TOKAMAX
Part A
As part of their normal pre-run checklist,
Tokamax CEO Grace Riley and CTO Ned Jones
excused themselves from the buzzy scene of their
control suite and reactor floor area to confer about
the final go/no-go decision for the ambitious run
they were about to undertake. Video crews were in
the final stages of setting up cameras everywhere to
capture the action, but in the Tokomax ethos, this
decision point is part of a checklist that is more than
a formality. Everyone knew the decision could be to
go ahead or postpone. The Tokamax way is to be
ambitious, yes, but science-the-you-know-what out
of the details to achieve great things.
The video crews and Tokamax investors were
hoping Grace and Jo would proceed and succeed
with their goal of today’s run. Data from their recent
successes suggest if they pushed their systems to their
limits, they could just break the record for the triple-
product of magnetic plasma confinement. Based on
their data and, the go/no-go decision Jo and Ned
were about to make would commit to an attempt
that, if successful, would blow minds in their
community by vaulting to a run time way beyond
the current art. Success would mean big things not
just for Tokamax and the team, but for the world.
At the same time, such a push risks damages
that could be serious. Jo and Ned are aware the
team have concerns that this “stunt” could damage
the reactor enough to put the company at risk. They
take this seriously, but with everything to play for,
they are feeling it is time to go all-in.
Background
For decades, fusion has always been 30 years
away, but a fusion race is now on! Recent advances
have cut predictions about when we will see
practical fusion. In 2022, the National Ignition
Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory (LLNL) in California achieved an
historic milestone with the first instance of fusion
ignition. As LLNL is funded by the US Department
of Energy (DOE), Secretary of Energy Jennifer
Granholm joined the LLNL team at the press
conference called to announce their achievement. In
her comments about the ignition event, Secretary
Granville said, “It's the first time it has ever been
done in a laboratory anywhere in the world —
simply put, this is one of the most impressive
scientific feats of the 21st century.” LLNL Director
Kim Budil also spoke, putting the ignition
achievement in context by looking to the future:
“Ignition is a first step—a truly monumental one
that sets the stage for a transformation decade in
high energy density science and fusion research—
and I cannot wait to see where it takes us.”
© 2023. Mark Thomas Kennedy.
Many experts say commercial fusion would be
decades away if we already knew how to build
reactors, but the enormous payday of succeeding at
that challenge is attracting ambitious investments in
a new wave of projects and companies. In 2022, for
example, the DOE announced a commercialisation
plan that includes $50M for investment in a
magnetic fusion plant, with the goal of a practical
reactor in only a decade. Whilst governments have a
history of over-promising on timelines for major
projects in basic science and energy, this optimism
about timing is echoed by developments reported in
a 2021 Nature article on fusion, “The chase for fusion
energy”. According to the newly created Fusion
Industry Association (established 2018), more than
US$5B has been invested in private fusion efforts
over just the last two years—twice the investment
seen in the prior two decades (see also McKinsey).
Though there are a number of competing
approaches to reactor design, they all use very high
fuel densities and temperature inspired by the
physics of solar fusion. Controlling these star-like
temperatures and pressures is an extraordinary feat
of engineering.
British fusion start-up Tokamax is a leader in
magnetic confinement fusion. Their distinctive skill
is using AI-enabled controllers of super-conducting
magnets to achieve superior confinement and
configuration of reactor fuel in place as it reaches
temperatures ten times hotter than the sun’s core.
The name Tokamax is a riff on tokamak, a toroidal
shaped reactor enclosure.
In the race to build systems that deliver plasma
confinement systems suitable for commercial fusion
reactor designs, Tokamax is part of a rich ecosystem
of different kinds of labs and organisations seeking to
push frontiers in temperatures, fuel densities, and
confinement times to thresholds of this fusion triple
product needed for commercial fusion.
Overall, the twin-goal of plasma confinement is
to avoid both total disruptions of plasmas and edge-
localized modes (ELMs), which are temporary
instabilities in the perimeter regions of plasmas.
Whereas fuel leaks are very dangerous in nuclear
fission reactors, there is little risk that the deuterium-
tritium fuel used in fusion reactors could escape and
cause significant environmental damage. Tritium is
radioactive and has a half-life of 12 years, but
plasmas that disrupt just disperse inside the reactor
enclosure, which just shuts off the reaction. ELMs
usually don’t shut off reactions, but they can interact
with plasma-facing components (PFCs) in the wall
blankets of reactor enclosures, damaging systems
that capture energy or breed the tritium used in the
reactor fuel. Theoretically, confinement failures
could damage reactor enclosures badly enough to
cause fuel leaks, but again, the dangers of such
events are low because such damage is very unlikely
given the small quantities of fuel used and the low
radioactivity of tritium. That said, confinement
failures can cause damage to sensitive systems
requiring costly repairs and, even worse, reactor
downtime that means falling behind in the fusion
race.
Decision Time
Tokamax CEO Jo Riley and Principal Scientist
Ned Jones faced a tough decision: should they push
their system to set a record for the triple-product of
magnetic plasma confinement? Recent runs suggest
they just might succeed, and savvy onlookers are
watching closely to see what they can do.
Setting the record would be a game-changer
for Tokamax. It would land $500M investment and
put them at the top of the table of teams competing
to build commercial fusion reactors. The money and
prominence would put them in a position to learn
from a higher rate of simulations and experiments in
systems under development by a range of potential
customers—i.e., the programme management teams
and general contractors leading reactor builds and
testing programmes at both research labs and fusion
start-ups. Also, their name would become known for
contributing to giving the world an energy source to
replace fossil fuels, thereby offering a way out of the
climate change crisis. The combination of money,
prominence, and brand would give them a source of
significant competitive advantage needed to survive
the rising heat of competition coming as the fusion
race heats up. There was everything to play for.
At the same time, going for the record comes
with the risk of significant costs and delays. Whilst
the triple-product includes temperature, density, and
time, Tokamax is focusing on time because of limits
on reactor vessel pressure (temperature x density).
Increasing density eventually causes a phenomenon
physicists call bremsstrahlung, a process that radiates
away a plasma’s power. Based on current theoretical
understanding of magnetic confinement fusion, it is
feasible only between 100 and 200 million °C and at
vacuum-like pressures—on the order of a million
times less dense than air. New theoretical work on
density suggests it could be increased by a factor of
two over widely used “Greenwald limits” derived
from empirical results. Again, based on current
understanding, neither temperature nor density can
be increased beyond 2x current benchmarks.
Because power output increases with the square of
pressure, gains from temperature and density appear
to be capped at 8x (23).
Time, however, is a different story. Consider
performance increases at the EAST Reactor in
© 2023. Mark Thomas Kennedy.
China: from 100M °C for 10 seconds in 2018 to a
120M °C for 101 seconds in 2021. This gain is
already greater than the theoretical maximum from
pushing harder on temperature and density.
To grab the lead in this race, the Tokamax
team have broken new ground in applications of
reinforcement learning (RL), a major family of
machine learning in AI, to tokamak operation and
design. Specifically, they have used RL skills to build
an innovative programme for fusion R&D that they
call “Fast Forward Mode” (FFM). In essence, FFM
is a system that uses their physical reactor and a
high-fidelity digital twin to simulate and learn from
longer and longer runs. FFM is built around two
neat tricks. First, a second set of controllers is added
to the blanket to induce ELMs and plasma
disruptions that match the profiles of similar events
they encounter in test runs. Second, reactor sensors
were modified to achieve ultra-fast identification of
ELMs, and magnet controllers were optimised for
super-low latency in controllers that correct
problems in plasma confinement as they arise. With
the speed of these systems, the team is able to do
runs in which events follow the cadence of arrival
times for real events, but at a rate that makes real
time seem dilated. Thus, FFM enables Tokamax to
practise detecting and containing the volume of
plasma confinement problems that should occur in
much longer runs. Tokamax have now built the
world’s largest data set of real plasma confinement
problems and recoveries, and this has enabled them
to generate even larger scale synthetic data sets of
confinement problems and recovery events. FFM
provides data useful for identifying and managing
the wider array of wonky ELMs, like edge cases,
only seen in much longer runs. Data from actual
reactor runs was used to refine the magnets that
perturb the plasma and related routines in the
digital twin of the reactor.
Based on data from physical and virtual runs of
increasing duration, the team have set an extremely
ambitious time goal: run for 24 hours without
interruption. Internally, they refer to this stretch
goal as “Le Mans”, and they can often be seen in T-
shirts sporting the logo of the 24 hours of Le Mans,
the famous endurance race that takes place each
year at the town of Le Mans, France. For Jo and
Ned, the race provides a metaphor that has helped
staff to focus on extreme endurance. As Jo puts it,
“Practical fusion requires scaling confinement
times—radically. Current knowledge suggests
longer times are the key, so we are lasered in
on that. Our goal? Run for 24 hours at
benchmark temps and densities. That’s almost
a 100x increase over current bests. Hitting that
time would mark the dawn of a fusion age.
Everything about power would be different
than everything that came before.”
The Risk-Reward Equation
Say Tokamax produces a physical and virtual
run that validates their model’s potential: what
might that be worth? Consider the California team
that closed a £220M round of funding in 2022 as
they achieved a temperature of 75M °C in their
reactor, bringing their total investment to £1B,
which was enough to finance a next generation
reactor. In this climate, Tokamax investors have
promised a new investment if the team manages a
time that is at least “on the order of” 24 hours. The
investors have resisted being more specific, but they
have hinted this could be any fraction of a day you
would round up to 1. The investment under
discussion is another£400M of their own money
plus syndicate partner funding likely (“90%
confident”) to total £4B. In private conversations,
the investors are convinced Tokamax can do it, and
they want to make some history.
Against these benefits of hitting the 24 hour
target, however, running for longer times raises the
odds of costly damage from interactions between a
reactor’s plasma and its blanket, a lining inside the
reactor comprised of heavy modules that capture
emissions for power generation, shielding, and
Tritium capture for fuel replenishment, or breeding.
The hazards associated with fusion reactor blankets
have been understood since the 1970s, with the
biggest risks arising from containment problems that
lead to interactions between wall systems for
generation and for shielding and fuel breeding.
Treating permanent staff as fixed costs of the
company and ignoring the opportunity cost
associated with other projects they might do (the
company is solely focused on FFM-driven fusion
breakthroughs), the direct variable cost of a run
includes both per hour expenses for computing and
energy and per-run costs of follow-up inspection and
maintenance along with estimated allowances for
repairs and refurbishment, as follows:
Computing cost: £250K per hour
Energy cost: £400K per hour
Inspection: £400K per run
Module Refurb: £100K per bdi
Note: The energy costs are high because the
team is optimising for time over the more marginal
increases in temperature and more efficient energy-
capture they need to nudge the reaction toward the
longer-term goal of positive net energy output. For
now, these experiments are still very costly.
Concerns
© 2023. Mark Thomas Kennedy.
Just before Jo and Ned left the room to confer
on the go/no-go checkpoint, Pat Smythe, Director
of the Blanket Engineering Team (BET), asked for a
quick word.
“I’m not gonna say I doubt your FFM
modelling, and I’m confident in the ELM counts
I’ve contributed from our blanket systems,” said Pat
Smythe. BET are the group who comb over the
Blanket Modules and the code that runs them both
before and after every run. “I really don’t want to
rain on the parade, but my concern is that longer
run times are interacting with blanket systems in
some way we don’t understand. In our longest
virtual runs, we’re seeing degradations to precision
of magnet controller hardware that are not
correlated to the ELM counts, which are still below
thresholds for replacement. As a caution, we’ve
replaced everything that’s even a little iffy, but I
gotta be honest, I’m worried about what would
happen if one of the controllers failed in the wrong
way. We all know a disruption just shuts down the
reaction, but a messy one could stress the vessel. In
the extreme, we could lose control of the fuel and
therefore the whole reactor hall. The building would
be a write-off. The business end of this is your area,
not mine, but could we really bounce back from
that?”
Ned countered, “You’re right, Pat, as usual,
about all of that. But then, as you say, the reactor
write-off disaster scenario is extreme. Our data
doesn’t point to that at all.”
“Yeah,” replied Pat, “but let’s be honest, what
we are about to try is pretty effing extreme!” Pat had
a wonderful way to make points with humour, and
that got a laugh that lightened the mood.
“Pat, thank you; you’re brilliant, as ever,” said
Jo, reaffirming the team bond.
If they had cash reserves to do it the slow-and-
steady-wins-the-race way, that would be tempting.
At current burn rates, however, Tokomax only have
one year, and the slow-and-steady approach would
likely take something closer to 18 months. Plus, the
whole point (something that Pat tends to miss) is to
demonstrate the value of their FFM toolkit. Even if
they failed in this attempt, they would get attention
for their work that could well lead to acquisition
offers, though that was not the dream. They hoped
to manage the company as a going concern and
make sustained contributions to clean energy.
Time to make the decision: should they go for
the record-breaking run, or drop back and work up
to this goal?
 TOKAMAX
Part B

Normally, scientists are keen to publish their ground-breaking results as soon as possible, but sensing the
chance to make history, the Tokamax team have kept quiet about both the FFM scheme and the impressive
results they have posted. The chart below combines results for virtual runs (i.e., simulated) with the longest
actual run have achieved to data (664 seconds, highlighted in yellow). In addition, the team have conducted
many shorter runs to build the dataset needed for FFM–that is, the data needed to learn and simulate blanket
damage incidents and impact, as measured in the number of modules that need repair or refurbishment. A
blanket module is one section of the enclosure lining.

Runs Times (sec) and #Modules Refurbed or Replaced (mrr)

For Runs with Blanket Damage Incidents (bdi)
5

3
(mrr)

0
- 5,000 10,000 15,000 20,000 25,000 30,000 35,000 40,000 45,000 50,000
(sec)

Obviously, the actual runs are expensive in terms of both energy cost and the time Tokamax scientists and
engineers devote to setting up for a run, inspecting reactor systems afterward, and refurbishing or replacing parts
and equipment as needed. Less obvious is the fact that virtual runs are also expensive in terms of computing
costs, data storage, and post-run analyses by the software team, scientists, and reactor engineers. Data from both
actual and virtual runs is analysed to learn patterns that drive the team’s digital twin model of their reactor. The
table below hardly looks like anyone’s idea of what people once faddishly called “big data”, it summarises
massive amounts of work. Columns show run times (t), the number of runs at each time (N), the number of
blanket damage incidents (bdi), and the number of modules refurbed or replaced. Again, the longest actual run
is 664 seconds, but with FFS, the team regard virtual run data as indicative of results to expect of actual runs.

t (sec) N bdi † #mrr *

1 1 0 0
31 1 0 0
76 1 0 0
153 1 0 0
437 2 0 0
664 2 1 2
1,333 1 0 0
1,795 1 0 0
3,026 4 2 2
3,814 1 0 0
4,732 1 0 0
5,790 2 0 0
6,997 1 0 0
9,905 1 1 1
23,350 1 1 1
29,699 1 1 1
41,278 1 1 3
1 day = 86,400 sec

† bdi = blanket damage incidents

* #mrr = number of modules refurbed or replaced

© 2023. Mark Thomas Kennedy.