Fusion energy, the source of energy for the sun, offers a very attractive, virtually inexhaustible, energy source for the future as it neither leaves long-lived radioactive waste, nor generates any greenhouse gases. It provides a potential long-term base load electricity production option and can, when realized, provide an efficient means of decarbonising energy production. It has proved quite difficult to achieve, with a number of technical challenges to overcome: creating a suitable environment in the laboratory to harness a sufficiently dense hydrogen plasma at about 100 million degrees for sufficiently long time for the hydrogen isotopes to fuse.
The potential impact on future energy production drives the current research with large scale experiments under construction, in particular the global collaboration towards ITER which is intended to fully demonstrate the scientific feasibility of large scale fusion based energy production. In addition there are medium scale devices at the national level and some smaller privately funded start-up enterprises which are seeking alternative paths to fusion energy.
Fusion energy research once led science in pushing for open and FAIR access to research, with a bottom-up, science driven community leading to the declassification of materials in the 1958 "Atoms for Peace" conference. This led to a significant cross fertilisation of ideas between the different research laboratories and represented a golden age in the advancement of fusion technologies. Since then, while scientific exchanges have become ever more open, the exchange of and access to data has become more fragmented due to different funding mechanisms, technical solutions and data management practices. Research exchanges and detailed comparisons of data between devices has so far been quite difficult and labour intensive.
The Fair for Fusion project has the aim of improving this situation by suggesting a framework for data sharing building on FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable). The project aims to improve the collaboration between researchers, to facilitate data access over the full range of European fusion experiments and to promote the technologies, policies and practices towards ITER. Building on the knowledge gained in developing existing tools and platforms both in the fusion community and other established research areas, we will provide a “blueprint” for a future implementation of FAIR data management within the fusion programme.
A well-defined blueprint architecture, supported by demonstrators and prototype implementations, should help raise the profile and awareness of FAIR and open data within the fusion programme and help lay the foundations for implementing an open data policy adapted to the needs of the present and future fusion energy research programme, particularly in the run up to the operation of ITER.
