A study from Princeton University and Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory researchers has described the use of AI to forecast and prevent instabilities in plasma, in what could be a significant step towards viable nuclear fusion power.

Nuclear fusion is a reaction in which two or more nuclei are fused together – for low-mass nuclei, this usually results in the release of energy. Harvesting this energy to boil water and turn steam turbines could provide an almost unlimited source of green power, but nuclear fusion power remains unviable after decades of work.

Nuclear fusion reactions have not been sustained for longer than seconds, with a new record being set earlier this year by researchers at the Joint European Torus in Oxfordshire, who sustained fusion for five seconds.

Most nuclear fusion experiments involve heating hydrogen to tremendous temperatures within a doughnut-shaped reactor (a tokamak) to form a plasma – a hot, ionised state of matter with electrons stripped from their atoms...