MIT scientists may have just taken a major step toward the future of clean, reliable nuclear energy… by teaching plasma how to behave.

The research team developed a new prediction model that combines physics and machine learning to anticipate how plasma will act inside a tokamak, a donut-shaped reactor designed to replicate the energy-producing process of the sun.

 The advance could help scientists avoid costly and dangerous disruptions during the delicate "rampdown" stage, when the reactor's plasma is being powered off.

"For fusion to be a useful energy source it's going to have to be reliable," said Allen Wang, lead author and graduate researcher at MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center. "To be reliable, we need to get good at managing our plasmas."

Fusion energy — the process of combining atoms rather than splitting them — has long been seen as the holy grail of clean energy. When perfected, it could offer virtually limitless power without the air pollution or carbon emissions that come from burning gas, oil, or coal. 

Unlike traditional nuclear fission, fusion doesn't create long-lived radioactive waste, making it far safer for communities and ecosystems.

But controlling plasma, which can reach over 100 million degrees Celsius, has been one of the field's biggest challenges. If a reactor's plasma becomes unstable, it can damage the reactor's interior and halt experiments for months.

MIT's new hybrid model learns from real-world reactor data, predicting these instabilities early and suggesting automatic adjustments to the magnets that contain the plasma. Tested on a reactor in Switzerland, it achieved high accuracy with just a small amount of data.

As governments worldwide search for reliable alternatives to fossil fuels, innovations like fusion are gaining political and commercial traction.

President Donald Trump's administration has made nuclear development a centerpiece of its so-called "nuclear renaissance," funding 11 pilot projects through the Department of Energy in hopes of achieving self-sustaining reactors by 2026. 

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While critics question the pace and oversight of this strategy, experts agree that the technology has advanced significantly since the Chernobyl and Fukushima eras.

Expanding clean nuclear power could drastically reduce harmful air pollution and ease the strain on communities vulnerable to extreme weather, rising heat, and power shortages. Fusion's near-limitless energy potential could also make electricity cheaper and more accessible.

Still, the technology carries challenges: building reactors requires high upfront costs, and disposing of even small amounts of radioactive waste demands strict safety measures. But experts view these as solvable engineering hurdles rather than existential threats.

Wang's team, in collaboration with Commonwealth Fusion Systems, an MIT spinout building the world's first compact, grid-scale fusion plant, hopes this model will make next-generation reactors safer and more efficient.

"We're trying to tackle the science questions to make fusion routinely useful," Wang said. "What we've done here is the start of what is still a long journey. But I think we've made some nice progress."

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