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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
DOE awards $134M for fusion research and development
The Department of Energy announced on Wednesday that it has awarded $134 million in funding for two programs designed to secure U.S. leadership in emerging fusion technologies and innovation. The funding was awarded through the DOE’s Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) program in the Office of Science and will support the next round of Fusion Innovation Research Engine (FIRE) collaboratives and the Innovation Network for Fusion Energy (INFUSE) awards.
C. E. Kessel, T. Bohm, M. S. Tillack, P. Titus, Y. Zhai
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 77 | Number 7 | November 2021 | Pages 519-531
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2021.1909988
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Restraining the size of fusion power plants is considered an important avenue to make them a competitive energy source among other forms of energy production. The most critical contributor to the size of a tokamak is the inboard radial build, composed of multiple components with various functions. This build is the ultimate limit to size reduction. The Fusion Nuclear Science Facility is reviewed and each element of the inboard build is described, showing that the build, including breeding blanket, structural ring, vacuum vessel, low-temperature shield, and toroidal field and central solenoid (CS) coils, contributes 2.9 m of build, with 0.6 m of bore hole inside the CS coil, or 3.5 m to reach the plasma scrape-off layer. This implies that it would be challenging to make a significantly smaller build and simultaneously meet all the engineering requirements.