Activities

EFDA focuses on research coordination with two main objectives: to prepare for the operation and exploitation of ITER and to further develop and consolidate the knowledge base needed for overall fusion development and in particular for DEMO, the first electricity producing experimental fusion power plant being built after ITER.

In order to achieve its objectives EFDA conducts the following group of activities:

Collective use of JET, the world´s largest fusion experiment, which is located near Oxford (United Kingdom).
Reinforced coordination of fusion physics and technology research and development in EU laboratories.
Training and carrier development of researchers, promoting links to universities and carrying out support actions for the benefit of the fusion programme.
EU contributions to international collaborations outside F4E

EFDA coordinates a range of activities to be carried out by the Associations in 7 key physics and technology areas. The implementation of these activities benefits from structures so called Task Forces and Topical Groups. The European Task Forces on Plasma Wall Interaction (PWI) and on Integrated Tokamak Modelling (ITM) set up respectively in 2002 and 2003. To strengthen the co-ordination in other key areas five Topical Groups have been set up in 2008: on Fusion Materials Development, Diagnostics, Heating and Current Drive, Transport and Plasma Stability and Control.

The role of Topical Groups and Task Forces is to develop well-informed and synthetic scientific views on their subject. They assist the EFDA Leader in the elaboration of the EFDA work programme, providing focus on subjects of particular importance, identifying specific issues and high priority research objectives which need to be addressed and proposing ways to address these issues. They naturally serve as forums to compare the results obtained in various conditions, assess the relative merits of different approaches and promote new developments.