SCI-FI-TEK-70YRS IN THE MAKING

UT secures $20 million DOE grant to develop critical nuclear fusion materials

University of Tennessee at Knoxville

 

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Professor Steven Zinkle, UT-ORNL Governor’s Chair for Nuclear Materials, talks with Munireach Nannory, first-year masters student, Civil and Structural Engineering, while preparing to test materials samples using a 3MV tandem accelerator with multiple beamlines and stations in the Ion Beam Materials Laboratory (IBML) inside Senter Hall.

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Credit: Steven Bridges/University of Tennessee

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Tickle College of Engineering has been awarded a $20 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy for a groundbreaking project led by UT-Oak Ridge National Laboratory Governor’s Chair for Nuclear Materials Steve Zinkle. The project, known as the Integrated Materials Program to Accelerate Chamber Technologies, or IMPACT, aims to revolutionize the design and manufacturing of high-performance materials for fusion energy systems.

“We are excited to embark on this ambitious program,” Zinkle said. “Our assembled multidisciplinary team includes experts with a demonstrated track record of using science-based methods to rapidly design, fabricate and deploy advanced structural materials.”

One of the biggest challenges in making fusion energy commercially viable is the lack of nuclear-code-qualified high-temperature structural materials that can be used in fusion reactors. IMPACT aims to create a process and database for the first-ever American Society of Mechanical Engineers Boiler and Pressure Vessel code qualification for a fusion material and to demonstrate how these new materials can more quickly move from code qualification to engineering application.

UT  has one of the best nuclear engineering programs in the country, including a new minor that launched in fall 2024. The IMPACT team led by Zinkle includes three other Tickle College of Engineering faculty members: Eric Lass, an assistant professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering; Bradley Jared, an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Biomedical Engineering; and Khalid Hattar, an associate professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering.

The DOE launched the FIRE Collaboratives initiative last year to establish collaborative networks that bridge the gap between fusion research and industry.

FIRE Collaboratives consist of teams from government facilities, academia and industry that come together to address technical challenges on the road to commercial fusion development. Through the FIRE Collaboratives, the DOE hopes to accelerate the transition of scientific discoveries into commercial fusion applications.

The other institutions involved in the project are Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Stony Brook University; the University of Michigan; Northwestern University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the University of California, Santa Barbara; Idaho National Laboratory; the University of Miami; and the University of California, Los Angeles.

US Department of Energy announces selectees for $107 million fusion innovation research engine collaboratives, and progress in milestone program inspired by NASA

New awards from DOE will support acceleration of commercial fusion energy toward viability

DOE/US Department of Energy

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced $107 million in funding for six projects in the Fusion Innovative Research Engine (FIRE) Collaboratives, and that several privately funded fusion companies have completed early critical-path science and technology (S&T) milestones in the Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program (“the Milestone Program”). Both programs, administered by DOE’s Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) program in the Office of Science, are cornerstones of DOE’s fusion strategy to accelerate the viability of commercial fusion energy. 

“The launch of the DOE Milestone Program and FIRE Collaboratives are critical steps in accelerating progress toward the U.S. Bold Decadal Vision for Commercial Fusion Energy,” said Deputy Secretary of Energy David Turk. “As the world races to make fusion a viable source of energy for industry and consumers, these programs signal that the U.S. intends to be the first to commercialize fusion energy through strong partnerships among our National Laboratories, universities, and the private sector to realize industry-led designs for fusion pilot plants.” 

FIRE Collaboratives Project Selections 

The FIRE Collaboratives are aimed at creating a fusion energy S&T innovation ecosystem by forming virtual, centrally managed teams called “Collaboratives” that have a collective goal of bridging FES’s basic science research programs with the needs of the growing fusion industry, including the activities supported under the Milestone Program. 

This initiative represents a significant step forward in FES’s commitment to advancing fusion energy research and development, and aims to create new economic opportunities, maintain US leadership in fusion, bolster US-based manufacturing and supply chains, and enable the development of technologies crucial for national security, energy security, and defense. 

FES is pleased to announce the first awards for the FIRE Collaboratives that support materials and technologies required by a diverse set of fusion concepts. They include developing nuclear blanket testing capabilities at Idaho National Laboratory, materials development at the University of Tennessee – Knoxville, materials testing and advanced simulation capabilities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, target injector technology for inertial fusion energy concepts, and fusion fuel-cycle testing capabilities at Savannah River National Laboratory.  

Total anticipated funding for FIRE collaboratives is $180 million for projects lasting up to four years in duration. Additional awards drawing from the same pool of proposals may be made in the future. This is contingent on the availability of funds appropriated by Congress. 

The list of projects and more information can be found on the Fusion Energy Sciences program homepage. 

Selection for award negotiations is not a commitment by DOE to issue an award or provide funding. Before funding is issued, DOE and the applicants will undergo a negotiation process, and DOE may cancel negotiations and rescind the selection for any reason during that time.   

Progress in the Milestone Program 

The Milestone Program is modeled in part after the NASA Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program. With relatively modest federal investments, the COTS program enabled private companies to meet early technical milestones on the way to building today’s commercial space-launch industry. 

Analogous to the earlier NASA COTS program, privately funded fusion companies in the DOE Milestone Program pursue both S&T and business/commercialization milestones (mutually negotiated with DOE). They receive federal payments after DOE verifies completion of each milestone through independent, expert review. The private company provides greater than 50% (in many cases much greater than 50%) of the cost to meet milestones. The company benefits both through the non-dilutive capital it receives from the government as well as through DOE’s validation of milestone completion, which are both helpful for subsequent private fundraising. 

Thus, the Milestone Program acts as a catalyst, where strategic federal investments are significantly amplified with follow-on private funding. To date, Milestone awardees have collectively raised over $350 million of new private funding since their selection into the program was announced in May 2023, compared to the $46 million of federal funding initially committed for negotiated milestones. The benefit to the U.S. public is the de-risking of multiple fusion-development paths that have both been peer-reviewed to be technically credible and are well aligned with commercial factors and needs. 

Specifically, the 8 awardees of the present DOE Milestone Program are working to resolve critical-path S&T gaps, in partnership with national laboratories and universities, toward realizing preliminary engineering designs for their fusion pilot plants (FPPs). The most aggressive and well-funded of the awardees are aiming for successful FPP preliminary-design reviews by the late 2020s to meet the ambitious and aspirational timeline of realizing an operating FPP by the mid-2030s. 

S&T milestones that have been met by companies thus far include the following: 

• Computational modeling for a high-gain target design for laser-driven inertial fusion energy (Focused Energy) 
• Demonstration of ion-beam focusing to support the fast-ignition approach to inertial fusion energy (Focused Energy) 
• Whole-device modeling of simple mirror equilibria to enable scientific energy gains of at least 5 for the tandem-mirror approach to fusion energy (Realta Fusion) 
• Down selection to a family of optimized stellarator equilibria taking into account multiple factors of plasma confinement, stability, and stellarator components and subsystems (Thea Energy) 
• Engineering design, prototyping, and operation of a single, high-temperature-superconducting magnet coil that is the building block of Thea Energy’s approach to generating 3-dimensional, optimized stellarator fields using only planar coils (Thea Energy). 

Quantitative metrics were required to be met for these milestones. The specific metrics are typically protected information of the companies. The other Milestone awardees are Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Tokamak Energy, Type One Energy, Xcimer Energy, and Zap Energy, all of whom are working on their early S&T milestones as well. 

All 8 awardees are presently working toward presenting pre-conceptual designs and technology roadmaps of their FPP concepts within the first 18 months of the Milestone program—roughly late 2025 (18 months into the Milestone Program). If they successfully meet these milestones, they will proceed into the next phase of the Milestone Program, where all the awardees are planning to build and operate major next-step integrated experiments and/or demonstrate some of the critical underlying technologies for their FPPs. Continued progress in the Milestone program is contingent on Congressional appropriations, successful negotiation of future milestones, and successful progress in the program. 

The DOE Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program was first authorized in the Energy Act of 2020 and received its first funding appropriation in fiscal year 2022. The program was announced in September 2022 and, following a rigorous merit-review process, 8 selectees were announced in May 2023. Initially, $46 million has been obligated for the first 18 months of the program. The program is authorized for a total of $415 million through fiscal year 2027 in the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022. 

State-of-the-art fusion simulation leads three scientists to the 2024 Kaul Foundation Prize

Prize Their simulation is one of many critical insights that have come from decades of work on a computer code known as XGC

DOE/Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

 

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The winners of the 2024 Kaul Foundation Prize for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research and Technology Development: PPPL’s Seung-Hoe Ku, Choongseok (CS) Chang, and Robert Hager.

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Credit: Michael Livingston / PPPL Communications Department

Three scientists were awarded the 2024 Kaul Foundation Prize for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research and Technology Development based on their decades of groundbreaking research about how plasma behaves in fusion reactors. 

Choongseok (CS) Chang, Seung-Hoe Ku and Robert Hager of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) were recognized “for experimentally validated simulations of turbulence-broadened divertor heat flux widths using the X-Point Included Gyrokinetic Code (XGC),” following decades of research developing comprehensive simulations to model the fusion plasma edge. 

Recently, the scientists – in collaboration with researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and other collaborators working on the DIII-D fusion device at General Atomics – determined that these simulations closely matched experiments in the DIII-D. The research showed that the turbulence doubles the exhaust layer width in conditions similar to what would be found in a commercial-scale reactor such as ITER. This is an important experimental validation that XGC can describe the relevant underlying physics, helping support XGC predictions that ITER could have a much broader exhaust footprint than what has been predicted by present tokamak data. 

This simulation code has been critical for a great deal of research that has advanced fusion science. The code simulates the whole volume of a tokamak plasma, especially the edge region of the magnetically confined plasma that includes the area where magnetic field lines cross, which is known as the X-point. This area is particularly important to study because of its reduced confining magnetic field strength, which can allow plasma particles to escape confinement. XGC is widely considered one of the best such codes available and is used by researchers worldwide on some of the planet’s most powerful computers. 

“This work has brought great honor to the Lab,” said PPPL Director Steve Cowley when he presented the award at PPPL’s annual State of the Lab address. “This high-performance computing exascale project code, developed at our Lab, is also being honored by the U.S. Secretary of Energy with the prestigious Secretary’s Honor Award as part of the broader exascale computing initiative.”

Using very powerful hardware, exascale computers can perform one quintillion (or a billion billion) calculations per second, which makes them faster than the most powerful supercomputers currently used. 

Each recipient of the annual Kaul Foundation Prize receives $7,500 in recognition of their scientific achievement. The prize was established with funds from the late PPPL Director Ronald C. Davidson’s 1993 Award for Excellence in Science, Education and Physics. It honors outstanding contributions to research in plasma physics. 

Notably, the 2024 winners used XGC to determine critical details about how ions and electrons escape the core plasma during fusion when the plasma is confined by magnetic fields inside a tokamak. Their highly sophisticated simulation is for ITER, the multinational fusion facility under construction in France. The simulation suggests that a key region of the ITER wall should not get as hot as once feared based on the experimental data from present-day tokamaks.

“We would like to thank the national and international XGC team members. For the divertor heat load research, credit goes to the ITER Organization collaborators led by Alberto Loarte and Richard Pitts; PPPL, DIII-D, Alcator C-Mod, National Spherical Torus Experiment and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory participants in the 2016 DOE Office of Science national theory milestone activities that led to the discovery of the ion leakage and turbulent electron loss physics that are responsible for plasma exhaust. We also thank the joint PPPL/DIII-D research team led by Alessandro Bortolon for the XGC application on DIII-D edge plasma and Darin Ernst of MIT for collaborating with us to simulate his experiments in ITER-like conditions, which turned out to be ideal for validating the XGC simulations,” said Chang. 

“We hope to see more experimental validations on other tokamaks. We also would like to thank the tremendous support from the DOE program managers, DOE computer centers and PPPL management, which made the research possible.”

Choongseok (CS) Chang

After graduating with a doctoral degree in physics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1979, Chang was a senior scientist at General Atomics in San Diego before holding a tenure position at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST). He later moved back to the U.S. and worked at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University (NYU) before ultimately landing at PPPL in 2011.

Chang’s long career in plasma physics has focused on solving key theoretical challenges to make fusion a reliable source of electricity. Chang has spent decades leading multidisciplinary teams of physicists, applied mathematicians and computer scientists — including those who use artificial intelligence — to lead the development of XGC and simulate the extremely complex environment inside fusion reactors. 

“Plasma is not a single physics phenomenon. Several physics interact together. But that was a very difficult theory to develop,” said Chang. Additionally, the problem was multiscale, meaning it needed to be studied at multiple levels of detail. 

“Fortunately, I had a hunch in the late 1990s that computers would become more and more powerful so we could solve these problems,” Chang said. He recruited “a few brilliant students” to work on this important task. Among them, Ku was the main workforce. At the time, creating models that considered multiple physics simultaneously was considered nearly impossible. But Chang and the talented team – especially Ku – persisted. Ultimately, the work developing the necessary computer codes that could realize his multiphysics vision would receive substantial funding from the DOE and recognition from major U.S. computer centers. The success of this work eventually led Chang to resign from his positions in Korea and at NYU to fully dedicate himself to the XGC project and scientific discovery at PPPL. More young and talented physicists joined the development team and raised the code to a higher capability level. Among them, Hager became another distinguished developer and physics researcher.

One of the most rewarding aspects for Chang is seeing his younger group members become successful computational physicists in their own right. His advice to young physicists is to think big. “Don’t be afraid to attack challenging and ambitious scientific problems,” he said.

Seung-Hoe Ku

Ku has been a research physicist at the Lab since 2011, following Chang’s move. He received his doctoral degree in physics from KAIST in 2004. 

Ku has been deeply involved in the research and development of the XGC code for decades, starting from when he was a graduate student at KAIST. Ku was effectively the sole person writing an initial version of what would one day become the backbone of XGC while he was still a graduate student. 

“This has been a lifelong pursuit,” Ku said. He has seen the code through many iterations, moving it from a two-dimensional code into three dimensions and adding code to include turbulence, for example.

“When I extended it to 3D, a few people came on board to help with code performance,” Ku said. Now, many people around the world are working on XGC, with Ku and Hager focusing on managing the core of the code. 

Ku has been interested in physics since middle school. In high school, he also developed an interest in coding. With some friends, Ku wrote what he describes as a precursor to the popular video game Angry Birds. “You throw the ball, and then it calculates the trajectory,” Ku said. “At the time, it was just for fun. But I think that’s my first physics simulation of particles.”

Ku would like to thank his wife, Haehyun Nam, for her patience.

Robert Hager

Hager received a doctoral degree in plasma physics jointly from the Technical University of Munich and the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in 2011. The following year, he came to PPPL as a postdoctoral researcher. Hager has been working with Chang and Ku on XGC ever since. He became a core developer and is now a research physicist at the Lab. 

“Winning the Kaul Prize is confirmation that what we’ve been doing all those years actually makes sense and produces good results,” Hager said. People sometimes question why he would work so hard on a code that is so complex it can only run using the world’s most powerful computers. “Now, finally, I think more people are seeing our results and realizing we can reproduce what people are seeing in experiments and get better insights,” Hager said.

In addition to being one of the main authors and managers of XGC, Hager is also responsible for training and supporting XGC users worldwide.

Hager says the field was definitely the right choice for him. “As a scientist, you sometimes have long stretches where nothing seems to work. But when you find a solution, you understand something new, and that is so rewarding. I also like the technical aspect, tinkering with computer tools.”

Like many in the field, Hager was initially drawn to plasma physics because of the environmental aspect of clean energy from fusion. However, there were also personal factors: His position at Max Planck brought him closer to his girlfriend, who he would later marry. “I would like to thank my wife, Sofia, my Ph.D. supervisor Klaus Hallatschek and everyone who helped make XGC what it is today.”