Science and Research Ministers from Spain and Croatia, Pedro Duque and Blazenka Divjak, have signed a cooperation agreement pushing the candidature of Granada (Spain) for IFMIF-DONES facility.
Spain and Croatia presented initially independent candidatures but they joined their efforts in order to present a common European candidature. IFMIF-DONES aims to study the extreme conditions of fusion materials under energy production and particularly research on irradiation for DEMO operation. The estimated budget for the construction is between 400 and 600 million euros and the construction will take 10 years and it will be operating at least 20 years.
IFMIF project (International Fusion Material Irradiation Facility) aims to study the irradiation of materials under fusion operation. It is a missing facility in the fusion field that it is required the analyse the material irradiation to the neutron bombardment. IFMIF-DONES (DEMO-Oriented Neutron Source) current design includes full energy (40 MeV, 125 mA) deuteron accelerator that will generate the neutrons that will hit the final target.
The infrastructure is complementary to IFMIF-EVEDA (Engineering Validation and Engineering Design Activity), currently under construction and commissioning at Rokkasho, Japan. IFMIF-EVEDA is designed and manufactured in Europe, installed and commissioned in Japan. It will operate with 125mA, 9MeV deuteron Linac in continuous wave to provide an average power of 1.125 MW. IFMIF-DONES will follow the results of IFMIF-EVEDA for their final design and commissioning.
The complexity of the facility makes it a major scientific challenge. The collaboration between Europe and Japan has already achieved significant milestones such as the first proton beam injected into the RFQ past 13 June 2018. Moreover, the uniqueness of IFMIF design may potentially allow the facility to contribute to other fields besides fusion such as medicine, industry or basic physics, but this has to be evaluated first.
Source: CIEMAT news