The plasma facing components, first wall, and blanket systems of future tokamak-based fusion power plants arguably represent the single greatest materials engineering challenge of all time. Indeed, the United States National Academy of Engineering has recently ranked the quest for fusion as one of the top grand challenges for engineering in the 21st century. These challenges are even more pronounced by the lack of experimental testing facilities that replicate the extreme operating environment involving simultaneous high heat and particle fluxes, large time-varying stresses, corrosive chemical environments, and large fluxes of 14-MeV peaked fusion neutrons. Fortunately, recent innovations in computational modeling techniques, increasingly powerful high-performance and massively parallel computing platforms, and improved analytical experimental characterization tools provide the means to develop self-consistent, experimentally validated models of materials performance and degradation in the fusion energy environment. This article will describe the challenges associated with modeling the performance of plasma facing component and structural materials in a fusion materials environment, the opportunities to utilize high-performance computing, and two examples of recent progress.

A review of structural materials choices under irradiation in fusion environments is presented. Results on the neutron source term and the intensities in the structural materials as a function of pulse time, energy, and protection is given. The role of multiscale modeling for understanding the basic physics in irradiated materials is explained, and simulations of metals under pulse irradiation and SiC are reported.

Radiation damage, and its attendant effect on a wide spectrum of materials properties, is a central issue in many advanced technologies ranging from ion-beam processing to the development of fusion power. Indeed, the various challenges presented by irradiation effects are too numerous to discuss in this brief article.