STEP Digital: Shortening the Pathway
The purpose of the digital workstream is the shorten the pathway to delivering a working fusion pilot plant. As with any development pathway there are rate limiting steps in a programme, a fairly major challenge that is common across fusion concepts is the limited possibility of physical testing with conditions close to that of a first wall environment. In order to replicate (even approximately) reactor relevant conditions we need an environment where neutron fluxes are greater than 1015 n cm−2 s−1, plasma fluxes of 1018 m−2 s−1 with surface temperatures in excess of 3000 ◦C, magnetic fields in excess of 10 T which, with all loads being present can only be found in an operational pilot plant. One must therefore consider alternatives, historically either theory or experiment would be used as modes of discovery, but with the emergence and commodity nature of high performance computing there is a third option - use computing as the third mode of discovery. It is argued that given the inability to replicate true fusion conditions that the use of advanced simulation techniques integrated into a framework will allow the acceleration and de-risking of fusion pilot plants targeted in the pre-2050 timescale.