| Abstract Scope |
Fusion power generation, while offering a potentially limitless source of energy, stemming from the availability of deuterium fuel and lithium for tritium breeding, involves a number of critical technological challenges from the mitigation of plasma disruptions in large-scale devices to the high rates of ageing of structural and plasma-facing materials in an operating fusion power plant. While the operating conditions for materials can be deduced from full fusion device simulations, the analysis of the detailed response of these materials to the extreme operating conditions in a power plant requires an approach combining detailed experimental observations and tests, and their quantitative interpretation using suitable microstructural evolutionary models. In this presentation, I shall review the European effort in modelling and experimental exploration of radiation effects in materials undertaken over the past decade that on the one hand has now enabled performing full tokamak device simulations, and on the other hand highlighted the challenges associated with the predictive interpretation of experimental data derived for example from electron microscope observations and other high resolution techniques, planning of irradiation campaigns, and the development of suitable multiscale computational models. |