Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the US ITER Project Office have developed a new cast stainless steel that is 70% stronger than comparable steels and is being evaluated for use in the huge shield modules required by the ITER fusion device. ITER is a multi-billion dollar international research and development project to demonstrate the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion power and to enable studies of self-heating burning plasmas. It will require hundreds of tons of complex stainless steel components that must withstand the temperatures associated with being in the proximity of plasma heated to more than 100 million degrees Celsius. The ITER device will be assembled in Cadarache in France, using components fabricated in the USA and in the other partner nations like China, the EU, India, Japan, the South Korea and Russia. It is based on the tokamak concept, in which a hot gas is confined in a torus shaped vessel using a magnetic field. When operational, the device will produce some 500MW of fusion power.
