UC San Diego Will Lead a New California Effort to Make Fusion Energy a Practical Reality

Fusion engineering grand challenges

While recent breakthroughs demonstrating fusion energy gain and an estimated influx of $10 billion in private investment have fueled growing interest in fusion energy, significant engineering and materials science challenges remain for both laser-based inertial confinement fusion and magnetic confinement fusion. The MDEC aims to address three of these challenges:

• Develop new radiation-resistant materials for use in fusion reactors
• Design diagnostic and detection tools that can survive the extreme radiation inside inertial fusion reactors, utilizing numerical tools including artificial intelligence
• Improve the tritium fuel cycle by improving materials-tritium interactions to limit losses, and studying how tritium affects the aging of other materials

To meet these goals, the MDEC Center brings together experts spanning both magnetic and inertial confinement fusion to drive progress in materials, diagnostics, and tritium handling. These leading fusion researchers will now have unprecedented access to some of the most advanced fusion research facilities in the world, including the National Ignition Facility at LLNL; the Divertor Materials Evaluation System at UC San Diego and General Atomics; the Ion Beam Materials Lab at LANL; the Inertial Fusion Energy Lab and new Poseidon ion beam accelerator in the PISCES lab at UC San Diego; the Center for Accelerator Mass Spectroscopy at LLNL; and the Hydrogen Processing Laboratory at LANL.

Preparing the future fusion workforce

In addition to these research goals, a key aim of the MDEC Center is to address critical fusion workforce needs by providing students at the undergraduate and graduate levels across the University of California with access to fusion energy research projects and skill sets. Critically, each PhD student involved in MDEC Center research will be paired with at least one mentor from a national laboratory, in addition to their campus advisors. This provides students with singular access to some of the most advanced fusion research facilities in the world, and gives national laboratory staff the opportunity to directly engage in university-led research efforts.

The MDEC Center will also offer new courses on fusion energy, building on an existing collaboration between UC San Diego and the High Energy Density Center at LLNL, which together have offered courses to UC students and the broader community for eight years. Given the limited availability of fusion-specific courses on each campus, this will be a valuable resource for students and researchers across the UC system.

This new LFRP funding will also allow the team to boost fusion offerings as part of the High Energy Density Science Summer School, offered to research scientists, postdoctoral scholars, undergraduate and graduate students  by Center for Matter Under Extreme Conditions at UC San Diego every other summer.

“The California fusion community has been working hard over the last few years to talk through shared challenges and to plan for maximum research impact. This new effort provides pathways for highly relevant fusion R&D collaborations. The program has been designed to seamlessly connect the most needed research with workforce development. I couldn’t be more excited to see the positive outcomes of these efforts,” said Javier E. Garay, inaugural director of the Fusion Engineering Institute at UC San Diego and co-investigator for this new Center, leading Center research on materials for fusion environments.

In addition to Beg and Garay, UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering faculty Mike Campbell and Alessandro Marinoni are also co-investigators for the MDEC Center, bringing expertise in inertial fusion and magnetic fusion, respectively.

Project Leadership and Partner Institutions

UC San Diego
Farhat Beg (PI) is a Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)
Arthur Pak (Co-PI) is the Lead for Strategic Development for the Inertial Confinement (ICF) Program at LLNL and the Associate Director for Strategy of the Livermore Institute for Fusion Technology

Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL)
John Kline (Co-PI) is a staff scientist and Fusion Energy Sciences Program Manager at LANL

UCLA
Jaime Marian (Co-PI) is Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UCLA

UC Irvine
Franklin Dollar (Co-PI) is a Professor with the Department of Physics & Astronomy and Associate Dean of Graduate Studies in the School of Physical Sciences at UC Irvine

UC Santa Cruz
Simone Mazza (Co-PI) is an Assistant Research Scientist in the SCIPP group at UC Santa Cruz

Funding

Funded by the net fee income the University receives for managing Lawrence Livermore (LLNL) and Los Alamos (LANL) National Laboratories, the University of California National Laboratory Fees Research Program sponsors innovative research, fosters new collaborations between UC faculty and national laboratory scientists, and provides unique training opportunities for UC graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.