FUSENET sponsors the Culham Plasma Physics Summer School in the UK. One of the students present, James Simpson, reports:

Monday 23rd July

Hi everyone! This is my very first time writing a blog and posting on Fusenet! So I hope you enjoy my reports on this summer school.

Today we had some great lectures on MHD instabilities and plasma transport and turbulence. I found these lectures fascinating, but then again - these are my favourite subjects since I would like to be a plasma theorist :-).

Lunch time! As usual we went to the canteen, but this British summer time has finally arrived (and hopefully here to stay) so as you can see we enjoyed the sunshine during our lunch break.

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Below: coffee time!

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Below: We also had a problem class on plasma oscillations - here is my friend Alberto hard at work solving his plasma wave problems!

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Unfortunately, our tour of MAST (spherical tokamak at Culham) was cancelled today due to asbestos being removed from the building. However, this was replaced with two very informative talks about the MAST upgrade (more information here http://www.ccfe.ac.uk/mast_upgrade.aspx) and about the engineering of our favourite tokamak ITER.

For dinner we decided to try and save some money, so we headed to weatherspoons. We then returned to our accommodation and with the weather being so good, we bought some alcohol and enjoyed drinks on the courtyard.

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Unfortunately, our friend Pedro had to leave today so we gave him a good send off, and we returned to the pub later on that night.

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