Yesterday, Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced that the Department of Energy has committed funding to develop a fusion breeding blanket test facility at the lab in partnership with Kyoto Fusioneering, and the company announced it will be relocating its U.S. headquarters to Oak Ridge, Tenn., with support from the state of Tennessee’s Nuclear Energy Supply Chain Investment Fund.

General Atomics announced it is developing design concepts in collaboration with the Department of Energy for the Fusion Blanket Component Test Facility (BCTF), which will test full-scale breeding blankets.

“No one has tested a fusion blanket at this scale. While there are more research and development challenges ahead, a BCTF brings us closer to turning fusion from proven science into practical, sustainable power,” said Anantha Krishnan, senior vice president of the General Atomics Energy Group.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory has announced a partnership with Japan’s Kyoto Fusioneering to develop technology for speeding the deployment of commercial fusion energy through the creation of a breeding blanket test facility. The lab said that the partnership will “leverage ORNL’s expertise in supercomputing, advanced manufacturing, materials science, and fusion research, and complement KF’s UNITY test facilities.”

Findings regarding the corrosion resistance of two promising structural materials for fusion reactors were recently reported by ScienceDaily. The research, published in the April 1 issue of Corrosion Science, was conducted by a team led by Masatoshi Kondo of the Tokyo Institute of Technology. The researchers describe details of the high-temperature compatibility of the two materials with the liquid breeding blanket (BB) surrounding the reactor core.