Bob Gunion, "Challenges and Promise at ITER, the World’s Largest Fusion Experiment"
by
Auditorium (50)
Abstract
The International Tokamak Experimental Reactor, ITER, is an ambitious project to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion power through magnetic confinement. Originally conceived in 1984 at a summit between Reagan and Gorbachev, ITER became a collaboration between Europe, Japan, China, India, South Korea, Russia and the US, and construction is now well under way in southern France. It aims to achieve 500MeV of thermal output from 50MeV of thermal input (Q=10). However the engineering and organizational challenges are immense and have recently become obvious through nonconformities which have resulted in significant setbacks. This presentation will speak honestly about the challenges facing ITER from the perspective of three years of inside observation.
Speaker Bio:
Bob Gunion obtained his doctorate in physical chemistry from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and leveraged this education and a love of software to move to LBNL in 1997 to create beamline control software. After a few moves within LBNL, he eventually led the accelerator controls group at the ALS and ALS-U. In 2021 he took a leave of absence from LBNL to move to southern France and take a position as Control System Architect at ITER. This role has provided unique insights into the ways that ITER works well, and those in which it doesn’t.