The Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production(STEP) environment will include magnetic, thermal, mechanical and environmental loads far greater than those seen in the Joint European Torus campaigns of the past decade or currently contemplated for ITER. Greater still are the neutron peak dose rates of 10−6 displacements per atom, per second, which in…
Commercial fusion energy will require an energy-producing fusion plasma core (the “fire”) surrounded by an integrated engineering system (the “fireplace”). This review focuses on the extreme materials requirements of the fusion “fireplace,” which has the following intertwined functions: (1) a first wall that faces and survives the inten…
Fusion has entered the engineering era. Moving from plasma science to experiments demonstrating the benefits of modified torus shapes and advanced divertor geometries, the ‘field’ has become an ‘industry’. Investors focus now on whether superconducting magnet joints are feasible in large tokamak designs and how to deliver net energy to g…
