DIGITAL & IT | FAST TRACK TO FUSION
Solving the fusion multi-challenge
The digital world may be key to making fusion a reality in a realistic timeframe. It will rely on step changes in high performance computing and artificial intelligence, and an open-source approach to collaboration
THE WORLD NEEDS CLEAN ENERGY at scale and fast. For many, the hope is that the need will be met by fusion. But while fusion may have the necessary scale, so far, the decades required to deploy it, progressively through the Joint European Torus (JET) in the UK and the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), still under construction in France, have ruled it out of power suppliers’ practical options in the short term. New fusion initiatives want to move much faster,
towards operation in good time to be the cause of significant carbon emissions by 2050. Now UKAEA, site of JET and a centre for fusion development in the UK, has joined with the University of Cambridge, Dell and Intel to achieve that goal, by moving from the real to the digital world to design and test a fusion reactor. The team will be able to take advantage of new supercomputers – and deploy a new open approach to development that should make it faster and more robust. Launching the collaboration, Dr Rob Ackers, Director of
Computing Programmes at UKAEA said that the concept at the heart of the so-called STEP (spherical tokamak for energy production) mission is to put fusion on the electricity grid in the 2040s. He described this as “a moonshot programme to prove fusion can be economically viable”. The collaboration is an important part of that mission and meeting the need to develop and nurture the
supply chain that will design and construct the world’s first fusion power plants. Ackers was blunt about the task. He said, “there is insufficient time to do engineering [for the fusion plant] if we do it the way we have been doing it for decades”. Historically, engineering has been carried out by an iterative test-based approach, in which “we design and build prototypes and then evaluate them and move forwards”.
But that is time consuming and expensive and now “we have 17 years to stand up STEP and plug it in. We need to think differently, change the engineering design process and take it into the virtual world.” This is a path that is well-trodden in other industries,
examples include the move from wind tunnels to computational fluid dynamics. But the fusion challenge is more difficult because “it is an incredibly complex strongly coupled system. The models underpinning it are limited in accuracy, there are coupling mechanisms to be taken into account, there is physics that spans the whole machine from structural forces, to heat loads, through the power plant, to electromagnetism and radiation.” A single change to a subsystem can have huge ramifications across the plant and the designers will have to look for emergent behaviour that will otherwise only become apparent when the plant is built.
Above: ITER may be passed on the road to fusion by virtual developments 30 | August 2023 |
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