Graduate students at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility have built a large language model (LLM) from the entire archive of experiment journal notes. The resulting interface provides remarkably good answers to questions about how to improve fusion performance in experiments.
Passive Coil To Mitigate Relativistic Electrons In Tokamaks
In many ways, a fusion reactor is passively safe; most off-normal events within such a device produce a naturally occurring behavior that leads to the calm shutdown of the fusion reaction without operator intervention. One outlier off-normal event is the formation of a relativistic electron beam, which is a very high-energy electron beam capable of […]
Tungsten Escaping a Closed Tokamak Divertor
Materials engineering for fusion energy frequently matures along two paths simultaneously. High-heat flux facilities provide qualifications that the candidate material can survive the power it will receive, and tokamaks demonstrate the feasibility of that material in the fusion plasma environment. In newly published work from S.H. Messer and colleagues, the fusion plasma exhaust in DIII-D […]
Tungsten Erosion Using Biased Samples Facing A Fusion Plasma
Identifying suitable materials for building a fusion power plant is a very broad challenge. In addition to managing the radiation environment across the facility, there is a unique set of requirements for anything that faces the plasma directly. For these plasma-facing wall materials, we need to know how they erode (shed material) so that we […]
Fusion Energy: great for the environment, not so good at roasting turkeys.
Long Pulse Fusion Device Performance
If you happen to hear that “fusion has evolved into an engineering challenge,” there is a lot of truth in that simplification. Our global community is expanding research projects to better address the engineering unknowns related to producing energy from a fusion device. The science and plasma physics of fusion energy remains a big part […]