Using a combination of physics and machine learning, the researchers predicted how the plasma inside a tokamak reactor would behave given a set of initial conditions.
A team of researchers at MIT think they may have lowered one of the major barriers to achieving large-scale nuclear fusion—taking us one step closer to making an abundant form of energy a reality.
By harnessing the same processes that power stars, we would have access to a clean, safe, and practically limitless energy source. Scientists have built reactors to try and tame fusion, with one of the most explored being the tokamak. Essentially a donut-shaped tube that uses strong magnets to confine the plasma needed to power fusion reactions, the tokamak has shown great potential. But to fully realize that, scientists must first navigate the potential pitfalls that such energy carries with it, including how to slow down a fusion reaction once it is in progress.
That’s where the new research comes in: Using a combination of physics and machine learning, the researchers predicted how the plasma inside a tokamak reactor would behave given a set of initial conditions—something that researchers have long puzzled over (it is hard to look inside a fusion reactor mid-run, after all). The paper was published Monday in Nature Communications.
“For fusion to be a useful energy source, it’s going to have to be reliable,” Allen Wang, study lead author and a graduate student at MIT, told MIT News.
