The second annual Progress Meeting of the CEA/IRFM – DOE collaboration was held on December 5, 2025, at IRFM in a hybrid format with around thirty participants, including Matt Lanctot (Office of Fusion Energy Sciences, DOE), Richard Buttery (Director of DIII-D, General Atomics), David Humphreys (General Atomics), Carlos Paz-Soldan (Columbia University), Nate Ferraro (PPPL), and Luis Delgado-Aparicio (PPPL) presents at Cadarache.
The meeting provided an opportunity to review the progress made since the Progress Meeting in Washington in April 2024 on four Specific Topics of Cooperation (STC) relating to:
- RF heating studies in WEST (1);
- the development of X-ray spectroscopy diagnostics in WEST and their exploitation (2);
- plasma-material interaction studies on long-duration plasmas and in the tungsten environment of WEST (3);
- studies of current generation by LH heating in WEST (4).
In addition, eleven new research project proposals involving IRFM and WEST, selected by the DOE as part of its Fusion 2025 call for projects, were presented. In-depth discussions will continue between the American teams and IRFM with a view to starting the projects in the first quarter of 2026. These new projects confirm the American community’s continued interest in WEST and the high-impact scientific collaboration developed with IRFM.
The implementation of these projects will be fully integrated into the DOE/FES’s new Tokamak Research Program, covering the following five main areas of research:
- Maintaining plasma combustion;
- Managing heat and particle extraction;
- Plasma-material interactions;
- Controlling harmful transient events;
- Theory, simulation, and validation.
These projects will be coordinated by the members of its Management Council, David Humphreys (General Atomics), Carlos Paz-Soldan (Columbia University), and Nate Ferraro (PPPL).
The meeting concluded with a tour of the WEST control room, where participants observed an experimental session dedicated to high-fluence, highly radiative plasmas (X Point Radiative), as well as an in situ demonstration of the infrared thermography plasma component monitoring system, which has recently led to very active collaboration with DIII-D.
Christel Fenzi
(1) Specific Topics of Cooperation #3 with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL)
(2) Specific Topics of Cooperation #4 with PPPL and MIT
(3) Specific Topics of Cooperation #5 with ORNL, PPPL, MIT, University of Tennessee-Knoxville, University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign, and Pennsylvania State University
(4) Specific Topics of Cooperation #5#6 with ORNL
