Scientists in the United States and the United Kingdom plan to link two supercomputers to bring fusion power plants closer to reality. Artificial intelligence will help them explore how to turn the process that powers the Sun and stars into a reliable source of electricity, Qazinform News Agency reports.
Nuclear fusion releases energy by combining light atomic nuclei. It is the process that makes the Sun shine. Scientists are working to harness it on Earth to generate electricity, but building a power plant that can do so reliably remains a major challenge. To accelerate research, experts at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) intend to combine the capabilities of the US computing platform STELLAR-AI and the UK’s SUNRISE supercomputer.
They discussed practical steps during an online workshop on September 9 and 10. Both organizations conduct experiments using devices known as spherical tokamaks. Inside them, magnetic fields confine extremely hot plasma. Scientists need to understand how to control it and whether this design could form the basis of a future power plant.
This is where supercomputers come in. They will process experimental results and help train AI to predict how the devices will behave. Data will come from two different machines: NSTX-U in the US and MAST-U in the UK. This will help researchers test whether AI predictions hold up beyond a single experimental device.
The partners also plan to create digital twins of both tokamaks. These are virtual replicas updated using data from the real machines. They will allow researchers to test changes on a computer and predict the results before carrying out experiments on the actual equipment.
The partners expect the collaboration to help them assess new ideas faster and shorten the time needed to design future fusion systems. Scientists will be able to run calculations on whichever of the two supercomputers is best suited to a particular task. The UK government has allocated £45 million, approximately $61 million, to SUNRISE.
The US STELLAR-AI platform costs $13 million. The collaboration builds on a memorandum signed by the two organizations in June. Experts are currently developing a plan to link the platforms. In the longer term, they aim to create a shared AI model to help design new fusion devices.
Earlier, Qazinform News Agency reported that Kazakhstan planned to launch its second supercomputer cluster in Astana.