Development of fusion technology for DEMO in Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe

The Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe develops for more than 20 years fusion technologies and structural materials for ITER and ultimately for DEMO. While the technologies developed for ITER have reached some maturity, although not yet completed, the technologies and structural materials for DEMO need substantial progress before such a commercial prototype fusion reactor can be built. The main advances required beyond the technologies already developed for ITER are: the development of high temperature superconducting coils, a He or liquid metal cooled breeding blanket, a He-cooled divertor and the integration of the “In Vessel” components into a DEMO (Tokamak) reactor (a complex design task). In addition the development of suitable structural materials for the blanket and the divertor is an urgent task. These structural materials have to be of a low activation kind (decay to low activation level within ∼100 years) and have to achieve a suitable lifetime (∼5 years, i.e. ∼150 dpa) when used for DEMO blankets and divertor and when considering the large neutron affluence in DEMO. In all these fields the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe is very active and in many cases a world leader.