With AMA: Energy 2026 approaching, 3D Printing Industry is taking a closer look at the role of additive manufacturing in the energy sector.
When most engineers think about the challenges of nuclear fusion, they think about plasma temperatures of 50 million degrees Celsius, magnetic containment, and tritium fuel cycles. Moataz Attallah, newly appointed Dean of the School of Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical, and Materials Engineering at Loughborough University, thinks about something far more fundamental: what the reactor walls are made of, and how to build them.
Speaking from his new role, having moved his research group the Advanced Materials Processing Laboratory (AMPLanb) from the University of Birmingham, where the research was conducted, Attallah presented findings from a major UK-funded program involving Metamorphic AM and private fusion company Tokamak Energy. The work focused on one of the most stubborn unsolved problems in fusion engineering: finding a material that can survive the inside of a reactor, and a manufacturing process that can actually build it.
The Material Problem Nobody Talks About
The physics of fusion, Attallah argues, is largely understood. The materials science is not. The walls of a fusion reactor must withstand extreme heat flux, constant radiation, and thermal shock, conditions that eliminate most conventional engineering materials immediately. The candidates that remain are refractory metals: tungsten, molybdenum, tantalum, niobium, and rhenium. Each has a melting point above 2,000 degrees Celsius. Each is also deeply problematic to work with.
Oxygen is the main problem. Even trace amounts, as little as four parts per million, can dramatically reduce ductility and strength in tungsten. Refractory metals have a high affinity for oxygen, meaning that any manufacturing environment that is not rigorously controlled will compromise the material before it ever reaches a reactor. Compounding this, most refractory metals are not considered weldable, which in additive manufacturing terms is a warning sign, since weldability is broadly seen as a proxy for printability.
The result is a materials challenge that sits at the intersection of metallurgy, manufacturing process control, and nuclear physics, and one that cannot be solved by any single discipline working alone.
Printing the Unprintable
AMPLab’s approach centered on laser powder bed fusion, using tungsten as the primary material but blending it with tantalum to address the oxygen problem. The logic was: tantalum oxides form more readily than tungsten oxides, meaning tantalum acts as a getter, effectively scavenging oxygen ions from the build chamber before they can damage the tungsten matrix. The result was a measurable reduction in the boundary segregation that leads to cracking.
The team designed complex cooling channel geometries, structures requiring highly turbulent internal flow to extract heat from reactor walls, geometries that would be impossible to manufacture by conventional means. Printed samples showed low porosity and, visually at least, were largely crack-free. Mechanical testing at Johns Hopkins University‘s advanced high temperature mechanical testing system returned compressive strength values close to those of standard tungsten, an encouraging early result.
The process was not without limitations. Powder blending introduces inhomogeneity: in a 90/10 tungsten-tantalum mix, tantalum concentration was consistently lower at the base of the build and higher toward the top, affecting material properties across the part height. Simulation tools helped characterize this behavior, but it remains a constraint that laser powder bed fusion has not yet fully resolved for bulk refractory structures. The results of the work are being prepared for publication, with a pre-print available online.
Electron Beam: The Vacuum Advantage
The most promising near-term direction, Attallah suggested, lies with electron beam additive manufacturing, specifically because the process operates in vacuum, eliminating the oxygen contamination problem at source. The team recently invested in a FreeMelt One system, an open-source electron beam platform that allows full control over scanning strategy and process parameters, giving researchers the flexibility to experiment with materials that commercial systems are not optimized for.
Early tungsten builds using electron beam showed the process operating in conditions far better suited to refractory metals than any laser-based approach. Surface finish is coarser, and the learning curve is steeper, particularly for researchers coming from a laser background, but for bulk tungsten structures destined for radiation environments, electron beam is increasingly the only credible option.
“Electron beam has a higher potential, once all the stochastic defects can be avoided and the powder quality can be improved,” said Attallah.
The broader ambition is to close the loop between process data, microstructural imaging, and AI-assisted optimization, using layer-by-layer backscattered electron images to correlate build parameters with part density in real time, accelerating qualification of materials that the fusion industry urgently needs.
AM to Address Supply Chain Challenges
Following his move to Loughborough, together with his colleague Dr. Yasmine Sabri from Loughborough’s Business School, Sabri and Attallah secured a grant from the RiSC+ Network (Reimagining Supply Chains), supported by BBSRC. The project addresses a key challenge in nuclear fusion: ensuring resilient supply chains for critical minerals including tungsten.
By exploring robust supply configurations, the project aims to support the UK’s ambitions for clean, secure, and economically sustainable future energy systems.
Dr. Sabri is based in the UK Supply Chain and Logistics Excellence (SCALE) Centre, part of the MIT Global SCALE Network and in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Center for Transportation & Logistics.
AM and the Race for Fusion Energy
Nuclear fusion has long been described as the energy source of the future and for decades, that future was on pause. That is beginning to change. Multinational fusion programs are accelerating, private investment is growing, and the materials and manufacturing challenges that once seemed intractable are now attracting serious industrial and academic attention. The bottleneck, as Attallah and his collaborators have found, is not physics, it is materials science and the manufacturing processes capable of handling it.
Institutions around the world are arriving at the same conclusion. The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority commissioned two additive manufacturing systems at its newly launched Central Support Facility, a Freemelt eMELT electron beam machine and a Nikon SLM Solutions laser system, with early trials focused specifically on layering tungsten with copper chrome zirconium, materials identified as critical for fusion reactors.
In a world-first, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory successfully 3D printed defect-free tungsten parts with complex geometries using electron beam additive manufacturing, components capable of withstanding temperatures exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius.
Both cases point to the same manufacturing reality the Birmingham and Loughborough work is built around: vacuum-based electron beam processing is not a preference for refractory metals in fusion applications, it is a necessity.
3D Printing Industry is inviting speakers for its 2026 Additive Manufacturing Applications (AMA) series, covering Energy, Healthcare, Automotive and Mobility, Aerospace, Space and Defense, and Software. Each online event focuses on real production deployments, qualification, and supply chain integration. Practitioners interested in contributing can complete the call for speakers form here.
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