Oak Ridge National Laboratory expertise in fission and fusion has come together to form a new collaboration, the Fusion Energy Reactor Models Integrator, or FERMI, which aims to apply a suite of predictive simulation platforms originally created for fission nuclear reactors to the challenges of designing the first generation of fusion reactors.

The FERMI project, headed by Vittorio Badalassi in collaboration with David Kropaczek, Dave Pointer and David Green, is funded jointly by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science and the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, or ARPA-E, to support research and development in the technical and commercial viability of fusion energy. FERMI will benefit from ORNL’s previous expertise honed through CASL, the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors, as the new project has the potential to significantly speed up the process of bringing a commercial fusion power plant online through modeling and simulation.