Interviews

Tony Donné

Datum der Prognose

27 March 2023

Expert:in

Tony Donné

Position

CEO

Unternehmen

EUROfusion

Akteursgruppe

Energieintensive Industrien (Energierückgewinnung), Forscher

Relevant für Branchen

Relevant für Technologien & Trends

Über die Expert:in

Tony Donné is since June 2014 Programme Manager (CEO) of EUROfusion, a European consortium of 30 national fusion research institutes in 26 EU countries plus Switzerland and Ukraine. Before that he was head of the Fusion Physics Division at the Dutch Institute for Fundamental Energy Research (DIFFER) and responsible for the coordination of the nuclear fusion research in the Netherlands. From 2008 to 2014 he was director of the Dutch-Russian Centre of Excellence on Fusion Physics and Technology, as well as programme director of the ITER-NL consortium.

Almost his entire career he worked in plasma diagnostics at a large range of tokamaks. As chair of the ITPA and EFDA Topical Group on Diagnostics, he was closely involved in the development of diagnostics for the international ITER project. He was member of the Governing Board of Fusion for Energy (F4E), the European Domestic Agency for ITER as well as member of the EURATOM Scientific and Technical Committee (STC). He is presently member of the ITER Scientific and Technology Advisory Committee, the Supervisory Board of the Max-Planck Institute for Plasma Physics and the International Advisory Committee of the EAST tokamak. He is chair of the Coordinating Committee of the International Tokamak Physics Activity. He is member of the International Organisation Committee of various conferences.

Until 2017 he chaired the physics advisory board of the Lorentz Centre in Leiden and he acted in organizing committees (in different functions: chair, secretary, treasurer, member) of many conferences and symposia. He is member of the Board of Editors of the peer-reviewed journal Nuclear Fusion.

He has published about 185 papers in peer-reviewed journals and more than 350 conference proceedings.

Zusammenfassung

Trendtreiber

He explains that in his job at EUROfusion they are aiming to create a roadmap that lays out the path towards a working fusion plant. As a collaboration of 31 National Research laboratories, they did an analysis and prioritised the work to focus on those areas where they need to make further progress in order to get there as soon as possible to the final goal. He talks about one of the main challenges they are facing at the moment: the need of finding warm materials which can resist the nutrients that come out of a fusion reaction, and that make the wall of the chamber brittle and make it radioactive. He mentions that in this sense they are making progress, but the problem is that they don't have suitable nutrients forces to test new materials, something in which they are working.

Prognose

In the future he foresees the use of lithium as a source of energy for the nuclear fusion, needing only the equivalent to the battery of 10 electric cars for a fusion plant, providing them with an energy source where the fuel is worldwide available. The use of lithium can also represent, according to him, the solution to get rid of wars fought for the mining of oil or scarce resources. He thinks that if we would make the comparison, having in mind that is still in the research phase, the fusion electricity can be competitive with other energy sources.

Auswirkungen

He foresees that, according to their roadmap, around 2050 we will have fusion electricity, and that by 2035 they will definitely have demonstrated that it’s possible to get more energy out of the process than the energy put in. He also sees that in the future we will see around more nuclear plants. By then politicians must have understood that with only renewables, wind, solar biomass storage is not possible to cover 100% energy the energetic needs of the population. In the future, as he sees it, there will be much stronger public private partnerships, where industries and public research are working together.

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