The International Tokamak Experimental Reactor (ITER), a $30 billion fusion reactor project in France, aims to create ten times as much thermal power from fusion as will be required to heat the plasma. But with temperatures in the plasma core exceeding 150 million °C, significant research effort is now underway to understand how the wall materials at the plasma edge will behave under the extraordinarily heat and particle fluxes they will be exposed to.

In this talk, we will explore the history of fusion reactor wall materials, with a focus on local developments here within the ANU's research school of Physics as we attempt to answer the ultimate question: how do we bottle the sun?