We’re partnering with Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) to bring clean, protected, limitless fusion energy closer to reality.
Fusion, the method that powers the sun, guarantees clean, abundant energy without long-lived radioactive waste. Making it work here on Earth means keeping an ionized gas, generally known as plasma, stable at temperatures over 100 million degrees Celsius — all inside a fusion energy machine’s limits. It is a highly complex physics problem that we’re working to unravel with artificial intelligence (AI).
Today, we’re announcing our research partnership with Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), a worldwide leader in fusion energy. CFS is pioneering a faster path to scrub, protected and effectively limitless fusion energy with its compact, powerful tokamak machine called SPARC.
SPARC leverages powerful high-temperature superconducting magnets and goals to be the primary magnetic fusion machine in history to generate net fusion energy — more power from fusion than it takes to sustain it. That landmark achievement is generally known as crossing “breakeven,” and a critical milestone on the trail to viable fusion energy.
This partnership builds on our groundbreaking work using AI to successfully control a plasma. With academic partners on the Swiss Plasma Center at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), we showed that deep reinforcement learning can control the magnets of a tokamak to stabilize complex plasma shapes. To cover a wider range of physics, we developed TORAX, a quick and differentiable plasma simulator written in JAX.
Now, we’re bringing that work to CFS to speed up the timeline to deliver fusion energy to the grid. We’ve been collaborating on three key areas up to now:
- Producing a quick, accurate, differentiable simulation of a fusion plasma.
- Finding probably the most efficient and robust path to maximizing fusion energy.
- Using reinforcement learning to find novel real-time control strategies.
The mix of our AI expertise with CFS’s cutting-edge hardware makes this the perfect partnership to advance foundational discoveries in fusion energy for the good thing about the worldwide research community, and ultimately, the entire world.
Simulating fusion plasma
To optimize the performance of a tokamak, we’d like to simulate how heat, electric current and matter flow through the core of a plasma and interact with the systems around it. Last yr, we released TORAX, an open-source plasma simulator built for optimization and control, expanding the scope of physics questions we could address beyond magnetic simulation. TORAX is in-built JAX, so it will possibly run easily on each CPUs and GPUs and might easily integrate AI-powered models, including our own, to realize even higher performance.
TORAX will help CFS teams test and refine their operating plans by running hundreds of thousands of virtual experiments before SPARC is even turned on. It also gives them flexibility to quickly adapt their plans once the primary data arrives.
This software has turn into a linchpin in CFS’s day by day workflows, helping them understand how the plasma will behave under different conditions, saving precious time and resources.
