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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Fusion Science and Technology
October 2025
Latest News
Shifting the paradigm of supply chain
Chad Wolf
When I began my nuclear career, I was coached up in the nuclear energy culture of the day to “run silent, run deep,” a mindset rooted in the U.S. Navy’s submarine philosophy. That was the norm—until Fukushima.
The nuclear renaissance that many had envisioned hit a wall. The focus shifted from expansion to survival. Many utility communications efforts pivoted from silence to broadcast, showcasing nuclear energy’s elegance and reliability. Nevertheless, despite being clean baseload 24/7 power that delivered a 90 percent capacity factor or higher, nuclear energy was painted as risky and expensive (alongside energy policies and incentives that favored renewables).
Economics became a driving force threatening to shutter nuclear power. The Delivering the Nuclear Promise initiative launched in 2015 challenged the industry to sustain high performance yet cut costs by up to 30 percent.
S.-H. Hong, K.-M. Kim, J.-H. Song, E.-N. Bang, H.-T. Kim, K.-S. Lee, A. Litnovsky, M. Hellwig, D. C. Seo, H. H. Lee, C. S. Kang, H.-Y. Lee, J.-H. Hong, J. G. Bak, H.-S. Kim, J.-W. Juhn, S.-H. Son, H.-K. Kim, D. Douai, C. Grisolia, J. Wu, G.-N. Luo, W.-H. Choe, M. Komm, M. van den Berg, G. De Temmerman, R. Pitts
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 1 | July 2015 | Pages 36-43
Technical Paper | Open Magnetic Systems 2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-897
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the main missions of KSTAR is to develop long-pulse operation capability relevant to the production of fusion energy. After a full metal wall configuration was decided for ITER, a major upgrade for KSTAR was planned, to a tungsten first wall similar to the JET ITER-like wall (coatings and bulk tungsten plasma-facing components). To accomplish the upgrade, tungsten bonding technology has been developed and tested. Since the leading edges of each castellation structure have to be protected, shaping of tungsten blocks has been studied by ANSYS simulation, and the miniaturized castellation has been exposed to Ohmic plasma to confirm the simulation results. It is found that a shaped castellation block has more heat handling capability than a conventional block. For more dedicated experiments, a multipurpose castellation block is fabricated and exposed to Ohmic, L- and H-mode plasmas and observed by IR camera from the top. During the fabrication and assembly of the blocks, leading edges caused by “naturally misaligned” blocks due to engineering limits with a maximum level up to 0.5 mm have been observed, and these have to be minimized for the future fusion machine.
