Overview

• Under the FIRE program, DOE initiated four coordinated collaborations—SWIFT-PFCs, BCTF, FILMS and MiRACL—to advance durable plasma-facing materials, blanket and coolant systems, tritium breeding and disruption risk mitigation.
• Oak Ridge National Laboratory leads SWIFT-PFCs to rapidly develop and validate solid plasma-facing materials with the stated goal of delivering options on industry timelines for a pilot plant.
• ORNL also leads the BCTF effort to plan and run the Helium and Salt Technology Experiment (HASTE) to test helium and molten-salt blanket and coolant prototypes that address a key infrastructure gap.
• Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory leads FILMS and MiRACL, with ORNL as a partner; FILMS investigates liquid-metal walls and an integrated liquid-metal cooling and breeding system, while MiRACL applies simulation and machine learning to quantify and mitigate plasma disruptions.
• Separately, in the 2025 INFUSE cohort, ORNL was selected to lead three industry collaborations—with Commonwealth Fusion Systems on irradiated tungsten performance, Realta Fusion on fast-ion diagnostics for WHAM modeling, and Xcimer Energy on FERMI simulations of FLiBe jet chambers—as DOE announced $6.1 million across 20 INFUSE projects with required private cost sharing.