Conclusion

The design of plasma-facing components—a field that bridges plasma physics and engineering—is a major challenge for next-generation fusion devices. This article presents significant advances in this field, from the first generations of components in the 1980s to the divertor currently under construction for ITER. The transition from inertial components to actively cooled components represented an initial technological challenge, in which the Tore Supra tokamak pioneered the way as early as the 1990s. The change in plasma-facing materials required for next-generation machines—shifting from carbon to tungsten—constitutes another challenge and is being studied in many current tokamaks. For the ITER divertor, the chosen design consists of tungsten monoblocks assembled on a copper heat sink and cooled by water. Following extensive testing on scaled-down models, full-scale prototypes have been...