Cheaper Fusion Power Off a 3D Printer: Printed Reactor Walls Survived 74 Plasma Blasts

Full-size 3D-printed tungsten tiles came through three days of plasma in a U.S. research tokamak intact. Damage scans aren't out yet; the account is a secondary report from the American Nuclear Society.

TL;DR

The wall of a fusion power plant takes a pounding no ordinary material can stand, and the best candidate, tungsten, is so hard to machine that its tiles are slow and costly to make. A U.S.-Japanese team printed them instead. Full-size, 3D-printed tungsten tiles spent three days inside DIII-D, a fusion research machine in San Diego, took 74 high-power plasma shots in the exhaust zone where the hottest plasma lands, and came out intact, the American Nuclear Society reports. If reactor walls can come off a printer, a part that is costly and slow to make today could get cheaper and faster to build, and that is the kind of factory progress that turns a physics experiment into a power station. To see our odds on printed parts lining a working fusion plant, and the timeline of breakthroughs that leads there, subscribe.

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