EUROfusion Started The DEMO Conceptual Design Phase

Last 5th July 2022, the EUROfusion consortium announced the start of conceptual design activities for Europe’s first demonstration fusion power plant DEMO, the ITER’s successor.

DEMO (Demonstration Fusion Power Reactor) is a first-of-its-kind facility that represents the next technological step after the global ITER fusion experiment. It aims to demonstrate the net production of 300 to 500 MW of electricity, so meeting the annual consumption of about 1.5 million households.

Moreover, DEMO aims to test essential technologies such as remote maintenance and tritium breeding. This latter technology to produce the tritium fusion fuel on-site is considered to be a crucial requirement not just for DEMO but also for any future fusion power device to follow ITER.

The announcement follows a milestone achieved earlier this year when the EUROfusion researchers at the Joint European Torus (JET) in the UK doubled previous records by producing a total of 59 megajoules of heat energy from fusion over a five-second period and using the same mix of deuterium-tritium fuels that will be used in ITER, DEMO and future fusion power plants.

Read more about the state of the art for DEMO.

Watch the event announcing the start of the DEMO conceptual design phase here.