Prof. Elizabeth Paul outlines remaining engineering and research challenges for fusion energy.
Transcript
We have now seen demonstrations of fusion occurring in plasma physics experiments, but there are still many checkpoints that need to be met before we have a functioning fusion power plant. Many engineering systems surrounding the plasma confinement device are necessary for a functioning power plant. You have a very hot plasma that needs to be in contact with a material surface. And we still need breakthroughs to understand how to manufacture materials that can withstand heat flux over decades of operation. Another example is computational modeling. So we need reliable computational models that can look at many different length scales and time scales at the plasma, and interact with the plasma dynamics with the other engineering systems that surround it. And so this is going to require breakthroughs in hardware, AI, assistant simulations, and accelerated algorithms.