DEMO (DEMOnstration Power Plant) is a proposed nuclear fusion power plant that is intended to build upon the expected success of the ITER (originally an acronym for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) nuclear fusion power plant. Whereas ITER's goal is to produce 500 million watts of fusion power for at least 400 seconds, the goal of DEMO will be to produce at least four times that much fusion power on a continual basis. Moreover, while ITER's goal is to produce 10 times as much power as is required for breakeven, DEMO's goal is to produce 25 times as much power. DEMO's 2 gigawattsFact: date=January 2008 of thermal output will be on the scale of a modern electric power plant.

To achieve its goals, DEMO must have linear dimensions about 15% larger than ITER and a plasma density about 30% greater than ITER. As a prototype commercial fusion reactor DEMO could make fusion energy (which does not have the problems associated with fossil fuels or fission energy) available within 20 years. Subsequent commercial fusion reactors could be built for nearly a quarter of the cost of DEMO if things go according to plan.

While fusion reactors like ITER and DEMO will not produce transuranic wastes, some of the components of the ITER and DEMO reactors will become radioactive due to neutrons impinging upon them. It is hoped that careful material choice will mean that the wastes produced in this way will have much shorter half lives than the waste from fission reactors, with wastes remaining harmful for less than one century. The process of manufacturing tritium currently produces long-lived waste, but both ITER and DEMO, it is hoped, will produce their own tritium, dispensing with the fission reactor currently used for this purpose.

Timeline

The following timetable was presented at the IAEA Fusion Energy Conference in 2004 by Prof. Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith. These dates are conceptual and as such are subject to change.

• Conceptual design is to be complete by 2017
• Engineering design is to be complete by 2024
• The first 'Construction Phase' is to last from 2024 to 2033
• The first phase of operation is to last from 2033 to 2038
• The plant is then to be expanded/updated
• The second phase of operation is to last from 2040 onwards

How the reactor will work

When deuterium and tritium fuse, the two nuclei come together to form a helium nucleus (an alpha particle) and a high energy neutron.

$\{\}^\{2\}\_\{1\}\backslash mbox\{H\}\; +\; \{\}^\{3\}\_\{1\}\backslash mbox\{H\}\; \backslash rightarrow\; \{\}^\{4\}\_\{2\}\backslash mbox\{He\}\; +\; \{\}^\{1\}\_\{0\}\backslash mbox\{n\}\; +\; 17.6\; \backslash mbox\{\; MeV\}$

There are three problems that DEMO must solve: getting the nuclei to fuse, containing the resulting plasma, and capturing the liberated energy.

• The activation energy for fusion is very large because the protons in each nucleus strongly repel one another; they are both positively charged. In order to fuse, the nuclei must be within 1 femtometre (1 × 10⁻¹⁵ metres) of each other, which is achievable using very high temperatures.
• High temperatures give the nuclei enough energy to overcome their electrostatic repulsion. This requires temperatures in the region of 100,000,000 °C, using energy from microwaves and ion beams.
• Containment vessels melt at these temperatures, so the plasma is to be kept away from the walls using magnetic confinement.