Fusion Energy Q&A with Experts
Last week, ASP noted that The Engineer, a British publication, solicited questions on fusion energy from its readers. This week, The Engineer posted the questions online with answers from fusion scientists. The Q&A centered around two proejcts – the Joint European Torus (JET), a fusion facility in the UK, and ITER, an internationally-backed fusion project under construction in France. From the article:
What is the biggest obstacle to making fusion technology commercially viable and what steps will we need to take after ITER to get there?
There are many challenges to creating a commercially viable fusion power plant, which is a complex integration of many systems ranging from plasma physics, through manufacturing to economics, that are intricately connected such that no single entity can be identified as the “major obstacle.”
One of the most interesting challenges is developing materials and manufacturing processes that can withstand the hostile environment of a fusion reactor where a high level of fast neutron irradiation causes damage at the atomic structure level and creates impurities by nuclear transmutation. This affects the bulk properties of the materials so that structural design is complicated due to variation of the material property throughout the body. When coupled with high heat flux and surface erosion rates, these effects preclude the use of most common structural materials; some special alloys have already been developed for fusion applications but more work is needed.
To read the full article, click here.
