Joining together is what has set us apart
As we forge a compelling strategy for our new directorate, a major opportunity we want to develop is the synergy we’ve gained. By merging fusion, fission, and US ITER, we have joined together a set of capabilities on one site in one organization that is unique. Ultimately, it enables us to be a powerful force for advancing the world toward a carbon-free energy supply – in a manner unlike any organization to come before us. In this debut issue of Connections, my monthly internal message to directorate staff, I’m spotlighting a collaboration that illustrates the spirit of this synergy.
—Kathy McCarthy, Associate Laboratory Director, April 2021
Changing what is possible
The inspiration of a few researchers to apply established predictive simulation tools for traditional nuclear fission reactors to fusion technology has created a collaboration that caught the eye of ARPA-E, DOE’s internal agency for high-risk, high-reward R&D.
ORNL’s FERMI project, headed by Vittorio Badalassi along with David Kropaczek, Dave Pointer, and David Green, applies platforms originally created for traditional fission nuclear power reactors to the challenges of designing the first generation of fusion-based reactors. Building on ORNL’s expertise honed with CASL (Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors), it has the potential to significantly speed up the process of bringing a commercial fusion power plant online.
“We are leveraging proven fission tools to significantly shorten the overall design cycle of a fusion reactor,” Badalassi said. “The benefit to society is that FERMI, when successful, will help bring about electricity production from a carbon-free fusion reactor more quickly.”
The name FERMI, which stands for Fusion Energy Reactor Models Integrator, was coined to commemorate Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, who is widely credited as the inventor of the first nuclear reactor and who was a key scientific contributor to the Manhattan Project that gave birth to what is now ORNL.
FERMI is one of 14 projects nationwide selected for a competitive program funded jointly by the DOE Office of Science’s Fusion Energy Science program and ARPA-E, whose motto is “changing what’s possible.” The program, called GAMOW (Galvanizing Advances in Market-aligned fusion for an Overabundance of Watts), seeks to bridge gaps in technology needed to deliver a net-energy-gain fusion core and establish the technical and commercial viability of fusion energy. GAMOW’s charge specifically targets the cross-cutting R&D that FERMI represents.
The FERMI team’s focus for GAMOW is to develop an integrated simulation environment to aid in designing a fusion reactor’s blanket component. This capability is essential in delivering a fully integrated simulation platform for future fusion systems that simultaneously considers the complex plasma physics of the fusion core and the stringent engineering and functional constraints of the blanket.
“For fusion, many of our predictive tools are focused on the energy-producing plasma core. This is especially true for the type of integrated modeling required to design a reactor,” said David Green, group leader for Plasma Theory and Modeling. “To make fusion power generation commercial, there are equally important – and integrated – engineering and technology challenges outside the core which must be solved to enable efficient energy extraction.”
To help address these challenges, the FERMI project draws from a suite of integrated reactor simulation tools that ORNL has successfully applied to fission reactors.
"This type of collaboration, together with the ability to perform the required multi-physics multi-scale engineering calculations using ORNL's leadership-class computing facilities, is unique to ORNL,” Green said.
To tackle this project, Badalassi, a distinguished R&D researcher in ORNL’s Thermal Hydraulics Group, assembled a team of fission and fusion experts from ORNL along with researchers at the MIT-spinoff Commonwealth Fusion Systems, HyPerComp Inc., and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
“Now is the time for fission and fusion experts to work together,” Badalassi said. “The synergies will be huge as fusion R&D moves from plasma challenges of the inner core to the engineering that figures out how to extract the energy from fusion for commercial production of electricity.”