IFMIF-DONES, a necessary step in the development of fusion energy

The bilingual school Colegio Monaita received the Coordinator of the IFMIF-DONES Technical Office, José Aguilar, at its library, who gave a talk to the school’s students. Approximately sixty female students attended this talk about the IFMIF-DONES project and its role in the development of fusion energy. The students, aged between 15 and 17, learned about fusion energy, its fundaments, as the main source of energy in the universe.

The aim of this talk was to motivate the students to focus their university studies on the STEAM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics). In this context, the Coordinator described that in the search of new sources of energy by humanity, in the last decades it has been undertaken ‘the great scientific and technological challenge of looking at the sun trying to replicate its fusion processes and make them possible in a controlled way here on Earth as a way to find a practically unlimited source of energy that is environmentally friendly’.

Among the most relevant steps in this mission was the development of ITER, a large-scale experiment designed to demonstrate the scientific and technical feasibility of fusion as a new source of energy. After, its successor the DEMO demonstration reactor will be built, the forerunner of fusion commercial reactors. Between both projects there is, among others, an intermediate, fundamental, and essential step in which Europe and Spain are positioned at the forefront of scientific and technological powers in the field. IFMIF-DONES, a facility intended for the study of materials essential to achieve fusion energy, was the main focus of the presentation by José Aguilar.