AI predicts fusion plasma instability 200 ms early, stops it in time

Nuclear fusion illustration Photo: Canva Inside a steel vault at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, a superheated whirl of charged particles spins in near vacuum, held in place by invisible magnetic fields. This is a fusion plasma, the same kind of matter that powers the Sun, and it is notoriously difficult to control.In a recent breakthrough, researchers handed part of that control to an artificial intelligence (AI) system that makes decisions every 20 milliseconds, far faster than any human operator could manage. In one critical test, the AI spotted the early signs of a dangerous instability a full 200 milliseconds before it would have erupted and adjusted the magnets in time to prevent it. As described by PPPL, the result marks a major step toward reliable, real-time AI control of fusion experiments and, eventually, fusion power plants.The problem of trapping a star in a jarFusion energy promises an almost inexhaustible source of clean power through the fusion of light atomic nuclei, releasing immense amounts of energy in the process. To achieve this on Earth, scientists heat hydrogen isotopes to hundreds of millions of degrees, producing a plasma so hot that no material c...