Elusive fusion reactors to be commercialised by 2025-2030... Or so they say

Seems like now every couple of months a new discovery, now thanks to AI.

Researchers tested the algorithm on a real reactor, the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego. They saw that their AI-based system could control the power being pumped into the reactor and the shape of the plasma to keep the swirling particles in check.
Co-author Azarakhsh Jalalvand said in a statement that the success of the AI model comes from the fact that it was trained on real data from previous fusion experiments, rather than theoretical physics models.
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Scientists Claim AI Breakthrough to Generate Boundless Clean Fusion Energy

Princeton researchers report that a new AI model has solved one of the major roadblocks to generating fusion energy.
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Fusion in nature isn't extremely rare, every single star, all the hundreds of trillions of them (correction, 200 billion-trillion stars) we can see currently or know of, all operate under fusion. When you have triple figure trillions of bodies in the known universe working the same way, it is anything but rare. It's the sheer mass of the star that sustains the fusion cycle before the fuel starts to run dry and the next phase of the star's lifecycle begins.

The sun is a perpetual fusion factory, made up of a gigantic burning ball of plasma. It fuses several hundred tons of hydrogen into helium each second.
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We don't have that sort of mass on Earth, instead fusion has to be done done with immense heat and plasma confinement. As Alan Partridge would say, these reactors are quite literally hotter than the Sun (by a factor of several multiples).
 
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A year ago Lex Fridman did a really interesting interview with MIT nuclear scientist Dennis Whyte, it's long, but well suited to the subject.

 
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