Eyeing Nvidia’s Omniverse for Fusion Reactor Design

Description

With climate change accelerating and fossil fuel supplies proving increasingly contentious, ensuring a secure supply of clean energy is top-of-mind for many researchers, companies and governments. Fusion energy — which is zero-carbon and low-radioactivity — has long been the Holy Grail in this quest, but has (thus far) not been successfully scaled for production, suffering from high energy input needs and general instability of the delicate fusion reaction.

Now, as Nvidia ramps up its Omniverse tool for digital twins — physically and photographically realistic simulated duplicates of real-world objects and environments — at least one research team has been wondering: could Omniverse be used to assist in fusion reactor design?

This was the subject of a session at Nvidia’s GTC22 presented by Lee Margetts, a professor at the University of Manchester and chair of digital engineering for nuclear fusion for the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA).