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      Leveraging science and technology against the world’s top problems

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      Looking back on nearly a half-century at MIT, Richard K. Lester, associate provost and Japan Steel Industry Professor, sees a “somewhat eccentric professional trajectory.”

      But while his path has been irregular, there has been a clearly defined through line, Lester says: the emergence of new science and new technologies, the potential of these developments to shake up the status quo and address some of society’s most consequential problems, and what the outcomes might mean for America’s place in the world.

      Perhaps no assignment in Lester’s portfolio better captures this theme than the new MIT Climate Grand Challenges competition. Spearheaded by Lester and Maria Zuber, MIT vice president for research, and launched at the height of the pandemic in summer 2020, this initiative is designed to mobilize the entire MIT research community around tackling “the really hard, challenging problems currently standing in the way of an effective global response to the climate emergency,” says Lester. “The focus is on those problems where progress requires developing and applying frontier knowledge in the natural and social sciences and cutting-edge technologies. This is the MIT community swinging for the fences in areas where we have a comparative advantage.”This is a passion project for him, not least because it has engaged colleagues from nearly all of MIT’s departments. After nearly 100 initial ideas were submitted by more than 300 faculty, 27 teams were named finalists and received funding to develop comprehensive research and innovation plans in such areas as decarbonizing complex industries; risk forecasting and adaptation; advancing climate equity; and carbon removal, management, and storage. In April, a small subset of this group will become multiyear flagship projects, augmenting the work of existing MIT units that are pursuing climate research. Lester is sunny in the face of these extraordinarily complex problems. “This is a bottom-up effort with exciting proposals, and where the Institute is collectively committed — it’s MIT at its best.”

      Nuclear to the core

      This initiative carries a particular resonance for Lester, who remains deeply engaged in nuclear engineering. “The role of nuclear energy is central and will need to become even more central if we’re to succeed in addressing the climate challenge,” he says. He also acknowledges that for nuclear energy technologies — both fission and fusion — to play a vital role in decarbonizing the economy, they must not just win “in the court of public opinion, but in the marketplace,” he says. “Over the years, my research has sought to elucidate what needs to be done to overcome these obstacles.”

      In fact, Lester has been campaigning for much of his career for a U.S. nuclear innovation agenda, a commitment that takes on increased urgency as the contours of the climate crisis sharpen. He argues for the rapid development and testing of nuclear technologies that can complement the renewable but intermittent energy sources of sun and wind. Whether powerful, large-scale, molten-salt-cooled reactors or small, modular, light water reactors, nuclear batteries or promising new fusion projects, U.S. energy policy must embrace nuclear innovation, says Lester, or risk losing the high-stakes race for a sustainable future.

      Chancing into a discipline

      Lester’s introduction to nuclear science was pure happenstance.

      Born in the English industrial city of Leeds, he grew up in a musical family and played piano, violin, and then viola. “It was a big part of my life,” he says, and for a time, music beckoned as a career. He tumbled into a chemical engineering concentration at Imperial College, London, after taking a job in a chemical factory following high school. “There’s a certain randomness to life, and in my case, it’s reflected in my choice of major, which had a very large impact on my ultimate career.”

      In his second year, Lester talked his way into running a small experiment in the university’s research reactor, on radiation effects in materials. “I got hooked, and began thinking of studying nuclear engineering.” But there were few graduate programs in British universities at the time. Then serendipity struck again. The instructor of Lester’s single humanities course at Imperial had previously taught at MIT, and suggested Lester take a look at the nuclear program there. “I will always be grateful to him (and, indirectly, to MIT’s Humanities program) for opening my eyes to the existence of this institution where I’ve spent my whole adult life,” says Lester.

      He arrived at MIT with the notion of mitigating the harms of nuclear weapons. It was a time when the nuclear arms race “was an existential threat in everyone’s life,” he recalls. He targeted his graduate studies on nuclear proliferation. But he also encountered an electrifying study by MIT meteorologist Jule Charney. “Professor Charney produced one of the first scientific assessments of the effects on climate of increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, with quantitative estimates that have not fundamentally changed in 40 years.”

      Lester shifted directions. “I came to MIT to work on nuclear security, but stayed in the nuclear field because of the contributions that it can and must make in addressing climate change,” he says.

      Research and policy

      His path forward, Lester believed, would involve applying his science and technology expertise to critical policy problems, grounded in immediate, real-world concerns, and aiming for broad policy impacts. Even as a member of NSE, he joined with colleagues from many MIT departments to study American industrial practices and what was required to make them globally competitive, and then founded MIT’s Industrial Performance Center (IPC). Working at the IPC with interdisciplinary teams of faculty and students on the sources of productivity and innovation, his research took him to many countries at different stages of industrialization, including China, Taiwan, Japan, and Brazil.

      Lester’s wide-ranging work yielded books (including the MIT Press bestseller “Made in America”), advisory positions with governments, corporations, and foundations, and unexpected collaborations. “My interests were always fairly broad, and being at MIT made it possible to team up with world-leading scholars and extraordinary students not just in nuclear engineering, but in many other fields such as political science, economics, and management,” he says.

      Forging cross-disciplinary ties and bringing creative people together around a common goal proved a valuable skill as Lester stepped into positions of ever-greater responsibility at the Institute. He didn’t exactly relish the prospect of a desk job, though. “I religiously avoided administrative roles until I felt I couldn’t keep avoiding them,” he says.

      Today, as associate provost, he tends to MIT’s international activities — a daunting task given increasing scrutiny of research universities’ globe-spanning research partnerships and education of foreign students. But even in the midst of these consuming chores, Lester remains devoted to his home department. “Being a nuclear engineer is a central part of my identity,” he says.

      To students entering the nuclear field nearly 50 years after he did, who are understandably “eager to fix everything that seems wrong immediately,” he has a message: “Be patient. The hard things, the ones that are really worth doing, will take a long time to do.” Putting the climate crisis behind us will take two generations, Lester believes. Current students will start the job, but it will also take the efforts of their children’s generation before it is done.  “So we need you to be energetic and creative, of course, but whatever you do we also need you to be patient and to have ‘stick-to-itiveness’ — and maybe also a moral compass that our generation has lacked.” More

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      Finding her way to fusion

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      “I catch myself startling people in public.”

      Zoe Fisher’s animated hands carry part of the conversation as she describes how her naturally loud and expressive laughter turned heads in the streets of Yerevan. There during MIT’s Independent Activities period (IAP), she was helping teach nuclear science at the American University of Armenia, before returning to MIT to pursue fusion research at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC).

      Startling people may simply be in Fisher’s DNA. She admits that when she first arrived at MIT, knowing nothing about nuclear science and engineering (NSE), she chose to join that department’s Freshman Pre-Orientation Program (FPOP) “for the shock value.” It was a choice unexpected by family, friends, and mostly herself. Now in her senior year, a 2021 recipient of NSE’s Irving Kaplan Award for academic achievements by a junior and entering a fifth-year master of science program in nuclear fusion, Fisher credits that original spontaneous impulse for introducing her to a subject she found so compelling that, after exploring multiple possibilities, she had to return to it.

      Fisher’s venture to Armenia, under the guidance of NSE associate professor Areg Danagoulian, is not the only time she has taught oversees with MISTI’s Global Teaching Labs, though it is the first time she has taught nuclear science, not to mention thermodynamics and materials science. During IAP 2020 she was a student teacher at a German high school, teaching life sciences, mathematics, and even English to grades five through 12. And after her first year she explored the transportation industry with a mechanical engineering internship in Tuscany, Italy.

      By the time she was ready to declare her NSE major she had sampled the alternatives both overseas and at home, taking advantage of MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). Drawn to fusion’s potential as an endless source of carbon-free energy on earth, she decided to try research at the PSFC, to see if the study was a good fit. 

      Much fusion research at MIT has favored heating hydrogen fuel inside a donut-shaped device called a tokamak, creating plasma that is hot and dense enough for fusion to occur. Because plasma will follow magnetic field lines, these devices are wrapped with magnets to keep the hot fuel from damaging the chamber walls.

      Fisher was assigned to SPARC, the PSFC’s new tokamak collaboration with MIT startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CSF), which uses a game-changing high-temperature superconducting (HTS) tape to create fusion magnets that minimize tokamak size and maximize performance. Working on a database reference book for SPARC materials, she was finding purpose even in the most repetitive tasks. “Which is how I knew I wanted to stay in fusion,” she laughs.

      Fisher’s latest UROP assignment takes her — literally — deeper into SPARC research. She works in a basement laboratory in building NW13 nicknamed “The Vault,” on a proton accelerator whose name conjures an underworld: DANTE. Supervised by PSFC Director Dennis Whyte and postdoc David Fischer, she is exploring the effects of radiation damage on the thin HTS tape that is key to SPARC’s design, and ultimately to the success of ARC, a prototype working fusion power plant.

      Because repetitive bombardment with neutrons produced during the fusion process can diminish the superconducting properties of the HTS, it is crucial to test the tape repeatedly. Fisher assists in assembling and testing the experimental setups for irradiating the HTS samples. Fisher recalls her first project was installing a “shutter” that would allow researchers to control exactly how much radiation reached the tape without having to turn off the entire experiment.

      “You could just push the button — block the radiation — then unblock it. It sounds super simple, but it took many trials. Because first I needed the right size solenoid, and then I couldn’t find a piece of metal that was small enough, and then we needed cryogenic glue…. To this day the actual final piece is made partially of paper towels.”

      She shrugs and laughs. “It worked, and it was the cheapest option.”

      Fisher is always ready to find the fun in fusion. Referring to DANTE as “A really cool dude,” she admits, “He’s perhaps a bit fickle. I may or may not have broken him once.” During a recent IAP seminar, she joined other PSFC UROP students to discuss her research, and expanded on how a mishap can become a gateway to understanding.

      “The grad student I work with and I got to repair almost the entire internal circuit when we blew the fuse — which originally was a really bad thing. But it ended up being great because we figured out exactly how it works.”

      Fisher’s upbeat spirit makes her ideal not only for the challenges of fusion research, but for serving the MIT community. As a student representative for NSE’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee, she meets monthly with the goal of growing and supporting diversity within the department.

      “This opportunity is impactful because I get my voice, and the voices of my peers, taken seriously,” she says. “Currently, we are spending most of our efforts trying to identify and eliminate hurdles based on race, ethnicity, gender, and income that prevent people from pursuing — and applying to — NSE.”

      To break from the lab and committees, she explores the Charles River as part of MIT’s varsity sailing team, refusing to miss a sunset. She also volunteers as an FPOP mentor, seeking to provide incoming first-years with the kind of experience that will make them want to return to the topic, as she did.

      She looks forward to continuing her studies on the HTS tapes she has been irradiating, proposing to send a current pulse above the critical current through the tape, to possibly anneal any defects from radiation, which would make repairs on future fusion power plants much easier.

      Fisher credits her current path to her UROP mentors and their infectious enthusiasm for the carbon-free potential of fusion energy.

      “UROPing around the PSFC showed me what I wanted to do with my life,” she says. “Who doesn’t want to save the world?” More

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      Toward batteries that pack twice as much energy per pound

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      In the endless quest to pack more energy into batteries without increasing their weight or volume, one especially promising technology is the solid-state battery. In these batteries, the usual liquid electrolyte that carries charges back and forth between the electrodes is replaced with a solid electrolyte layer. Such batteries could potentially not only deliver twice as much energy for their size, they also could virtually eliminate the fire hazard associated with today’s lithium-ion batteries.

      But one thing has held back solid-state batteries: Instabilities at the boundary between the solid electrolyte layer and the two electrodes on either side can dramatically shorten the lifetime of such batteries. Some studies have used special coatings to improve the bonding between the layers, but this adds the expense of extra coating steps in the fabrication process. Now, a team of researchers at MIT and Brookhaven National Laboratory have come up with a way of achieving results that equal or surpass the durability of the coated surfaces, but with no need for any coatings.

      The new method simply requires eliminating any carbon dioxide present during a critical manufacturing step, called sintering, where the battery materials are heated to create bonding between the cathode and electrolyte layers, which are made of ceramic compounds. Even though the amount of carbon dioxide present is vanishingly small in air, measured in parts per million, its effects turn out to be dramatic and detrimental. Carrying out the sintering step in pure oxygen creates bonds that match the performance of the best coated surfaces, without that extra cost of the coating, the researchers say.

      The findings are reported in the journal Advanced Energy Materials, in a paper by MIT doctoral student Younggyu Kim, professor of nuclear science and engineering and of materials science and engineering Bilge Yildiz, and Iradikanari Waluyo and Adrian Hunt at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

      “Solid-state batteries have been desirable for different reasons for a long time,” Yildiz says. “The key motivating points for solid batteries are they are safer and have higher energy density,” but they have been held back from large scale commercialization by two factors, she says: the lower conductivity of the solid electrolyte, and the interface instability issues.

      The conductivity issue has been effectively tackled, and reasonably high-conductivity materials have already been demonstrated, according to Yildiz. But overcoming the instabilities that arise at the interface has been far more challenging. These instabilities can occur during both the manufacturing and the electrochemical operation of such batteries, but for now the researchers have focused on the manufacturing, and specifically the sintering process.

      Sintering is needed because if the ceramic layers are simply pressed onto each other, the contact between them is far from ideal, there are far too many gaps, and the electrical resistance across the interface is high. Sintering, which is usually done at temperatures of 1,000 degrees Celsius or above for ceramic materials, causes atoms from each material to migrate into the other to form bonds. The team’s experiments showed that at temperatures anywhere above a few hundred degrees, detrimental reactions take place that increase the resistance at the interface — but only if carbon dioxide is present, even in tiny amounts. They demonstrated that avoiding carbon dioxide, and in particular maintaining a pure oxygen atmosphere during sintering, could create very good bonding at temperatures up to 700 degrees, with none of the detrimental compounds formed.

      The performance of the cathode-electrolyte interface made using this method, Yildiz says, was “comparable to the best interface resistances we have seen in the literature,” but those were all achieved using the extra step of applying coatings. “We are finding that you can avoid that additional fabrication step, which is typically expensive.”

      The potential gains in energy density that solid-state batteries provide comes from the fact that they enable the use of pure lithium metal as one of the electrodes, which is much lighter than the currently used electrodes made of lithium-infused graphite.

      The team is now studying the next part of the performance of such batteries, which is how these bonds hold up over the long run during battery cycling. Meanwhile, the new findings could potentially be applied rapidly to battery production, she says. “What we are proposing is a relatively simple process in the fabrication of the cells. It doesn’t add much energy penalty to the fabrication. So, we believe that it can be adopted relatively easily into the fabrication process,” and the added costs, they have calculated, should be negligible.

      Large companies such as Toyota are already at work commercializing early versions of solid-state lithium-ion batteries, and these new findings could quickly help such companies improve the economics and durability of the technology.

      The research was supported by the U.S. Army Research Office through MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies. The team used facilities supported by the National Science Foundation and facilities at Brookhaven National Laboratory supported by the Department of Energy. More

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      Tuning in to invisible waves on the JET tokamak

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      Research scientist Alex Tinguely is readjusting to Cambridge and Boston.

      As a postdoc with the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), the MIT graduate spent the last two years in Oxford, England, a city he recalls can be traversed entirely “in the time it takes to walk from MIT to Harvard.” With its ancient stone walls, cathedrals, cobblestone streets, and winding paths, that small city was his home base for a big project: JET, a tokamak that is currently the largest operating magnetic fusion energy experiment in the world.

      Located at the Culham Center for Fusion Energy (CCFE), part of the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority, this key research center of the European Fusion Program has recently announced historic success. Using a 50-50 deuterium-tritium fuel mixture for the first time since 1997, JET established a fusion power record of 10 megawatts output over five seconds. It produced 59 megajoules of fusion energy, more than doubling the 22 megajoule record it set in 1997. As a member of the JET Team, Tinguely has overseen the measurement and instrumentation systems (diagnostics) contributed by the MIT group.

      A lucky chance

      The postdoctoral opportunity arose just as Tinguely was graduating with a PhD in physics from MIT. Managed by Professor Miklos Porkolab as the principal investigator for over 20 years, this postdoctoral program has prepared multiple young researchers for careers in fusion facilities around the world. The collaborative research provided Tinguely the chance to work on a fusion device that would be adding tritium to the usual deuterium fuel.

      Fusion, the process that fuels the sun and other stars, could provide a long-term source of carbon-free power on Earth, if it can be harnessed. For decades researchers have tried to create an artificial star in a doughnut-shaped bottle, or “tokamak,” using magnetic fields to keep the turbulent plasma fuel confined and away from the walls of its container long enough for fusion to occur.

      In his graduate student days at MIT, Tinguely worked on the PSFC’s Alcator C-Mod tokamak, now decommissioned, which, like most magnetic fusion devices, used deuterium to create the plasmas for experiments. JET, since beginning operation in 1983, has done the same, later joining a small number of facilities that added tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen. While this addition increases the amount of fusion, it also creates much more radiation and activation.

      Tinguely considers himself fortunate to have been placed at JET.

      “There aren’t that many operating tokamaks in the U.S. right now,” says Tinguely, “not to mention one that would be running deuterium-tritium (DT), which hasn’t been run for over 20 years, and which would be making some really important measurements. I got a very lucky spot where I was an MIT postdoc, but I lived in Oxford, working on a very international project.”

      Strumming magnetic field lines

      The measurements that interest Tinguely are of low-frequency electromagnetic waves in tokamak plasmas. Tinguely uses an antenna diagnostic developed by MIT, EPFL Swiss Plasma Center, and CCFE to probe the so-called Alfvén eigenmodes when they are stable, before the energetic alpha particles produced by DT fusion plasmas can drive them toward instability.

      What makes MIT’s “Alfvén Eigenmode Active Diagnostic” essential is that without it researchers cannot see, or measure, stable eigenmodes. Unstable modes show up clearly as magnetic fluctuations in the data, but stable waves are invisible without prompting from the antenna. These measurements help researchers understand the physics of Alfvén waves and their potential for degrading fusion performance, providing insights that will be increasingly important for future DT fusion devices.

      Tinguely likens the diagnostic to fingers on guitar strings.

      “The magnetic field lines in the tokamak are like guitar strings. If you have nothing to give energy to the strings — or give energy to the waves of the magnetic field lines — they just sit there, they don’t do anything. The energetic plasma particles can essentially ‘play the guitar strings,’ strum the magnetic field lines of the plasma, and that’s when you can see the waves in your plasma. But if the energetic particle drive of the waves is not strong enough you won’t see them, so you need to come along and ‘pluck the strings’ with our antenna. And that’s how you learn some information about the waves.”

      Much of Tinguely’s experience on JET took place during the Covid-19 pandemic, when off-site operation and analysis were the norm. However, because the MIT diagnostic needed to be physically turned on and off, someone from Tinguely’s team needed to be on site twice a day, a routine that became even less convenient when tritium was introduced.

      “When you have deuterium and tritium, you produce a lot of neutrons. So, some of the buildings became off-limits during operation, which meant they had to be turned on really early in the morning, like 6:30 a.m., and then turned off very late at night, around 10:30 p.m.”

      Looking to the future

      Now a research scientist at the PSFC, Tinguely continues to work at JET remotely. He sometimes wishes he could again ride that train from Oxford to Culham — which he fondly remembers for its clean, comfortable efficiency — to see work colleagues and to visit local friends. The life he created for himself in England included practice and performance with the 125-year-old Oxford Bach Choir, as well as weekly dinner service at The Gatehouse, a facility that offers free support for the local homeless and low-income communities.

      “Being back is exciting too,” he says. “It’s fun to see how things have changed, how people and projects have grown, what new opportunities have arrived.”

      He refers specifically to a project that is beginning to take up more of his time: SPARC, the tokamak the PSFC supports in collaboration with Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Designed to use deuterium-tritium to make net fusion gains, SPARC will be able to use the latest research on JET to advantage. Tinguely is already exploring how his expertise with Alfvén eigenmodes can support the experiment.

      “I actually had an opportunity to do my PhD — or DPhil as they would call it — at Oxford University, but I went to MIT for grad school instead,” Tinguely reveals. “So, this is almost like closure, in a sense. I got to have my Oxford experience in the end, just in a different way, and have the MIT experience too.”

      He adds, “And I see myself being here at MIT for some time.” More

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      Seeing the plasma edge of fusion experiments in new ways with artificial intelligence

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      To make fusion energy a viable resource for the world’s energy grid, researchers need to understand the turbulent motion of plasmas: a mix of ions and electrons swirling around in reactor vessels. The plasma particles, following magnetic field lines in toroidal chambers known as tokamaks, must be confined long enough for fusion devices to produce significant gains in net energy, a challenge when the hot edge of the plasma (over 1 million degrees Celsius) is just centimeters away from the much cooler solid walls of the vessel.

      Abhilash Mathews, a PhD candidate in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering working at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), believes this plasma edge to be a particularly rich source of unanswered questions. A turbulent boundary, it is central to understanding plasma confinement, fueling, and the potentially damaging heat fluxes that can strike material surfaces — factors that impact fusion reactor designs.

      To better understand edge conditions, scientists focus on modeling turbulence at this boundary using numerical simulations that will help predict the plasma’s behavior. However, “first principles” simulations of this region are among the most challenging and time-consuming computations in fusion research. Progress could be accelerated if researchers could develop “reduced” computer models that run much faster, but with quantified levels of accuracy.

      For decades, tokamak physicists have regularly used a reduced “two-fluid theory” rather than higher-fidelity models to simulate boundary plasmas in experiment, despite uncertainty about accuracy. In a pair of recent publications, Mathews begins directly testing the accuracy of this reduced plasma turbulence model in a new way: he combines physics with machine learning.

      “A successful theory is supposed to predict what you’re going to observe,” explains Mathews, “for example, the temperature, the density, the electric potential, the flows. And it’s the relationships between these variables that fundamentally define a turbulence theory. What our work essentially examines is the dynamic relationship between two of these variables: the turbulent electric field and the electron pressure.”

      In the first paper, published in Physical Review E, Mathews employs a novel deep-learning technique that uses artificial neural networks to build representations of the equations governing the reduced fluid theory. With this framework, he demonstrates a way to compute the turbulent electric field from an electron pressure fluctuation in the plasma consistent with the reduced fluid theory. Models commonly used to relate the electric field to pressure break down when applied to turbulent plasmas, but this one is robust even to noisy pressure measurements.

      In the second paper, published in Physics of Plasmas, Mathews further investigates this connection, contrasting it against higher-fidelity turbulence simulations. This first-of-its-kind comparison of turbulence across models has previously been difficult — if not impossible — to evaluate precisely. Mathews finds that in plasmas relevant to existing fusion devices, the reduced fluid model’s predicted turbulent fields are consistent with high-fidelity calculations. In this sense, the reduced turbulence theory works. But to fully validate it, “one should check every connection between every variable,” says Mathews.

      Mathews’ advisor, Principal Research Scientist Jerry Hughes, notes that plasma turbulence is notoriously difficult to simulate, more so than the familiar turbulence seen in air and water. “This work shows that, under the right set of conditions, physics-informed machine-learning techniques can paint a very full picture of the rapidly fluctuating edge plasma, beginning from a limited set of observations. I’m excited to see how we can apply this to new experiments, in which we essentially never observe every quantity we want.”

      These physics-informed deep-learning methods pave new ways in testing old theories and expanding what can be observed from new experiments. David Hatch, a research scientist at the Institute for Fusion Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, believes these applications are the start of a promising new technique.

      “Abhi’s work is a major achievement with the potential for broad application,” he says. “For example, given limited diagnostic measurements of a specific plasma quantity, physics-informed machine learning could infer additional plasma quantities in a nearby domain, thereby augmenting the information provided by a given diagnostic. The technique also opens new strategies for model validation.”

      Mathews sees exciting research ahead.

      “Translating these techniques into fusion experiments for real edge plasmas is one goal we have in sight, and work is currently underway,” he says. “But this is just the beginning.”

      Mathews was supported in this work by the Manson Benedict Fellowship, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science under the Fusion Energy Sciences program.​ More

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      Helping to make nuclear fusion a reality

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      Up until she served in the Peace Corps in Malawi, Rachel Bielajew was open to a career reboot. Having studied nuclear engineering as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, graduate school had been on her mind. But seeing the drastic impacts of climate change play out in real-time in Malawi — the lives of the country’s subsistence farmers swing wildly, depending on the rains — convinced Bielajew of the importance of nuclear engineering. Bielajew was struck that her high school students in the small town of Chisenga had a shaky understanding of math, but universally understood global warming. “The concept of the changing world due to human impact was evident, and they could see it,” Bielajew says.

      Bielajew was looking to work on solutions that could positively impact global problems and feed her love of physics. Nuclear engineering, especially the study of fusion as a carbon-free energy source, checked off both boxes. Bielajew is now a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE). She researches magnetic confinement fusion in the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) with Professor Anne White.

      Researching fusion’s big challenge

      You need to confine plasma effectively in order to generate the extremely high temperatures (100 million degrees Celsius) fusion needs, without melting the walls of the tokamak, the device that hosts these reactions. Magnets can do the job, but “plasmas are weird, they behave strangely and are challenging to understand,” Bielajew says. Small instabilities in plasma can coalesce into fluctuating turbulence that can drive heat and particles out of the machine.

      In high-confinement mode, the edges of the plasma have less tolerance for such unruly behavior. “The turbulence gets damped out and sheared apart at the edge,” Bielajew says. This might seem like a good thing, but high-confinement plasmas have their own challenges. They are so tightly bound that they create edge-localized modes (ELMs), bursts of damaging particles and energy, that can be extremely damaging to the machine.

      The questions Bielajew is looking to answer: How do we get high confinement without ELMs? How do turbulence and transport play a role in plasmas? “We do not fully understand turbulence, even though we have studied it for a long time,” Bielajew says, “It is a big and important problem to solve for fusion to be a reality. I like that challenge,” Bielajew adds.

      A love of science

      Confronting such challenges head-on has been part of Bielajew’s toolkit since she was a child growing up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her father, Alex Bielajew, is a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Michigan, and Bielajew’s mother also pursued graduate studies.

      Bielajew’s parents encouraged her to follow her own path and she found it led to her father’s chosen profession: nuclear engineering. Once she decided to pursue research in fusion, MIT stood out as a school she could set her sights on. “I knew that MIT had an extensive program in fusion and a lot of faculty in the field,” Bielajew says. The mechanics of the application were challenging: Chisenga had limited internet access, so Bielajew had to ride on the back of a pickup truck to meet a friend in a city a few hours away and use his phone as a hotspot to send the documents.

      A similar tenacity has surfaced in Bielajew’s approach to research during the Covid-19 pandemic. Working off a blueprint, Bielajew built the Correlation Cyclotron Emission Diagnostic, which measures turbulent electron temperature fluctuations. Through a collaboration, Bielajew conducts her plasma research at the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak in Germany. Traditionally, Bielajew would ship the diagnostic to Germany, follow and install it, and conduct the research in person. The pandemic threw a wrench in the plans, so Bielajew shipped the diagnostic and relied on team members to install it. She Zooms into the control room and trusts others to run the plasma experiments.

      DEI advocate

      Bielajew is very hands-on with another endeavor: improving diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in her own backyard. Having grown up with parental encouragement and in an environment that never doubted her place as a woman in engineering, Bielajew realizes not everyone has the same opportunities. “I wish that the world was in a place where all I had to do was care about my research, but it’s not,” Bielajew says. While science can solve many problems, more fundamental ones about equity need humans to act in specific ways, she points out. “I want to see more women represented, more people of color. Everyone needs a voice in building a better world,” Bielajew says.

      To get there, Bielajew co-launched NSE’s Graduate Application Assistance Program, which connects underrepresented student applicants with NSE mentors. She has been the DEI officer with NSE’s student group, ANS, and is very involved in the department’s DEI committee.

      As for future research, Bielajew hopes to concentrate on the experiments that make her question existing paradigms about plasmas under high confinement. Bielajew has registered more head-scratching “hmm” moments than “a-ha” ones. Measurements from her experiments drive the need for more intensive study.

      Bielajew’s dogs, Dobby and Winky, keep her company through it all. They came home with her from Malawi. More

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      Radio-frequency wave scattering improves fusion simulations

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      In the quest for fusion energy, understanding how radio-frequency (RF) waves travel (or “propagate”) in the turbulent interior of a fusion furnace is crucial to maintaining an efficient, continuously operating power plant. Transmitted by an antenna in the doughnut-shaped vacuum chamber common to magnetic confinement fusion devices called tokamaks, RF waves heat the plasma fuel and drive its current around the toroidal interior. The efficiency of this process can be affected by how the wave’s trajectory is altered (or “scattered”) by conditions within the chamber.

      Researchers have tried to study these RF processes using computer simulations to match the experimental conditions. A good match would validate the computer model, and raise confidence in using it to explore new physics and design future RF antennas that perform efficiently. While the simulations can accurately calculate how much total current is driven by RF waves, they do a poor job at predicting where exactly in the plasma this current is produced.

      Now, in a paper published in the Journal of Plasma Physics, MIT researchers suggest that the models for RF wave propagation used for these simulations have not properly taken into account the way these waves are scattered as they encounter dense, turbulent filaments present in the edge of the plasma known as the “scrape-off layer” (SOL).

      Bodhi Biswas, a graduate student at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) under the direction of Senior Research Scientist Paul Bonoli, School of Engineering Distinguished Professor of Engineering Anne White, and Principal Research Scientist Abhay Ram, who is the paper’s lead author. Ram compares the scattering that occurs in this situation to a wave of water hitting a lily pad: “The wave crashing with the lily pad will excite a secondary, scattered wave that makes circular ripples traveling outward from the plant. The incoming wave has transferred energy to the scattered wave. Some of this energy is reflected backwards (in relation to the incoming wave), some travels forwards, and some is deflected to the side. The specifics all depend on the particular attributes of the wave, the water, and the lily pad. In our case, the lily pad is the plasma filament.”

      Until now, researchers have not properly taken these filaments and the scattering they provoke into consideration when modeling the turbulence inside a tokamak, leading to an underestimation of wave scattering. Using data from PSFC tokamak Alcator C-Mod, Biswas shows that using the new method of modeling RF-wave scattering from SOL turbulence provides results considerably different from older models, and a much better match to experiments. Notably, the “lower-hybrid” wave spectrum, crucial to driving plasma current in a steady-state tokamak, appears to scatter asymmetrically, an important effect not accounted for in previous models.

      Biswas’s advisor Paul Bonoli is well acquainted with traditional “ray-tracing” models, which evaluate a wave trajectory by dividing it into a series of rays. He has used this model, with its limitations, for decades in his own research to understand plasma behavior. Bonoli says he is pleased that “the research results in Bodhi’s doctoral thesis have refocused attention on the profound effect that edge turbulence can have on the propagation and absorption of radio-frequency power.”

      Although ray-tracing treatments of scattering do not fully capture all the wave physics, a “full-wave” model that does would be prohibitively expensive. To solve the problem economically, Biswas splits his analysis into two parts: (1) using ray tracing to model the trajectory of the wave in the tokamak assuming no turbulence, while (2) modifying this ray-trajectory with the new scattering model that accounts for the turbulent plasma filaments.

      “This scattering model is a full-wave model, but computed over a small region and in a simplified geometry so that it is very quick to do,” says Biswas. “The result is a ray-tracing model that, for the first time, accounts for full-wave scattering physics.”

      Biswas notes that this model bridges the gap between simple scattering models that fail to match experiment and full-wave models that are prohibitively expensive, providing reasonable accuracy at low cost.

      “Our results suggest scattering is an important effect, and that it must be taken into account when designing future RF antennas. The low cost of our scattering model makes this very doable.”

      “This is exciting progress,” says Syun’ichi Shiraiwa, staff research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. “I believe that Bodhi’s work provides a clear path to the end of a long tunnel we have been in. His work not only demonstrates that the wave scattering, once accurately accounted for, can explain the experimental results, but also answers a puzzling question: why previous scattering models were incomplete, and their results unsatisfying.”

      Work is now underway to apply this model to more plasmas from Alcator C-Mod and other tokamaks. Biswas believes that this new model will be particularly applicable to high-density tokamak plasmas, for which the standard ray-tracing model has been noticeably inaccurate. He is also excited that the model could be validated by DIII-D National Fusion Facility, a fusion experiment on which the PSFC collaborates.

      “The DIII-D tokamak will soon be capable of launching lower hybrid waves and measuring its electric field in the scrape-off layer. These measurements could provide direct evidence of the asymmetric scattering effect predicted by our model.” More

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      Q&A: Options for the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant

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      The Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California, the only one still operating in the state, is set to close in 2025. A team of researchers at MIT’s Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems, Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab, and Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research; Stanford’s Precourt Energy Institute; and energy analysis firm LucidCatalyst LLC have analyzed the potential benefits the plant could provide if its operation were extended to 2030 or 2045.

      They found that this nuclear plant could simultaneously help to stabilize the state’s electric grid, provide desalinated water to supplement the state’s chronic water shortages, and provide carbon-free hydrogen fuel for transportation. MIT News asked report co-authors Jacopo Buongiorno, the TEPCO Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering, and John Lienhard, the Jameel Professor of Water and Food, to discuss the group’s findings.

      Q: Your report suggests co-locating a major desalination plant alongside the existing Diablo Canyon power plant. What would be the potential benefits from operating a desalination plant in conjunction with the power plant?

      Lienhard: The cost of desalinated water produced at Diablo Canyon would be lower than for a stand-alone plant because the cost of electricity would be significantly lower and you could take advantage of the existing infrastructure for the intake of seawater and the outfall of brine. Electricity would be cheaper because the location takes advantage of Diablo Canyon’s unique capability to provide low cost, zero-carbon baseload power.

      Depending on the scale at which the desalination plant is built, you could make a very significant impact on the water shortfalls of state and federal projects in the area. In fact, one of the numbers that came out of this study was that an intermediate-sized desalination plant there would produce more fresh water than the highest estimate of the net yield from the proposed Delta Conveyance Project on the Sacramento River. You could get that amount of water at Diablo Canyon for an investment cost less than half as large, and without the associated impacts that would come with the Delta Conveyance Project.

      And the technology envisioned for desalination here, reverse osmosis, is available off the shelf. You can buy this equipment today. In fact, it’s already in use in California and thousands of other places around the world.

      Q: You discuss in the report three potential products from the Diablo Canyon plant:  desalinatinated water, power for the grid, and clean hydrogen. How well can the plant accommodate all of those efforts, and are there advantages to combining them as opposed to doing any one of them separately?

      Buongiorno: California, like many other regions in the world, is facing multiple challenges as it seeks to reduce carbon emissions on a grand scale. First, the wide deployment of intermittent energy sources such as solar and wind creates a great deal of variability on the grid that can be balanced by dispatchable firm power generators like Diablo. So, the first mission for Diablo is to continue to provide reliable, clean electricity to the grid.

      The second challenge is the prolonged drought and water scarcity for the state in general. And one way to address that is water desalination co-located with the nuclear plant at the Diablo site, as John explained.

      The third challenge is related to decarbonization the transportation sector. A possible approach is replacing conventional cars and trucks with vehicles powered by fuel cells which consume hydrogen. Hydrogen has to be produced from a primary energy source. Nuclear power, through a process called electrolysis, can do that quite efficiently and in a manner that is carbon-free.

      Our economic analysis took into account the expected revenue from selling these multiple products — electricity for the grid, hydrogen for the transportation sector, water for farmers or other local users — as well as the costs associated with deploying the new facilities needed to produce desalinated water and hydrogen. We found that, if Diablo’s operating license was extended until 2035, it would cut carbon emissions by an average of 7 million metric tons a year — a more than 11 percent reduction from 2017 levels — and save ratepayers $2.6 billion in power system costs.

      Further delaying the retirement of Diablo to 2045 would spare 90,000 acres of land that would need to be dedicated to renewable energy production to replace the facility’s capacity, and it would save ratepayers up to $21 billion in power system costs.

      Finally, if Diablo was operated as a polygeneration facility that provides electricity, desalinated water, and hydrogen simultaneously, its value, quantified in terms of dollars per unit electricity generated, could increase by 50 percent.

      Lienhard: Most of the desalination scenarios that we considered did not consume the full electrical output of that plant, meaning that under most scenarios you would continue to make electricity and do something with it, beyond just desalination. I think it’s also important to remember that this power plant produces 15 percent of California’s carbon-free electricity today and is responsible for 8 percent of the state’s total electrical production. In other words, Diablo Canyon is a very large factor in California’s decarbonization. When or if this plant goes offline, the near-term outcome is likely to be increased reliance on natural gas to produce electricity, meaning a rise in California’s carbon emissions.

      Q: This plant in particular has been highly controversial since its inception. What’s your assessment of the plant’s safety beyond its scheduled shutdown, and how do you see this report as contributing to the decision-making about that shutdown?

      Buongiorno: The Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant has a very strong safety record. The potential safety concern for Diablo is related to its proximity to several fault lines. Being located in California, the plant was designed to withstand large earthquakes to begin with. Following the Fukushima accident in 2011, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission reviewed the plant’s ability to withstand external events (e.g., earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, tornadoes, wildfires, hurricanes) of exceptionally rare and severe magnitude. After nine years of assessment the NRC’s conclusion is that “existing seismic capacity or effective flood protection [at Diablo Canyon] will address the unbounded reevaluated hazards.” That is, Diablo was designed and built to withstand even the rarest and strongest earthquakes that are physically possible at this site.

      As an additional level of protection, the plant has been retrofitted with special equipment and procedures meant to ensure reliable cooling of the reactor core and spent fuel pool under a hypothetical scenario in which all design-basis safety systems have been disabled by a severe external event.

      Lienhard: As for the potential impact of this report, PG&E [the California utility] has already made the decision to shut down the plant, and we and others hope that decision will be revisited and reversed. We believe that this report gives the relevant stakeholders and policymakers a lot of information about options and value associated with keeping the plant running, and about how California could benefit from clean water and clean power generated at Diablo Canyon. It’s not up to us to make the decision, of course — that is a decision that must be made by the people of California. All we can do is provide information.

      Q: What are the biggest challenges or obstacles to seeing these ideas implemented?

      Lienhard: California has very strict environmental protection regulations, and it’s good that they do. One of the areas of great concern to California is the health of the ocean and protection of the coastal ecosystem. As a result, very strict rules are in place about the intake and outfall of both power plants and desalination plants, to protect marine life. Our analysis suggests that this combined plant can be implemented within the parameters prescribed by the California Ocean Plan and that it can meet the regulatory requirements.

      We believe that deeper analysis would be needed before you could proceed. You would need to do site studies and really get out into the water and look in detail at what’s there. But the preliminary analysis is positive. A second challenge is that the discourse in California around nuclear power has generally not been very supportive, and similarly some groups in California oppose desalination. We expect that that both of those points of view would be part of the conversation about whether or not to procede with this project.

      Q: How particular is this analysis to the specifics of this location? Are there aspects of it that apply to other nuclear plants, domestically or globally?

      Lienhard: Hundreds of nuclear plants around the world are situated along the coast, and many are in water stressed regions. Although our analysis focused on Diablo Canyon, we believe that the general findings are applicable to many other seaside nuclear plants, so that this approach and these conclusions could potentially be applied at hundreds of sites worldwide. More