Scientists pursuing fusion energy say they have found a way to overcome one of their biggest challenges to date — by using artificial intelligence.
Nuclear fusion has for decades been promoted as a near-limitless source of clean energy. That would be a game-changing solution to the climate crisis. However, experts have only achieved and sustained fusion energy for a few seconds, and many obstacles remain, including instabilities in the highly complex process.
There are several ways to achieve fusion energy. The most common involves using hydrogen isotopes as an input fuel and raising temperatures and pressures to extraordinarily high levels in a donut-shaped machine, known as a tokamak, to create a plasma, a soup-like state of matter.
But that plasma has to be carefully controlled and is vulnerable to “tearing” and escaping the machine’s powerful magnetic fields that are designed to keep the plasma contained.
Last Wednesday, researchers from Princeton University and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) published a report in the journal Nature that they had found a way to use artificial intelligence (AI) to forecast these potential instabilities and prevent them from happening in real time.
The team executed their experiments at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego. They found that their AI controller could forecast potential plasma tearing up to 300 milliseconds in advance. Without that intervention, the fusion reaction would have ended suddenly.
A Princeton spokesperson said, “The experiments provide a foundation for using AI to solve a broad range of plasma instabilities, which have long hindered fusion energy.”
Egemen Kolemen is a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University and an author of the study. He said that the findings are “definitely” a step forward for nuclear fusion.
Kolemen said in a recent interview, “This is one of the big roadblocks — disruptions — and you want any reactor to be operating 24/7 for years without any problem. And these types of disruption and instabilities would be very problematic, so developing solutions like this increase their confidence that we can run these machines without any issues.”
Fusion energy is the process that powers the sun and all the other stars, and scientists have been trying for decades to master it on Earth. It is achieved when two atoms are fused together, releasing huge amounts of energy. It’s the opposite of nuclear fission which relies on splitting atoms to generate heat. Nuclear fission is the current basis of nuclear power.
Scientists and engineers near the English city of Oxford recently set a new nuclear fusion energy record, sustaining 69 megajoules of fusion energy for five seconds, using just 0.2 milligrams of fuel. That would be sufficient to power roughly twelve thousand households.
However, that experiment still used more energy as input than it generated. Another team in California managed to produce a net amount of fusion energy in December 2022, in a process called “ignition.” They have replicated ignition three times since.
Despite the promising progress, fusion energy is a long way from becoming commercially available. Some analysts say that it will arrive too late to provide the pollution free energy needed to stave off worsening impacts of the climate crisis. Climate scientists say those pollution cuts are required this decade.