Google Inc. may have cut back on its moonshots, but it’s not done with them just yet. The tech giant said Tuesday that its scientific researchers are working with nuclear power company Tri Alpha Energy Inc. to try to create “an abundant source of zero-carbon energy” using nuclear fusion.

Nuclear fusion refers to the process of combining two atoms to create energy, as opposed to the more commonplace nuclear fission, where an atom is split into two in order to release energy. For years, nuclear fusion has been seen as the “Holy Grail” of clean energy production, but only if it could be done more efficiently than is currently possible.

Scientists have long alluded to nuclear fusion’s potential for producing more energy than is needed to start a nuclear reaction in the first place. The problem is that the world’s most talented nuclear physicists have been working on this problem ever since the 1950s without success. Progress is slow, mostly because it costs a small fortune to sustain the hot-plasma environments necessary for testing fusion reactions. As a result, most experts have said, nuclear fusion energy is at least 30 years away from becoming a reality

But Google’s scientists now believe they can help to reduce this time frame with a new code they’ve developed called the Optometrist Algorithm, which is designed to help researchers create the plasma they need for experiments more efficiently. At present, the vast amount of energy required to sustain nuclear fusion systems massively outweighs the amount of useful energy that can be obtained from them. Google’s algorithm is intended to reduce that gap and help scientists develop the technology as an economically viable alternative to coal, gas and nuclear fission.

Nuclear fusion experiments are rather tricky because they involve adjusting thousands of parameters such as the strength of the magnetic field, voltages and so on. The Optometrist Algorithm works by doing the calculations itself and presenting human operators with a number of choices that can help them to tweak these parameters to obtain optimal performance from their nuclear toys.

Ted Baltz, a senior staff software engineer with Google’s Accelerated Science Team, explained in a blog post how Google and Tri Alpha Energy spun a bunch of plasma and hydrogen atoms together in a 20-meter-long chamber dubbed the C-2U machine, which is controlled by a magnetic field. The researchers did so using parameters suggested by the algorithm, and the results of their experiment show that the software helped to reduce energy loss by a factor of two, while simultaneously increasing the temperature of the plasma.

Here’s a short video clip showing how it generates plasma more efficiently:

Baltz was quick to caution that this breakthrough is not going to revolutionize nuclear fusion alone. He admitted that the process only lasted “about two milliseconds, but still, it was a first!”

“Just like getting an eyeglass prescription, the algorithm presents the expert human with machine settings and the associated outcomes,” he explained. “They can just use their judgment on what is interesting, and what is unhealthy for the machine. These could be ‘That initial collision looked really strong!’ or ‘The edge biasing is actually working well now!’ or ‘Wow, that was awesome, but the electrode current was way too high, let’s not do that again!’ The key improvement we provided was a technique to search the high-dimensional space of machine parameters efficiently.”

The tests actually took place back in September 2015, and since then Tri Alpha has replaced the C-2U machine with a more efficient plasma generator called Norman, which is named after the company’s late cofounder Norman Rostoker. Tri Alpha said Norman is just about ready to begin its testing phase, and will use Google’s Optometrist Algorithm to work out the optimum conditions for plasma generation.

Ultimately, Tri Alpha’s goal is to perfect the process of plasma production before fusing together hydrogen and boron atoms to create helium and energy. It’s this energy that would then be used to boil water and create steam, which in turn drives the turbines that generate the electricity to power homes.

Image: geralt/pixabay