Artificial intelligence has the ability to predict the future of a thermonuclear explosion

The model predicts plasma instability 300 milliseconds in advance

Fusion energy scientists say they have found a way to overcome one of their biggest challenges to date – with the help of artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence can be used to search for almost limitless clean energy. Nuclear fusion has been touted for decades as a virtually limitless source of clean energy that could transform solutions to the climate crisis.

There are several ways to produce fusion energy, but the most common involves using hydrogen variants as the starting fuel and raising the temperature to unusually high levels in a donut-shaped machine known as a tokamak to create plasma, a soup-like state of matter.

Researchers from Princeton University and the Plasma Physics Laboratory report in the journal Nature that they have found a way to use artificial intelligence to predict potential instabilities and prevent them from occurring in real time.

The team conducted their experiments at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego and found that an artificial intelligence controller could predict a potential plasma rupture 300 milliseconds in advance. Without this intervention, the fusion reaction would have ended suddenly.

“The experiments lay the groundwork for using artificial intelligence to solve a wide range of plasma instability problems that have long hindered fusion,” explains a Princeton spokesman.

The results are “definitely” a step forward in the field of nuclear fusion, according to mechanical engineering professor Egemen Colemen.

“That’s one of the biggest obstacles – outages – and you want any reactor to run 24 hours a day for seven years without any problems,” Coleman told CNN. “And this type of failure and instability would be very problematic, so developing solutions like this increases their confidence that we can run these machines without any problems.”

Fusion is the process that powers the Sun and other stars, and experts have been trying to harness it on Earth for decades. This is achieved when two atoms that would normally repel each other are forced to fuse together. This is the opposite of the type of nuclear fission commonly used today, which relies on the splitting of atoms.

Scientists and engineers near the English city of Oxford set a new fusion energy record earlier in February, generating 69 megajoules of fusion energy in five seconds using just 0.2 milligrams of fuel. This is enough to provide electricity to approximately 12 thousand households for the same period of time.

But this experiment still used more energy as input than was generated. Another team in California, however, managed to produce a net amount of fusion energy in December 2022 in a process called “ignition.” Since then they repeated this action three times.

Despite promising progress, fusion power is still a long way from becoming commercially available – well beyond the years when deep and sustained reductions in planet-warming pollution will be required to prevent the worsening effects of the climate crisis.

Scientists emphasize that such reductions in pollution are needed this decade.