US supercomputer refines most promising nuclear fusion reactor design

Type One Energy Group, based in Knoxville, has refined the design of a commercial-scale nuclear fusion power plant using extensive simulations on the Department of Energy’s Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Their advanced stellarator concept leverages high-performance computing to model plasma behavior and optimize the reactor’s physical shape, aiming to minimize turbulence and energy loss—a key challenge in sustaining fusion reactions. The team was granted 250,000 node hours on Summit, enabling thousands of complex evaluations that accelerated the design process by at least a year. This approach marks a novel use of high-fidelity performance projections in fusion power plant design. The stellarator design confines plasma made of hydrogen isotopes at temperatures around 270 million degrees Fahrenheit, about ten times hotter than the sun’s core, using intricate superconducting electromagnetic coils. While the fundamental principles have been demonstrated in research devices like Germany’s Wendelstein 7-X, Type One Energy’s simulations focused on passive turbulence control through shape optimization rather than simply scaling