DOE teases a Fusion reactor
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FUSION SOLUTION: How this device could pave the way to commercially viable nuclear #fusion energy.
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5:31 PM · Jul 16, 2019
Fusion's Path to Practicality
California company TAE Technologies Inc. subscribes to a fail-fast approach in its quest for commercially viable nuclear fusion energy.
“It’s a venture capital-backed mindset where you want to have many product iterations fail as quickly as you can,” says Sean Dettrick, the company’s director of computational sciences. “If you have a bad concept you want to realize that as quickly as possible and move on to the next concept.”
That attitude has paid off. In 2015, the company achieved its most significant milestone toward sustaining a fusion reaction, maintaining plasma as hot as the sun for 10 milliseconds. That was after 17 years of experiments – fast, given that the first tokamak reactor designed to produce fusion energy began operation in 1958. But production of the thermonuclear fusion energy that powers the sun remains elusive.
The Department of Energy (DOE) has fueled TAE Technologies’ quest in with awards of computer time through the INCITE (Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment) program. This year, the company has 750,000 node-hours on Argonne National Laboratory’s Theta supercomputer. That followed a 2018 INCITE award of 500,000 node-hours on Theta, housed at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science user facility. Theta helps TAE sift the physical models underlying codes that simulate the vastly different temporal and spatial scales inherent to plasma physics.
https://www.energy.gov/science/articles/fusions-path-practicality