices and datapoints. Will ITER be successful and make the breakthrough that steers the course of our planet on a positive track, or will fusion forever remain 50 years ahead of our time?

Speaker:

Mikel Rojo was born and raised in Spain. He relocated to Ljubljana and joined the Slovene company Cosylab (http://www.cosylab.com/), the world's leader in control systems for large physics projects, in 2009. Since 2010, he has been involved in the ITER project as the head of the CODAC Core System Support Team, providing support to all ITER suppliers around the world that use CODAC Core System, ITER's control system development toolkit. He is also the lead trainer for all CODAC Core System training hands-on workshops.

General Outline of the talk:

• History of Fusion and Tokamak developments
• Why fusion? & The physics behind it
• Tokamaks vs. other fusion devices
• Controlling ITER
• Machine requirements
• Control System Architecture
• Challenges