‘This is really save-the-planet kind of stuff.’ MSU at forefront of fusion energy.

The tens of millions of visitors who passed through General Electric’s Progressland pavilion at the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair were treated to a Carousel of Progress filled with animatronics designed by Walt Disney and a Skydome Spectacular billed as “the epic story of man’s efforts to control and use the new energy sources of nature for the benefit of all.”

They also got a glimpse of something almost no one had seen before: a display of nuclear fusion.

Roughly every six minutes for 10 hours a day, a magnetic field from a fusion reactor would put pressure on a plasma of deuterium gas, producing brilliant bursts of light and loud cracks of electricity.

“You have just witnessed one of the first public demonstrations of fusion - the energy source that may someday supply all the electricity we’ll ever need,” the souvenir booklet from the exhibit said. “Much new knowledge, many new skills, are needed before sustained fusion power can be realized on a large scale.”

Which was, if anything, understating the challenge. Someday hasn’t happened yet.

“The joke is that fusion is always ten years off,” said Andrew Christlieb, a Michigan State University mathematician. “It’s a technology that hasn’t really lived up to its promises.”

Except maybe it’s about to, and Christlieb is leading a five-year, $15 million project for the U.S. Department of Energy to develop the computational tools needed to make it happen.

“This is really save-the-planet kind of stuff,” he said.

Fusion is the process that powers the sun. Under the right conditions – and in the case of the sun, those conditions are temperatures exceeding ten million degrees Celsius and immense gravitational pressure - light atomic nuclei will combine into larger nuclei, releasing massive amounts of energy.

The promise of harnessing that process is immense: essentially unlimited energy with no greenhouse gas emissions and only small amounts of short-lived nuclear waste.

Fusion releases four times as much energy as the fission reactions that power present-day nuclear power plants and, because of the way fusion reactions work, involves basically no risk of a nuclear disaster.

But, while scientists have known how to create fusion reactions since the 1930s, sustaining them has proven vexingly complicated.

“We can certainly create a plasma,” said Christlieb. Plasma is matter so hot that electrons are ripped away from atoms, forming a cloud of charged particles. It is inside that cloud that fusion occurs. The sun is more or less a roiling ball of plasma. “But confining it so that it doesn’t escape long enough to actually get it to do what we want is the hard thing.”

And, after decades of stop-and-start progress, there have been promising recent developments.

Last year, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility generated 10 quadrillion watts of fusion power for the barest fraction of a second by focusing lasers from the football-field-sized facility onto a target roughly the size of a raindrop.

In February, the Joint European Torus project in the United Kingdom, which uses powerful magnets to compress fusion fuel and produces temperatures 10 times hotter than the sun, broke its own world record for energy projection.

And then there’s ITER, a $23 billion collaboration between the European Union countries, the United States, China, Russia, and India and others, which is building the world’s largest tokamak, a doughnut-shaped magnetic fusion device, about an hour north of Marseilles in France.

It is shooting to achieve what project leaders call “first plasma” at the end of 2025.

But, to date, the National Ignition Facility reaction last year is the only one to create what’s known as a burning plasma, one that heats itself from its own internal reactions, and scientists there haven’t been able to recreate it.

The center led by MSU, dubbed the Center for Hierarchical and Robust Modeling of Non-Equilibrium Transport or CHaRMNET, was created to devise computational approaches that will allow researchers to simulate plasmas in real time.

Which is even harder than it sounds.

There is a fundamental equation that, in theory, would allow the researchers to model plasmas.

The problem is that solving it would take “longer than the life of the universe,” given the limitations of modern computers, Christlieb said.

The problem is something mathematicians call the “curse of dimensionality.”

“Every time you add in a new parameter as part of your problem, it’s multiplicative,” said Bill Spotz, an applied mathematics program manager with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. “The size of your problem, you multiply it by the size of your new dimension, and then you add another dimension and another and so the curse there is that it very quickly becomes very large.”

The problem of modeling plasma will have to be solved in at least seven dimensions, he said.

The center will involve 20 research teams from MSU, the University of Colorado-Boulder, the University of Delaware, the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, the University of Washington, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories.

And it will be working out new computational and statistical methods, hoping to replace dauntingly complex simulations with simpler equations without shortchanging the physics.

Fusion, according to Christlieb, has “a funny storied history.”

“If you look at the history of fusion funding, there were major advances there were also cuts in funding that along with it, that slowed progress down,” he said.

But recent breakthroughs and the promise of developing technologies “have got people’s creative ideas surfacing again,” he said, both at universities and at spinoff startup companies.

“I think this is the time to really try and nail down the tools we need to be able to push this sort of physics experiment into an engineering reality,” he said.

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