Efforts to duplicate on Earth the fusion reactions that power the sun and stars for unlimited energy must contend with extreme heat-load density that can damage the doughnut-shaped fusion facilities called tokamaks, the most widely used laboratory facilities that house fusion reactions, and shut them down. These loads flow against the walls of what are called divertor plates that extract waste heat from the tokamaks.
But using high-performance computers and artificial intelligence (AI), researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have predicted a far larger and less damaging heat-load width for the full-power operation of ITER, the international tokamak under construction in France, than previous estimates have found. The new formula produced a forecast that was over six-times wider than those developed by a simple extrapolation from present tokamaks to the much larger ITER facility whose goal is to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion power.
To read more, click here.