ASM World Series Talks with Dr. Greg De Temmerman

When: on May 5^th at 1 pm EDT

Where: online – register at www.asmontario.org

ASM Ontario Chapter is excited to bring you another interesting talk, and this time from France!

Title: Nuclear Fusion, Wall Loading and Materials: on the Difficult Life of a Material Close to a Thermonuclear Plasma

Nuclear fusion is a promising option for a future low-carbon, dispatchable and abundant energy source. Fusion requires high temperatures to occur and simply speaking, the fusion process consists of heating a gas at 150 million °C in a vacuum chamber and confining it with a strong magnetic fields or lasers. In a magnetically confined fusion reactor, power from the hot core plasma is exhausted by the plasma-facing components. This happens mainly in the divertor area, a special area of the plasma chamber where the open magnetic field lines intersect the primary plasma facing components and where the plasma is neutralized and pumped away. The plasma-facing surfaces in the divertor are exposed to extreme heat (>10MW.m^-2) and particle fluxes, for extended durations of times. Being continuously bombarded by energetic particles, together with high energy neutrons from the fusion reactions, the plasma-facing materials need to satisfy stringent demands. These materials require minimum erosion to reduce impurity sources and plasma contamination and maximum lifetime, resilience to changes in morphology/composition, minimum retention of tritium (nuclear licensing) and good thermo-mechanical properties. Plasma-surface interactions at the plasma boundary also play a significant role in the machine performances.