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Final report for the DOE Fusion Energy Sciences project titled "A Streamlined, Open Source Neutronics Toolkit for Fusion Reactor Design". This project developed unstructured mesh tracking capabilities in OpenMC as well as two shutdown dose rate methodologies, and performed extensive performance improvements and validation of the open source Monte Carlo code, OpenMC.
CONNECT is an innovative on-premise hardware and software solution that integrates edge and cloud computing infrastructure at NREL. Built on the AWS Greengrass middleware and leveraging the MQTT protocol, CONNECT enables real-time data streaming from IoT devices and gateways to both cloud and local services, empowering researchers to rapidly capture, analyze, and act upon edge-generated data while leveraging cloud capabilities. The platform addresses research infrastructure challenges by providing a pre-approved platform which is already configured with the correct networking and cybersecurity baselines thus eliminating procurement delays and enabling on-demand availability. CONNECT's hybrid architecture efficiently manages burstable workloads, allowing research teams to dynamically scale computational capacity, handle peak data loads, and reduce operational bottlenecks. Advanced capabilities include built-in GPU support for executing machine learning models which enables low-latency inference at the edge from models trained in the cloud. This architecture supports real-time analytics and filtering, providing a mechanism to allow only transmitting and processing high-value data. Cloud-based configuration management permits engineers to manage on-premise systems remotely, optimizing operational efficiency. By bridging edge and cloud computing, CONNECT provides NREL researchers with a flexible, scalable platform that accelerates scientific discovery while maintaining robust security and performance standards.
The research goal of this Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Fusion Energy Science (OFES) project was to investigate the electrified liquid surface dynamics using a shallow water model. The project was an extension of the Princeton Collaborative Research Facility (PCRF) project to work with Dr. Mikhail Shneider at Princeton University.
LaserNetUS Collaborative Network established in 2018 is a network of high-power laser facilities supported by the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) and operating effectively as a user facility. Its mission is to advance and promote intense laser science and applications by providing scientists and students with broad access to unique facilities and enabling technologies, advancing the frontiers of laser-science research, and fostering collaboration among researchers and networks from around the world. Users who submit proposals through an annual call are selected by an external and independent proposal review panel (PRP) not involving personnel from any of the facilities.
An activity is underway to engage the fusion energy community to understand and plan for management of accountable nuclear materials during the development and commercialization of fusion energy within the scope of DOE Order 410.2. It includes developing an initial assessment of the accountable nuclear materials needed to support fusion development and implementation, understanding the supply/production dynamics of these materials, identifying opportunities to engage with the fusion community to follow technology development efforts that will impact the need for these materials, and initiating engagement with the fusion community to consider DOE Order 410.2 requirements in a full fusion environment.
Fusion energy represents a transformative opportunity to deliver a safe, plentiful, and carbon-free source of reliable primary power. In recent years, fusion research and development have accelerated significantly, particularly within the US, driven by decades of foundational public investment. Notably, in 2024 the US Department of Energy (DOE) established a comprehensive Fusion Energy Strategy aimed at collaborating with industry partners to enable the deployment of fusion power plants and grid integration by the 2030s. This strategy is chiefly implemented through the DOE Office of Science (SC) Fusion Energy Sciences program. This project was initiated to identify potential approaches for the Office of Environment, Safety, and Health (NA-ESH-12) within DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration to begin engagement with the fusion community on future accountable material needs. The goal of the project is to inform and influence the supply of and demand for accountable nuclear materials as fusion energy is developed and commercialized. NA-ESH-12 must proactively engage with the fusion community regarding the production and management of accountable nuclear materials. Given the complexity and scale of materials required for research, pilot projects, and eventual commercial reactors, early coordination is vital. The project’s objective is to provide insights that will shape the supply and demand landscape for critical nuclear materials, ensuring that DOE is prepared to effectively support fusion energy development and commercialization. In FY 2025, an initial limited review was conducted to identify the status of the fusion energy community’s progress toward full-scale energy production and the need for accountable nuclear material. This included communications with SC, NA-ESH-12, Savannah River National Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and attending the Rutgers University–sponsored Supply Chain Workshop: Scaling the Fusion Industry and the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Ninth DEMO Programme Workshop. The review to date indicates that the amounts of tritium, lithium-6, and deuterium required by the fusion industry will be dependent on fuel type, breeding technology, blankets, and R&D improvements. One concern is that the commercial sector does not have a sufficient supply chain to meet the demand for development and commercialization for fusion energy production. The supply and demand estimates for these materials should be routinely reviewed as fusion technologies mature.
This document represents a final report on the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science, Office of Fusion Energy Science (OFES) Grant Entitled “Development and Qualification of Advanced Alloys Used in High Helium and Displacement Damage Service for Fusion Energy Applications” (DE-FG02-94ER54275). This grant has been funded since 1994, by a series of five and three-year renewals. We express our deep appreciation for the long-standing support by OFES for our fusion materials research. The latest three-year renewal was awarded in 2019. This renewal subsequently received a 1- year no-cost extension, followed by another funded 1-year phaseout period. Here, we focus on this five-year effort. The final report is composed of 35 Fusion Semiannual Reports covering the period from 2019 to 2024. In addition, Appendix A lists 158 fusion materials papers published since 1994, with the partial, or full, support of the OFES program. We note that, as metrics of their high impact, these papers have received a total of 8582 citations, with an average of 54 per paper.
Runaway electrons can severely damage the plasma facing components on ITER during a major disruption and pose a major risk for tokamak fusion. It has been recognized that an adequate disruption mitigation system (DMS) is essential for the safe operation of ITER. The United States is responsible for the design and implementation of the disruption mitigation system on ITER, and in July 2016 the Simulation Center for Runaway Electron Avoidance and Mitigation (SCREAM) was launched by DOE, in a joint Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) and Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) collaboration. SCREAM was a comprehensive theory and simulation SciDAC center that provided physics guidance in the avoidance and mitigation of runaway electrons, and in tandem with domestic and international experiments, helped establish the qualitative and quantitative bases for safe operational scenarios and viable mitigation techniques. The SCREAM center assembled a national team of experts in runaway electron physics, tokamak disruptions, magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulation, and advanced algorithms and computing. The team combined advanced simulation and analysis capability facilitated by direct participation of ASCR SciDAC institutes with theoretical models and code development by FES scientists to focus on the runaway risk for ITER and tokamaks in general. The research scope was focussed on integrated simulations of kinetic runaway electrons, including MHD and fluid models of impurity transport, within a research plan guided by theory. The specific research tasks were (1) establish the fundamental physics of runaway generation, saturation, and dynamical evolution in a tokamak; (2) examine the critical path toward runaway avoidance; and (3) investigate the viability and effectiveness of the leading candidate schemes for runaway mitigation. In all three areas, members of the team carried out scoping studies that established the readiness for rapid and critical advances, especially in the deployment and further development of large-to extreme-scale simulation tools. Our multi-pronged computational approach included (1) relativistic Fokker-Planck solvers with discretization in phase space, (2) self-consistent particle-in-cell techniques, (3) particle-based Monte-Carlo, and (4) MHD-particle hybrid simulations. Cross-check between these different methods provided an additional means for verification and further bolstered the fidelity of our physics prediction. Validation against experimental results brings confidence to the predictive capability for ITER and frequently leads to new ideas for understanding and mitigating the thermal quench driven runaway electron phenomenon.
The report summarizes DOE INFUSE-supported work between HB11 Energy and the University of Rochester’s TriForce Institute to improve computational modeling of advanced fusion fuels, especially proton–boron-11 (p- 11 B). The project extended the TriForce particle-in-cell/Monte Carlo collision code to include physics needed for dense, high-temperature p- 11 B burn studies, including p- 11 B fusion reactions, three-alpha-particle reaction products, relativistic Coulomb collisions, large-angle nuclear scattering, bremsstrahlung radiation, inverse bremsstrahlung absorption, and photon transport. The upgraded models were verified against focused physics tests and against known deuterium–tritium burn behavior. The study then used one-dimensional spherical simulations to estimate the conditions required for thermonuclear burn propagation in isochoric p- 11 B fuel. The calculations found that burn propagation is possible in the model, but only under very extreme hot-spot conditions, such as about 7000 g/cm 3 at 500 keV or 9000 g/cm 3 at 300 keV for a 20-micron hot spot. These conditions are much more demanding than current demonstrated inertial confinement fusion hot spots. The report concludes that the INFUSE collaboration successfully advanced kinetic and radiation modeling capabilities for p- 11 B fusion and provided useful estimates of ignition requirements. However, the simulated fuel gains remain below what would be needed for practical inertial fusion energy, and further work is needed to reconcile differences among kinetic, radiation-hydrodynamic, and analytic models and to identify more achievable target designs.
NRAD is a 250-kilowatt TRIGA research reactor that first went online at INL in 1977. (TRIGA stands for Training, Research, Isotopes, General Atomics.) Historically, NRAD was utilized as a neutron radiography reactor that provides comprehensive, non-destructive information about the internal condition of irradiated nuclear fuel. Idaho National Laboratory (INL) has multiple nuclear fuels research and development programs that routinely evaluate irradiated fuels using neutron radiography at NRAD. In recent years, NRAD has gone through a transformation from the single purpose radiography reactor for which it was designed into a multipurpose research reactor, and expanding its in-core irradiation capabilities to support a broader mission for the US Department of Energy (DOE) Nuclear Energy (NE) programs, Basic Energy Science (BES) Programs, as well as Fusion Energy programs. NRAD is a designated user facility under the DOE Nuclear Science User Facility (NSUF) program, and is available for access for general public via a competitive proposal process. More information about NSUF and NRAD are available from the website: https://nsuf.inl.gov/Home/Facility/654.
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) is constructing a new High Field Vertical Magnet Test Facility (HFVMTF) with capabilities comparable to the European facilities EDIPO and FRESCA2. The facility, located at Fermilab, will feature a background magnetic field of 15 T, generated by a magnet provided by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). The HFVMTF will support two U.S. national programs under the DOE Office of Science: the U.S. Fusion Energy Science (FES) program and the Magnet Development Program (MDP). It will enable the testing of HTS samples in high magnetic fields across a wide range of temperatures and facilitate the development of hybrid magnets combining LTS and HTS superconductors. This paper presents an overview of the current progress in constructing the facility, including updates on the test cryostat, power supplies, and systems for quench protection and monitoring.
The Fusion Safety Program at Idaho National Laboratory has supported efforts to develop magnetic and inertial confinement fusion energy devices for commercial energy power development since 1979. In addition to our DOE less than hazard category 3 tritium handling facility STAR, we also have unique capabilities such as an adaptation of the severe accident code MELCOR developed specifically for fusion, and integrated modeling capabilities using the MOOSE Finite Element Code. In this presentation, we cover our unique experimental capabilities for investigating tritium sorption, solubility and permeation including in molten salts. We also show the application of MELCOR-TMAP to predict thermal hydraulics and tritium migration in normal and accident conditions. Finally, we demonstrate high-fidelity modeling capabilities found within the open-source MOOSE finite element framework as well as fuel-cycle modeling using TMAP8.
Inverse problems, which aim to infer unknown properties of a system using experimental and observational data, are central to addressing many of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) most critical scientific and engineering challenges. Accurate, computationally efficient, and data-efficient solutions to inverse problems are essential for advancing DOE mission-critical science drivers, including analyzing data from large-scale experimental facilities, optimizing fusion reactor performance, accelerating materials discovery, enhancing geophysical imaging, improving wildfire predictions, and enabling autonomous systems and digital twins. However, these problems are becoming increasingly complex, often involving nonlinear, highdimensional, and interconnected systems and models that span multiple physics and scales, while relying on data with varying quantity, quality, and information content. Compounding these challenges is the uncertainty inherent in DOE-relevant systems, where errors in inputs, noise in data, incompleteness of data, and discrepancies between models and reality constrain the accuracy and precision of solutions. At the same time, the convergence of recent scientific computing trends—scientific machine learning, artificial intelligence, and computing advances such as exascale computing—is creating unprecedented opportunities for tackling these challenges. The cross-cutting nature of inverse problems, combined with their growing complexity and rapidly evolving data and algorithmic demands, strongly motivates the formulation of a prioritized research agenda to maximize their capabilities and impact. In response to this need, DOE’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program in the Office of Science convened the Workshop on Basic Research Needs for Inverse Problems for Complex Systems Under Uncertainty in June 2025. This workshop brought together experts across disciplines to identify grand challenges and major opportunities in the field. Through collaborative discussions, the workshop defined transformative research directions aimed at addressing the mathematical, statistical, and computational challenges posed by inverse problems under uncertainty. As a result of these efforts, four priority research directions (PRDs) were identified to guide future research and development in this area. These PRDs, summarized below, represent a roadmap for advancing the foundational science and mathematics of inverse problems, enabling robust, scalable, and uncertainty-aware solutions that are critical for DOE applications.
Both NASA and Google have explored and funded Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR) aka Solid-State Fusion or Lattice Confinement Fusion (LCF) research. NASA has funded efforts since 1989, and Google Research began in 2014. Google, and researchers initially-funded by Google, published significant scientific papers in Nature, Nature Communications and the Journal of Applied Physics. NASA began a significant set of LENR-triggering programs in 2012 resulting in papers in Physical Review C, the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry and the Journal of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science. Both NASA and Google engaged researchers across fields of nuclear physics, chemistry, electrochemistry, material science and more. NASA built upon early novel gas pumping experiments then followed the patented work of the US Navy SPAWAR (US8,419,919, “System and Method to Generate Particles”) and experiments with the Naval Surface Warfare Centers. Google supported researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), the University of British Columbia (UBC), MIT and others. This resulted in patent applications and two granted patents (US10264661B2, “Target structure for enhanced electron screening” and US10566094B2 “Enhanced electron screening through plasmon oscillations”). These separate efforts, unknown to the researchers at the time, provided the impetus for the DoE ARPA-E LENR program followed by the DARPA DSO “Mechanisms for Amplification of Fusion Reaction Rates in Solids” (MARRS) program. This document briefly describes the overlapping NASA and Google Research efforts in plasma loading and electron screening emphasizing the results of the latest paper in Nature Communications. The papers and patents cited are listed.
The Advanced Reactor Safeguards and Security (ARSS) program in the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy (DOE-NE) seeks to identify new technology solutions for safeguards and security challenges associated with domestic deployment of advanced nuclear reactors. Research in the ARSS program is investigating alternative physical protection system (PPS) approaches that leverage new detection technologies. This report shows test results from a new form of artificial intelligence (AI) that is called deliberate motion analytics (DMA) when used to spatially and temporally fuse active radar and passive radio frequency (RF) detection that significantly improves detection of uncrewed aircraft systems (UASs). DMA is designed to filter out false positive alarms yet provide highly reliable intrusion detection at nuclear power plants (NPPs) and advanced small modular reactor (ASMR) perimeters. This form of AI is considered to be an enabling technology for security of the future and supports the ARSS investigation of alternative PPSs.
Detection of unknown waveforms in mission-critical communications is a crucial area of interest for the Department of Energy (DoE). Traditional methods and recent deep learning-based approaches often assume that the training set includes all possible classes, which is impractical for detecting new waveforms. This limitation gives rise to the problem of open-set recognition (OSR), which involves correctly identifying known classes while detecting and rejecting unknown or unseen classes. To address this limitation, we propose a novel dual-domain complex-valued neural architecture that jointly processes time-domain and frequency-domain signal representations using transformer mechanisms. A transformer model is a deep learning architecture that uses self-attention mechanisms to process and learn relationships in sequential data. Our model employs a cosine similarity loss to extract domain-specific features and incorporates a transformer architecture in the latent space to weigh the importance of different features from the time and frequency domains. The transformer layer includes stacked self-attention and cross-attention modules to learn intra-domain and inter-domain dependencies, creating a more holistic signal representation. An attention-based fusion module intelligently combines the time and frequency-domain features using multi-head attention, enabling the network to learn the optimal feature for each domain in each input signal. Quantitative results demonstrate the impact of these architectural choices on overall performance, showing significant improvement after incorporating self and cross-attention modules and using complex attention fusion over simple weighted fusion. Our ongoing work will focus on addressing the limitations of threshold-based OSR methods by developing a novel generative framework that integrates a conditional diffusion probabilistic model (DPM). DPM is a generative framework that learns to synthesize complex data by reversing a gradual noising process using a neural network trained to denoise step-by-step. Our goal is to leverage the inherent strengths of DPMs for identifying unknown signals more robustly. One primary advantage of using a DPM is its ability to provide a more reliable anomaly score based on the model's reconstruction error, rather than relying solely on classifier confidence. Additionally, the iterative denoising process of DPMs makes this approach naturally resilient to low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) conditions, where traditional methods often fail. By implementing this generative framework, we aim to enhance the model's capability to accurately detect unknown waveforms and maintain performance in challenging environments.
The continuing move toward establishing fusion systems for power generation and the associated research to that end is prompting examination of the potential health and safety impacts of such plants to the environment and human health. As many fusion facilities will have tritium inventories on site as part of the fusion fuel, evaluating the potential for downwind impacts from fusion facilities or power plants resulting from accident or routine emissions is a general requirement for assessing location and impacts to workers and the public. As part of siting considerations and permitting, the fusion facilities would be evaluated for potential for downwind concentration and dose impacts. For accident assessment scenarios, the downwind impacts are usually modeled as an instantaneous (or near-instantaneous) release of material transported following the wind. A range of meteorological conditions are usually assessed to determine a bounding case which results in a dose exceeding a specified threshold (e.g., 95 th or 99 th percentile; DOE 2015). This report provides initial estimates of the downwind dose impacts from a potential tritium release at a fusion power plant-relevant facility and identifies potential distances required to limit impacts to nearby population. This effort is meant to provide a bounding analysis and theoretical understanding of impacts of tritium releases for facilities subject to various environmental and atmospheric conditions. Using a Gaussian dispersion model to simulate a brief plume, downwind concentration and dose is projected for tritium oxide. Releases are assumed to consist entirely of tritium oxide due to the increased dose impacts from the oxide form relative to the elemental form of tritium. We also briefly identify how climatological conditions could potentially be used to support risk profile determination.
This is the final report for the project “Demonstration High Temperature Superconducting Non- Planar Stellarator Magnet with Advanced Manufactured Assemblies”, funded by DOE, and performed by Type One Energy from September, 2020, to March 2024 involving the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) to design and fabricate the first non-planar HTS (REBCO) coil for a high-field stellarator based on the SPARC tokamak’s VIPER cable concept. Stellarators at high fields make high-temperature superconducting magnets necessary for a compact fusion device. But the asymmetric and non-planar nature of its components, especially the magnets make it difficult for scalable producibility. To address these challenges, two promising technologies have emerged: advanced manufacturing (AM) for the supporting plates for forming the magnets, and high-temperature superconducting (HTS) cables inside the plates. AM has advanced enough to produce stellarator components with the necessary geometric complexity, size, and the precision, leading to potentially significant reductions in production time, cost, and waste. The cost of HTS tape has decreased dramatically, and progress in HTS planar magnet development has reached a point where it can be proposed for application to complex 3D non-planar magnets. The main objective of this project is to develop, demonstrate and pre-commercialize a novel, non-planar HTS coil shape that remains superconducting to achieve production scalable reductions in time and cost and performance. The proposed technology is based on the novel concept of a precision sub-scale HTS nonplanar coil assembly. This project focuses on the design, fabrication, material optimization of cable design, and validation and demonstration of the high current carrying capability of superconducting magnets and their support in a complex 3D shape needed for application to stellarator magnetic plasma confinement. The specific objectives of this research program include: (1) The successful application of metal AM to build a precision sub-scale HTS nonplanar coil, (2) An HTS cable and cross-section design that can conform to the required nonplanar coil shape (bend radii as tight as 10-cm) and remains superconducting at an engineering current density of 1.35 kA/cm 2 at 77 K and 1 tesla at the conductor (5 kA in the cable). To achieve the above challenging goals, we have formed a multidisciplinary research team consisting of members from Type One Energy and UW-Madison, MIT PSFC and CFS with complementary skills and strong facilities. The team worked collaboratively on fundamental and applied research on the following three major technical areas: (1) Design, fabrication, and optimization of non-planar HTS Cable The ultimate goal of the project is to determine if commercial REBCO tapes and additive manufacturing can be used to fabricate high field (≥ 10T) non-planar coils with tight bending radii (≃ 100mm) and with a degradation of the critical current (Ic) smaller than 20% with respect to the expected performance. We started with shorter length cable to evaluate the scalability of the production process and eventually reached multiple turns for higher magnetic fields. Our findings suggest that a stellarator coil system of a relevant size, characterized by its asymmetric and non-planar components, can be fabricated using a formed cable in plate method. This system can be simulated using a large-scale modeling approach. The use of hybrid modeling 3 techniques will be pivotal in reducing the complexity of the model and in assessing expected performance in designs. (2) Modeling and simulation of the non-planar HTS Cable Multiphysics simulations are performed using the commercial software and are carried out in self-field conditions, involving 2D and 3D models and twisted around one slot of twist-pitched VIPER cable. Multiphysics simulations are mainly focused on the coil for the critical current evaluation, the magnetic field map, self-Lorentz forces and mechanical, and magnetothermal behavior and the quench dynamics. The detailed model and prediction of the superconducting performance of a stellarator-relevant demonstration cable from numerical simulations supports the results from the actual testing backing the results. A detailed description and results are provided in the later sections. (3) Design, fabrication, and optimization of support for the non-planar HTS Cable The team developed an additive manufactured (AM) coil positioning plate that formed into the required non-planar geometry (with bend radii as tight as 10-cm) and to acceptable tolerances required for a stellarator magnet: (+0.25-mm from ideal on dimensions of coil positioning plates and up to +1-mm from ideal for position of wound coil). The plate materials is also included in this selection process from fabrication and 3D printing perspective and commensurate with eventual application to a fusion reactor. From the cost effectiveness point of view, the HTS coil and plate has the potential to cost less than that made in conventional methods with less waste (<75% waste) reducing time (<50%) and cost (<50%), especially as the AM field matures. The application of advanced manufacturing in the construction of the support plates will also lead to cost reduction, as the cables can be easily replaced, thereby making the assembly modular. With such high primary cost and time savings, high current densities and magnetic field, the funded R&D work has validated the designs, proven the feasibility, and characterized the performance of the HTS coil and plate assembly, paving the way for a relevant-size stellarator coil system.