Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

As part of Fusion Energy Week, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in partnership with Type One Energy hosted an “Early Career Fusion Lightning Talks” presentation, giving the public an accessible look into emerging researchers’ latest work in fusion energy. Here are the hot topics.

Using AI to design reactor parts

Fusion reactors occasionally experience disruptive bursts of energy. ORNL researchers are designing sacrificial parts built to take that damage and be swapped out quickly, like a fuse, so that the machines aren’t down for long.

However, the tools and files used to design these swappable parts have been so complex that only experts can run them, creating a bottleneck. AI is changing that. Instead of editing dense input files manually with selective tools, researchers can simply chat with an AI assistant to tweak a design and generate a 3D model.

ORNL is taking a “trust and verify” approach with using AI, and checking all prompted suggestions at every step carefully.

Keeping hot liquid metals from eating the reactor

The industry is prepping to surround future reactors with a “blanket” of hot liquid metal that captures energy and breeds new fuel. But, those liquids slowly corrode, crack, and dissolve the very materials meant to contain them.

Using a first-of-its-kind experiment inside ORNL’s High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR), the team is testing how materials will hold up under radiation and corrosion at the same time. Finding success here is a key step toward optimizing parts so that they can last a power plant’s 50,000-hour lifetime.

Researchers said it’s like conducting an orchestra — getting neutrons, liquid metals, and structural materials to play in harmony instead of working against each other.

Recycling fusion’s $30,000-per-gram fuel

Did you know that less than 2% of fusion fuel actually burns in the reactor? The rest comes out in the exhaust. With tritium fuel costing about $30,000 per gram, recovering it is essential.

The solution is extreme cold. While fusion happens at about 150 million kelvin, ORNL’s recycling pumps run near 4 kelvin. At this temperature, the fuel freezes solid while the leftover helium “ash” stays a gas, making the two easy to separate.

One device, nicknamed the “snail pump” for a rotating scraper that eats frozen fuel off the pump wall, recovers nearly 99% of the fuel and sends it straight back to the reactor. This could potentially cut the amount of tritium a plant needs to keep on hand by nearly 2 kilograms.

Follow ORNL and Type One Energy on LinkedIn to stay in the know on future research.

 

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