Both meetings were held days after the General Assembly and gathered representatives of the partners involved and of the ten observers

November has been an important month for the DONES Preparatory Phase project (DONES-PreP). Besides the General Assembly, the project also organised its two high-level meetings to discuss key aspects for the management of the European initiative, which had the aim to propose a management, governance, and funding model for IFMIF-DONES.

The Council meeting took place on November 23. This body is responsible for monitoring the DONES-PreP project and for the approval of the latest results obtained during its implementation. This online meeting gathered the 16 partners of the project and members from Fusion for Energy and EUROfusion. It assessed the progress made and the first results achieved related to the governance proposal for IFMIF-DONES.

The members of the Council were also informed about the Project Committee meeting, an advisory board with five experts that meet every 6 months to analyse the milestones of the preparatory phase, and about other fusion-related experiments.

The second Stakeholders Committee meeting of the project was held online on November 26. Along with Representatives of the partners involved in the project attended this meeting, along with members of the ten observer institutions and of the funding agencies of the different countries interested in the development of the project. The meeting was chaired by the Secretary-General of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, Rafael Rodrigo.

The partners involved in the project are: CIEMAT, University of Granada (UGR), OnGranada Tech City, United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (CCFE), Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et les énergies alternatives (CEA), Empresarios Agrupados Internacional, Agenzia Nazionale per le Nuove Tecnologie, l’Energia e lo Sviluppo Economico Sostenibile (ENEA), Instytut Fizyki Jądrowej Polskiej Akademii Nauk (IFJ PAN), Instituo Nzionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), Institute of Plasma Physics and Laser Microfusion (IPPLM), Instituto Superior Tecnico (IST), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Ruđer Bošković Institute (RBI), Studiecentrum voor Kernenergie/Centre d’Etude de l’Energie Nucléaire (SCK-CEN), Warsaw University of Technology (WUT) and Centre for Energy Research (EK).

The observer institutions participating in the project are: Fusion for Energy (F4E), EUROfusion, National Institutes for Quantum and Radiological Science and Technology (QST, Japan), École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland), the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Spain), the Regional Government of Andalucía (Spain), the Centre for the Development of Industrial Technology (CDTI, Spain) and other European and Spanish scientific organisations, such as Spanish Society of Neutron Techniques (SETN) and the Nuclear Physics European Collaboration Committee (NuPEcc).