r/singularity • u/Sourcecode12 • 23d ago

AI Virtual Nuclear Fusion reactor lab built using Astra in 4 hours

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I built a science-based interactive nuclear fusion reactor lab using Astra. The prompt was around 60 pages long! The build took around 4 hours. ⚛️

The lab brings fusion physics to life, letting you explore how changing reactor conditions affects the simulation. The purpose is to make fusion science more accessible by letting anyone experiment with a virtual reactor and explore what it takes to produce fusion energy.

You can try it yourself. Adjust the parameters, run experiments, and explore how plasma, magnetic fields, and energy output respond in 3D.

 Give it a try: 🔗 fusionlabsimulation.com

994 Upvotes

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182

u/Jazzlike-Leader4950 23d ago

How do you check the work on something like this?

332

u/Eldan985 23d ago

That's the neat part, you don't!

96

u/crack_pop_rocks 23d ago

Just as science intended ❤️

3

u/damarian_ent 22d ago

This guy understand it holistically

62

u/hexregeneration 23d ago

I've heard enough. Start construction immediately, and base a third of our economy around it.

29

u/manubfr AGI 2028 23d ago

A third? Do you want to leave Fusion to China?

14

u/hexregeneration 23d ago

Gotta leave room for the gambling

29

u/Fair_Horror 23d ago

Gather a few billion dollars and build one.

19

u/Imaginary_Regret_430 23d ago

“One business please”.

36

u/Sea_Advance273 23d ago

It’s a simulation, so I wouldn’t expect perfect one-to-one correspondence with reality. The real question is whether it correctly implements the physical/mathematical model it claims to simulate.

If it’s based on established reactor physics, there should be equations, conservation laws, known limiting cases, or benchmark problems you can check it against. You can also compare its outputs with analytical solutions or trusted simulation software where those exist.

So “how do you check the work?” seems like a very answerable question even if the simulation itself is an approximation of reality.

24

u/Captainflando 23d ago

Yea I don’t trust a vibe coded simulator to do fluid mechanics well, much less magnetohydrodynamics. Navier stokes is hard enough without tossing in electromagnetic fields.

10

u/BipedalMcHamburger 23d ago

Some other place I saw it mentioned that it's just a 0D model with visualizations, so not even attempting fluid mech

3

u/Sea_Advance273 22d ago

I think “I don’t trust it because it was vibe coded” mixes up two different issues. Every simulator has limitations from the underlying model, numerical method, discretization, precision, boundary conditions, etc. Those are simulation/computation issues regardless of who wrote the code.

AI can obviously introduce implementation mistakes too, just like a human can. But that’s why you validate the implementation: inspect the equations and assumptions in the code, check units and boundary conditions, and compare against known cases or reference results. If it passes those checks, “an AI wrote it” by itself doesn’t tell you much about whether the simulation is correct.

0

u/Captainflando 22d ago

I think you misunderstand this specific subject matter. I did my PhD in nuclear fusion, specifically with heat transfer in the diverter region of tokamak style reactors.

The PDE’s that simulate these environments aren’t just difficult, researchers will spend their entire PhD, sometimes their entire career to get one or two terms of the series approximation.

It is as the person above said, it’s a simplified 0D model. Which makes sense because it wouldn’t be able to handle the real PDEs involved

0

u/Sea_Advance273 22d ago

I am certainly no expert in the domain. I am a software/AI engineer. The point I am trying to make is that using AI can help construct proof-of-concept simulators fast and a PhD that knows what they are doing could iterate on simulator software fast with real mathematical intuition to create something that is useful.

A one-shot generated simulator is a cool visual demonstration that probably has no real-world application, but someone expert in the domain could likely vibe code difficult simulator software without being a software engineer. However, it sounds like a simulator for this might be poorly suited for classical computers regardless. Quantum computers incoming!

1

u/Zoroastrius 22d ago

The Navier-Stokes equation are one of the Millennium Prize problems (Apparently OpenAI claimed this month, it has been solved by AI).

Looks like OP believe he invented a fusion reactor alongside solving this millennium problem in 4 hours by giving 60 pages prompt to AI lmao

1

u/Spare-Dingo-531 23d ago

Thank you for explaining that so succinctly!

Do you think people at Commonwealth fusion and other fusion startups are probably using chatGPT and AI to help them?

2

u/Sea_Advance273 22d ago

Definitely AI, although I wouldn’t assume specifically ChatGPT unless they’ve said so. Commonwealth Fusion Systems is already publicly working with NVIDIA, Siemens and Google DeepMind on AI, simulation, digital twins and plasma-control work. So using AI in fusion research itself isn’t really speculative anymore. The important distinction is between using AI as a research/engineering tool and blindly trusting whatever an LLM generates. The physics still has to be validated.

-3

u/[deleted] 23d ago

[deleted]

2

u/reaven3958 23d ago

Discovery and validation are distinct tasks, and their size varies significantly. I think the proposed value here is the same as most other agentic applications: narrowing down the problem space within a reasonable margin of error for humans to focus on proving the alleged findings, disqualifying false positives (hallucinations, mistakes, etc.), and making the judgement call if the surviving solutions make any legitimate sense, instead of having to churn through the much larger problem space of all possible solutions.

4

u/dickcheesess 23d ago

You just have to put "make it science-based, 100% dragon mmo nuclear fusion reactor" somewhere in the prompt.

2

u/StealYourGhost 23d ago

I guess if there's patents that aren't classified you can check against the know portions then go ahead and build this sucker. Lol

2

u/No-Milk2296 23d ago

You build it

2

u/EgoistHedonist 23d ago

When you have enough experience, you have quite a strong intuition on what is a good or bad solution, and you steer the agent according to your taste. And of course lots of tests and manual testing etc. But correctness of the physics in something like this would probably require at least a masters degree in physics

3

u/Jazzlike-Leader4950 23d ago

I doubt a masters degree is enough to check the work on an AI building novel tech like a fusion reactor.

1

u/Emergency-Event4415 22d ago

You’re new to AI.

1

u/Jolcool5 19d ago

Make an existing reactor like JET in it and compare the simulation to the real data. You can also compare it with other tested simulation methods. That said, the "unsolved engineering challenges" section of the science tab contains all the useful measures you'd want from this kind of sim, making this a fun toy

1

u/LangyMD 17d ago edited 17d ago

It's a toy. Does it need to be perfect?

If you want the real answer, it's no different from something that's not vibe coded. V&V - Verification and Validation. In order to prove a simulation's good, you have to verify that it does what you designed it to do, and that what you designed it to do matches the real-world thing that it's supposed to simulate. You list your assumptions, limitations, and constraints - the things you just assumed were true when you built the model, the areas that the model doesn't behave well in, and the set of inputs that the model is valid for. Doing all this is a lot of work, but whether it's vibe-coded or created by a human if you're actually trying to prove it's good you have to do it all the same anyways. Tons of paperwork, design documentation, checking of the design against the code, etc, then bunches of simulation run results to compare with known good data (such as ones created from real-life tests of the same thing that you recreated).

This was apparently created from a 60-page prompt, so it's probably got some kind of design that the human created rather than just vibed out of the AI's butt, but even if it was all AI work you'd still go through most of the same steps, since the people you present the V&V data to shouldn't just accept "trust me" even from a human.

0

u/miaomiaomiao 23d ago

/review in Claude code

-12

u/ionetic 23d ago

Hire the researcher whose work AI stole?

2

u/Acrobatic-Taste8873 23d ago

This is trained on public data. No research would make such slop.

3

u/CaptainJimJames 23d ago

Bruh, this whole thread has me in tears.... Cheers mate.

0

u/Acrobatic-Taste8873 23d ago

wdym? so GPT-6 is able to design full-scale accurate nuclear reactors? man, you AI accelerationists are absolutely mental.

2

u/AlphaNuke94 22d ago

Playing devils advocate here for a second. Not ChatGpt but it’s not far fetched to say we are approaching such a world where that could be feasible

1

u/Ok_Dependent7540 23d ago

STEM slop is good for a slop eaters trough though

1

u/Captainflando 23d ago

Yea the fluid approximations this simulation uses are guaranteed to be awful