Energy Department announces $112 million for fusion research
The Department of Energy on Monday announced $112 million in funding for 12 projects that will focus on maximizing the use of high performance computers for nuclear fusion research.
Scientists working on the programs will computers, including exascale computers, to model plasmas, study turbulence and to address problems such as energy loss, according to the agency.
It it is the latest round of research and development funding to be announced by the agency in recent months. Other project funding has included $11.7 million allocated by the agency in July to investigate the limitations of currently available quantum processors and $33 million on clean energy tech research.
“This collaborative effort will advance our understanding of fusion as an energy source while utilizing the most powerful supercomputers in the world,” said Jean Paul Allain, DOE Associate Director of Science for Fusion Energy Sciences. “The modeling and simulation work of these partnerships will offer insight into the multitude of physical processes that plasmas experience under extreme conditions and will also guide the design of fusion pilot plants. We are also looking forward to including efforts from inertial confinement devices and stellarators in this program.”
The 12 DOE projects will focus on collaborations among fusion scientists, applied mathematicians, and computer scientists to maximize the use of high performance computing, including exascale computers.
The new fusion energy projects were selected by competitive peer review under the DOE’s Funding Opportunity Announcement for Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing – FES Partnerships. The list of projects have been announced by the DOE’s Fusion Energy Sciences and Advanced Scientific Computing Research programs.
