FUSE Design Explorer: Interactive Fusion Reactor Design Space Visualization
The FUSE Design Explorer is a free, interactive web application that puts fusion reactor design data in your hands. Built on results from the open-source FUSE integrated modeling framework, the Explorer lets researchers, students, and anyone curious about fusion energy explore the tradeoffs involved in designing a fusion power plant.
The currently-featured datasets span a wide range of design assumptions for both positive and negative triangularity tokamak power plants, including different net power targets (50 and 200 MW), divertor power exhaust limits (Psol/R of 15 and 30 MW/m), and flattop durations (30 minutes and 24 hours). Together these represent tens of thousands of self-consistent fusion power plant evaluations, each with full plasma profiles, engineering parameters, and cost estimates. The methodology builds on a study published in Nuclear Fusion comparing positive and negative triangularity configurations through constrained multi-objective optimization (Slendebroek, Nelson, Meneghini et al., Nucl. Fusion 66 026032, 2026), with the Explorer extending those results to explore additional design scenarios.
What you can do:
- Choose any two parameters as axes and instantly visualize the design space
- Filter by physics constraints (safety factor, heat exhaust, coil currents, and more)
- Highlight the Pareto-optimal frontier showing the best tradeoffs between competing objectives
- Scrub through the optimization evolution from initial random population to converged solutions
- Click on any design point to inspect detailed plasma profiles, engineering parameters, and cost breakdowns
- Compare how different physics assumptions and engineering choices shape what a fusion power plant could look like
Who is it for:
- Fusion researchers exploring reactor design tradeoffs
- Students learning about integrated fusion plant design
- Anyone curious about what goes into designing a fusion power plant
Links:
- Explorer: fuseexplorer.com
- Video Tutorial: YouTube walkthrough
- FUSE on GitHub: github.com/ProjectTorreyPines/FUSE.jl
- Paper: T. Slendebroek, A.O. Nelson, O.M. Meneghini et al., "Exploring the fusion power plant design space: comparative analysis of positive and negative triangularity tokamaks through optimization," Nucl. Fusion 66 026032 (2026). [DOI: 10.1088/1741-4326/ae27e6](https://doi.org/10.1088/1741-4326/ae27e6)
Credits:
Developed by Tim Slendebroek (UC San Diego, Center for Energy Research) Supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under SMARTs grants DE-SC0024399 and DE-SC0022270. Computing by NERSC.
