CNN
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Researchers in the field of fusion energy have made a significant breakthrough by leveraging artificial intelligence to address a longstanding challenge. While the concept of nuclear fusion has long been touted as a virtually boundless source of clean energy with the potential to revolutionize the fight against climate change, achieving and maintaining fusion energy has posed difficulties, with issues such as process instabilities impeding progress.
Various methods exist to attain fusion energy, with the most prevalent approach involving the use of different forms of hydrogen as fuel and elevating temperatures to extreme levels within a torus-shaped device known as a tokamak to generate a plasma state. However, controlling this plasma is crucial, as it is prone to disruptions and escaping the magnetic fields intended to confine it within the device.
Recently, a team of experts from Princeton University and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory published a breakthrough in the journal Nature, detailing how they employed AI to predict and prevent potential instabilities in real-time during experiments conducted at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego. Their AI system demonstrated the ability to forecast plasma disruptions up to 300 milliseconds in advance, averting abrupt halts in the fusion reaction.
According to a spokesperson from Princeton, this development lays the groundwork for utilizing AI to address a wide array of plasma instabilities that have long impeded progress in fusion energy research.
While fusion energy mirrors the process that fuels celestial bodies like the sun, achieving controlled fusion reactions on Earth has been a daunting task. Unlike nuclear fission, which involves splitting atoms, fusion energy results from the merging of atoms that typically repel each other.
In a recent achievement near Oxford, researchers sustained a record-breaking 69 megajoules of fusion energy for five seconds using a mere 0.2 milligrams of fuel—enough to power approximately 12,000 households for the same duration. However, the input energy still exceeded the energy output in this experiment. Conversely, a team in California achieved a net surplus of fusion energy in December 2022 through a process known as “ignition,” successfully replicating this milestone multiple times.
Despite these advancements, the road to commercializing fusion energy remains lengthy, extending well beyond the critical timeframe in which substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are imperative to mitigate the escalating impacts of climate change. Scientists emphasize the urgency of implementing significant pollution reductions within this decade.
