Materials issues in fusion reactors

Abstract

The world scientific community is presently engaged in one of the toughest technological tasks of the current century, namely, exploitation of nuclear fusion in a controlled manner for the benefit of mankind. Scientific feasibility of controlled fusion of the light elements in plasma under magnetic confinement has already been proven. International efforts in a coordinated and co-operative manner are presently being made to build ITER – the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor – to test, in this first step, the concept of 'Tokamak' for net fusion energy production. To exploit this new developing option of making energy available through the route of fusion, India too embarked on a robust fusion programme under which we now have a working tokamak – the Aditya and a steady state tokamak (SST-1), which is on the verge of functioning. The programme envisages further development in terms of making SST-2 followed by a DEMO and finally the fusion power reactor. Further, with the participation of India in the ITER program in 2005, and recent allocation of half – a – port in ITER for placing our Lead – Lithium Ceramic Breeder (LLCB) based Test Blanket Module (TBM), meant basically for breeding tritium and extracting high grade heat, the need to understand and address issues related to materials for these complex systems has become all the more necessary. Also, it is obvious that with increasing power from the SST stages to DEMO and further to PROTOTYPE, the increasing demands on performance of materials would necessitate discovery and development of new materials.