Fusion energy research is growing quickly, responding to a worldwide need for clean, sustainable, baseload-capable sources of energy. According to some experts, a fusion pilot power plant could even be capable of delivering power to the grid by the 2040s. To achieve this aggressive goal, however, strong investment in safety systems and analysis is required to ensure new materials, device concepts, and technologies are both effective and safe for the public. Idaho National Laboratory (INL) has performed research on fusion safety for over 45 years, and the laboratory took part in the design and analysis of many fusion concepts, including ARIES, Compact Iginition Tokamak, and ITER. This history is discussed through the lens of electromagnetic simulation tools—MSCAP and MAGARC—developed to evaluate superconducting magnets for fusion tokamaks. To achieve the goal of rapid commercial deployment, the fusion community will need to draw on and learn from this large body of work and apply it to new computing paradigms and modern supercomputers. To update INL’s legacy for such an effort, ongoing and planned research will use MOOSE—a multiscale, multiphysics framework originally developed for nuclear fission reactor simulation—to design and develop future fusion concepts.
