Cost and Complexity of Scaling Up Fusion Reactor Materials

cen.acs.org article

How advanced materials could unleash fusion energy - C&EN

https://cen.acs.org/energy/nuclear-power/how-advanced-materials-unleash-fusio…

“That allows us to make magnets that are much more powerful and more compact so you can make [fusion] devices smaller,” Dennett says. Half the world’s fusion start-ups are using one of two common magnetic fusion reactor designs, tokamaks and stellarators—which also look like doughnuts but use asymmetric coils to produce twisting magnetic fields—and most of them rely on HTS tape. “The most fundamental problem in materials for fusion is the chicken-and-egg problem,” El Alami says. Whether it’s magnets or lasers that control the plasma, every fusion reactor will need materials that can handle incredibly harsh conditions. What fusion scientists and engineers do know is that developing high-tech materials and building a full-size reactor will require billions of dollars. And while the world waits for commercial fusion reactors to go live, the new materials technologies being developed could find use in other applications. Developing new fusion materials is especially challenging because of the “the lack of prototypical test-beds to measure the hardness of materials,” says ORNL’s Kato.

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re.public.polimi.it article

[PDF] 1 Can Fusion Energy be cost-competitive and commercially viable ...

https://re.public.polimi.it/bitstream/11311/1249725/2/Fusion%20Paper%20R1%20f…

There have been a handful of studies (introduced below) that have previously estimated the cost of fusion energy, which mostly rely on some combination of data from ITER; the PROCESS fusion reactor design code originally developed by what is now UKAEA [40]; and, in the US, models produced in 1980s and updated recently in Ref. We investigate the effect of discount rate, power scaling effects and economy of multiples. Considering the Advanced Small technology option, fusion energy cost of 75 units is in the region of $101-145/MWh – a range that is comparable to 10 units of Advanced Large and also the energy cost of LWR fission reactors. Nevertheless, for fusion to be competitive beyond 2040 with renewables costs including back-up for reliability, generation costs will need to be at or below $80-100/MWh. These low energy costs will be hard to achieve for the early technology large fusion designs considered here even with the reduced capital costs from production learning.

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singularityhub.com article

Here's What It Will Take to Ignite Scalable Fusion Power

https://singularityhub.com/2025/01/14/heres-what-it-will-take-to-ignite-scala…

To scale up inertial fusion, engineers will need to develop lasers capable of repeatedly hitting a fusion fuel target, made of frozen deuterium

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nrc.gov official

[PDF] Review of Advanced Manufacturing Technologies for Fusion ...

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2413/ML24137A055.pdf

The high heat fluxes, high neutron energies, tritium breeding, and containment constraints place immense performance requirements on materials for the PFC/FW structures. This report focuses on the performance of fusion system PFC materials and the associated FW materials under conditions anticipated for near-term and advanced fusion demonstration and power systems. PFC/FW issues apply to most fusion systems regardless of the plasma confinement approach and must stand up to the most extreme operating conditions of all system components. The conditions which must be endured for DT fusion are more damaging to PFC/FW materials than other fusion fuel combinations due to the high energy neutrons produced. While there are multiple fusion system design issues that cannot be directly tested at the scale required to qualify a commercial-grade system, there are two issues that are always cited as major concerns for qualifying PFC and FW materials: irradiation effects and extreme heat loads.

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engineering.princeton.edu research

Fusion’s future in the U.S. could come down to dollars and cents - Princeton Engineering

https://engineering.princeton.edu/news/2023/03/16/fusions-future-u-s-could-co…

In a study led by fusion expert Egemen Kolemen, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, and energy systems expert Jesse Jenkins, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, Princeton researchers modeled the cost targets that a fusion reactor might have to meet to gain traction in a future U.S. energy grid. “People will not pay an unlimited amount of money for fusion energy if they could spend that money to generate clean energy more cost-effectively,” said Jacob Schwartz, a former postdoc with Kolemen and Jenkins who led the modeling for the study and currently works as a research physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, a national laboratory working to advance the science of fusion energy. The model results demonstrated that the niche for fusion in the U.S. depends not only on the price of building a reactor but hinges greatly on the energy mix of the future grid and the cost of competing technologies like nuclear fission.

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