MIT Plasma Fusion Center welding project

Roughly 1990, MIT plasma-fusion researchers approached Tom about welding 20-inch-thick by ~4-foot stainless steel sections for the top dome of the ITER reactor (now being built in France) because no available forging shop could produce the part in one piece.

We never did it. No one wanted to spend the money to actually do the trial. You could have used electroslag, you could have used narrow-gap welding. There were a couple of welding techniques that could have done it. Every now and then people run into these things. About twenty years ago, the guys over here at the MIT Plasma Fusion Center came to me and they wanted to weld twenty-inch-thick by about four-foot-long stainless steel together. This was going to be for the top dome of the International Thermonuclear Reactor that they're building in France now. But there was no place they could forge something this big in stainless steel. So they wanted to know — actually, if there was, it was going to be too expensive — if they could weld a bunch of smaller pieces of steel together. So every now and then someone wants to weld a piece of something that's twenty inches thick. Can it be done? Yes. But you can't make a lot of test welds and have them screw up.