“The inside of a tokamak—the doughnut-shaped vessel designed to contain a nuclear fusion reaction—presents a special kind of chaos. Hydrogen atoms are smashed together at unfathomably high temperatures, creating a whirling, roiling plasma that’s hotter than the surface of the sun. Finding smart ways to control and confine that plasma will be key to unlocking the potential of nuclear fusion, which has been mooted as the clean energy source of the future for decades.”
“That’s where DeepMind comes in. The artificial intelligence firm, backed by Google parent company Alphabet, has previously turned its hand to video games and protein folding, and has been working on a joint research project with the Swiss Plasma Center to develop an AI for controlling a nuclear fusion reaction.”
“DeepMind has developed an AI that can control the plasma autonomously. A paper published in the journal Nature describes how researchers from the two groups taught a deep reinforcement learning system to control the 19 magnetic coils inside TCV, the variable-configuration tokamak at the Swiss Plasma Center, which is used to carry out research that will inform the design of bigger fusion reactors in the future. ‘AI, and specifically reinforcement learning, is particularly well suited to the complex problems presented by controlling plasma in a tokamak,’ says Martin Riedmiller, control team lead at DeepMind.”’
“The neural network—a type of AI setup designed to mimic the architecture of the human brain—was initially trained in a simulation.”
“Ultimately, Fasoli says, the collaboration with DeepMind could allow researchers to push the boundaries and accelerate the long journey toward fusion power. ‘AI would enable us to explore things that we wouldn’t explore otherwise, because we can take risks with this kind of control system we wouldn’t dare take otherwise,’ he says. ‘If we are sure that we have a control system that can take us close to the limit but not beyond the limit, we can actually explore possibilities that wouldn’t otherwise be there for exploring.”’