The present project is put into the context of the international projects ITER and DEMO aiming at managing nuclear fusion to produce energy. In tokamaks (nuclear fusion reactors), a hot plasma composed of deuterium and tritium nuclei is magnetically confined to achieve fusion. The heating of the plasma is mainly obtained by the injection of high-energy deuterium neutral beams, coming from the neutralization of high-intensity D- negative-ion beams. D- negative-ions are produced in a low-pressure plasma source and subsequently extracted and accelerated. The standard and most efficient solution to produce high negative-ion current uses cesium (Cs) injection and deposition inside the source to enhance negative-ion surface-production mechanisms. However, ITER and DEMO requirements in terms of extracted current push this technology to its limits. The already identified drawbacks of cesium injection are becoming real technological and scientific bottlenecks, and alternative solutions to produce negative-ions would be highly valuable. The first objective of the present project is to find an alternative solution to produce high yields of H-/D- negative-ions on surfaces in Cs-free H2/D2 plasmas. The proposed study is based on a physical effect discovered at PIIM in collaboration with LSPM, namely the enhancement of negative-ion yield on boron-doped-diamond at high temperature. The yield increase observed places diamond material as the most up to date relevant alternative solution for the generation of negative-ions in Cs-free plasmas. The project aims at fully characterizing and evaluating the relevance and the capabilities of diamond films (intrinsic and doped polycrystalline, single crystal as well as nanodiamond films…) as negative-ion enhancers in a negative-ion source. The second objective is to investigate diamond erosion under hydrogen (deuterium) plasma irradiation, with two main motivations. First, material erosion could be a limitation of the use of diamond as a negative-ion enhancer in a negative-ion source and must be evaluated. Second, the inner-parts of the tokamaks receiving the highest flux of particles and power are supposed to be made of tungsten, but its self-sputtering and its melting under high thermal loads are still major issues limiting its use. It has been shown in the past by one of the partners that diamond is a serious candidate as an efficient alternative-material for fusion reactors. Therefore, diamond erosion in hydrogen plasmas will also be investigated from this perspective. At the moment when all the efforts are put on tungsten, maintaining a scientific watch on backup solutions for tokamak materials is crucial. The project associates partners with complementary expertise in the field of plasma-surface interactions on the one hand, and diamond deposition and characterization on the other hand. Furthermore, in order to span the gap between fundamental science and real-life applications, negative-ion surface-production and diamond erosion will be studied in laboratory plasmas (PIIM in collaboration with LSPM ) as well as in real devices (Cybele negative-ion source at IRFM and Magnum-PSI experiment at DIFFER ). PIIM: Physique des Interactions Ioniques et Moléculaires, Université Aix-Marseille, CNRS LSPM: Laboratoire des Sciences des Procédés et des Matériaux, CNRS, Université de Paris 13 IRFM: Institut de Recherche sur la Fusion Magnétique, Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique, Cadarache DIFFER: Dutch Institute For Fundamental Energy Research, The Netherlands

The overall objective of Mopo is to develop a validated, user-friendly, feature-rich, innovative and well-performing energy system modelling toolset to serve public authorities, network operators, industry and academia to plan sustainable and resilient energy systems in a cost-effective manner. Mopo will include 1) component tools to produce all necessary energy system data; 2) system tool to manage data, scenarios and modelling workflows, to visualise data and to maintain datasets in multi-user environment without losing the track of changes; 3) planning tool to optimise all energy sectors in detail, including sector specific physics and highly flexible representation of temporal, spatial and technological aspects – user can choose how to model depending on the specific needs. The project is based on existing state-of-the-art tools including Spine Toolbox and SpineOpt. The advanced capabilities will be demonstrated through an industrial case (with detailed sector-specific physics) and Pan-European case (resilient pathways). The project will also produce an open access Pan-European dataset at hourly temporal resolution and high spatial resolution (NUTS2 capable). It can be fed into SpineOpt or used by other modelling groups. Mopo tools can recreate data at resolution required by the end-user – also for future climates. End-user requirements, feedback and tool validations will be important part of Mopo – the consortium includes representatives from all end-user categories. Partners will also have skills in user-interfaces, computational efficiency, data processing, code testing, community building and all aspects related to energy systems (technologies, sectors, resources). Mopo project aims to benefit 60% of network operators and public authorities within 2 years of the project end. The tools will be modular, which allows different organisations to adopt the parts that benefit their existing modelling systems.

Microbiomes have high potential to improve biobased processes. For example, in soil and groundwater they can degrade organic contaminants, a process called bioremediation. In Europe about 324,000 severely contaminated sites exist, which pose a risk to humans and the environment. Conventional remediation technologies to clean them are often too expensive and technically Microbiomes have a high potential to improve processes in the bio-based industry. Like the microbiome in the gut, that supports the body in the digestion of food, microbiomes in environmental compartments like soil and groundwater can produce enzymes that can degrade organic contaminants caused by human activities. In MIBIREM we will develop a TOOLBOX that helps to better develop applications for microbiomes. The TOOLBOX includes molecular methods for a better understand and monitoring, isolation and cultivation techniques as well as quality criteria for deposition of whole microbiomes and last, but not least methods that are applied to improve specific functions of microbiomes like microbiome evolution and enrichment cultures and microcosm tests. The TOOLBOX is developed for the environmental applications of microbiomes for ‘bioremediation’. For that purpose, three use-cases were selected. In these three use-cases the degradation of organic contaminants in soil and groundwater by active microbiomes is investigated and developed. The three groups of contaminants are cyanides, hexachlorocyclohexane (HCH) and petroleum hydrocarbons (PHC). The project starts with sampling of contaminated sites to isolate microbiomes active in degradation and to gain data for the development of a prediction tool that helps guide bioremediation. Isolated microbiomes and degrading strains will be deposited and will also be improved via laboratory evolution. Finally, the performance of the isolated microbiomes will be tested based on the gained knowledge about degrading microbiomes in pilot tests under real field conditions.

The European Climate Prediction system project (EUCP) has four objectives, all directly relevant to the work programme, and fully meet the challenge, scope and impact of the work programme. 1. Develop an innovative ensemble climate prediction system based on high-resolution climate models for Europe for the near-term (~1-40years), including improved methods used to characterise uncertainty in climate predictions, regional downscaling, and evaluation against observations. 2. Use the climate prediction system to produce consistent, authoritative and actionable climate information. This information will be co-designed with users to constitute a robust foundation for Europe-wide climate service activities to support climate-related risk assessments and climate change adaptation programmes. 3. Demonstrate the value of this climate prediction system through high impact extreme weather events in the near past and near future drawing on convection permitting regional climate models translated into risk information for, and with, targeted end users. 4. Develop, and publish, methodologies, good practice and guidance for producing and using authoritative climate predictions for 1-40year timescale. The system (objective1) will combine initialised climate predictions on the multi-annual timescale with longer-term climate projections and high resolution regional downscaling, using observations for evaluation. Methodologies will be developed to characterise uncertainty and to seamlessly blend the predictions and projections. Users will be engaged through active user groups. The system will be utilised (objective2) with users to co-produce information suitable for European climate service activities. A set of demonstrators will show the value of this information in real-world applications with user involvement (objective3). Key outputs will include disseminating and publishing the project’s methodologies, and user-relevant data and knowledge (objective4).

The path towards exascale computing holds enormous challenges for the community of weather and climate modelling regarding portability, scalability and data management that can hardly be faced by individual institutes. ESiWACE2 will therefore link, organise and enhance Europe's excellence in weather and climate modelling to (1) enable leading European weather and climate models to leverage the performance of pre-exascale systems with regard to both compute and data capacity as soon as possible and (2) prepare the weather and climate community to be able to make use of exascale systems when they become available. To achieve this goal, ESiWACE2 will (a) improve throughput and scalability of leading European weather and climate models and demonstrate the technical and scientific performance of the models in unprecedented resolution on pre-exascale EuroHPC systems, (b) evaluate and establish new technologies such as domain specific languages and machine learning for use in weather and climate modelling, (c) enhance HPC capacity via services to the weather and climate community to optimize code performance and allow model porting, (d) improve the data management tool chain from weather and climate simulations at scale, (e) foster co-design between model developers, HPC manufacturers and HPC centres, and (f) strengthen interactions of the community with the European HPC Eco-system. ESiWACE2 will deliver configurations of leading models that can make efficient use of the largest supercomputers in Europe and run at unprecedented resolution for high-quality weather and climate predictions. This will be a beacon for the community in Europe and around the world. ESiWACE2 will develop HPC benchmarks, increase flexibility to use heterogeneous hardware and co-design and provide targeted education and training for one of the most challenging applications to shape the future of HPC in Europe.