Clean energy breakthrough as AI controls fusion reactor

The AI ‘learned’ how to control plasma in the reactor. (Getty)An AI system owned by Google has just “learned” how to control a magnetic field in a fusion reactor – and it could pave the way to generating limitless clean energy.The breakthrough – where a system designed by DeepMind was able to control the magnetic field in a Swiss tokamak reactor – could pave the way for new designs of fusion reactor, researchers believe.Tokamak reactors hope to generate fusion energy from a plasma trapped in a magnetic field, but controlling the magnetic field is complex.The reactors use a powerful magnetic field to confine plasma at extremely high temperatures – hundreds of millions of degrees Celsius, even hotter than the sun’s core – so that nuclear fusion can occur between hydrogen atoms.Every nuclear reactor currently operating on Earth is a fission reactor – using energy released…

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