Artificial intelligence helps accelerate progress toward efficient fusion reactions - ScienceBlog.com

Before scientists can effectively capture and deploy fusion energy, they must learn to predict major disruptions that can halt fusion reactions and damage the walls of doughnut-shaped fusion devices called tokamaks. Timely prediction of disruptions, the sudden loss of control of the hot, charged plasma that fuels the reactions, will be vital to triggering steps to avoid or mitigate such large-scale events. Today, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and Princeton University are employing artificial intelligence to improve predictive capability. Researchers led by William Tang, a PPPL physicist and a lecturer with the rank of professor in astrophysical sciences at Princeton, are developing the code for predictions for ITER, the international experiment under construction in France to demonstrate the practicality of fusion energy. The new predictive software, called the Fusion Recurrent Neural Network (FRNN) code, is a form of "deep learning" -- a newer and more powerful version of modern machine learning software, an application of artificial intelligence.