nuclear-news

UK, USA enhance cooperation on fusion energy

WNN Tuesday, 15 September 2026

A number of collaboration agreements have been announced between US and UK partners aimed at accelerating the commercial deployment of nuclear fusion power plants around the world.

Firstly, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and the US Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have signed a joint declaration of intent to explore linking their advanced fusion supercomputing platforms, using artificial intelligence to accelerate fusion energy’s development.

Under the joint declaration – signed at the Global Fusion Policy Summit in London on Monday – UKAEA’s SUNRISE mission-focused AI supercomputer would be linked with PPPL’s Simulation, Technology and Experiment Leveraging Learning-Accelerated Research (STELLAR-AI) platform through a partnership known as the SUNRISE–STELLAR-AI Federation. SUNRISE is the UK’s first AI supercomputer dedicated to fusion energy, backed by GBP45 million (USD60.6 million) from the UK government. STELLAR-AI is PPPL’s USD13 million AI and high-performance computing platform to be operated with support from Princeton University. STELLAR-AI is designed to host AI tools and workflows as they mature.

The collaboration – which builds on a memorandum of understanding signed between UKAEA and PPPL in June – would draw on experiments completed using UKAEA’s MAST Upgrade facility in Oxfordshire and PPPL’s NSTX-U facility in New Jersey. The federation will mean both advanced computers will be used to train the same AI models, which need large volumes of high-quality data to make accurate predictions……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/uk-usa-enhance-cooperation-on-fusion-energy

September 18, 2026 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | technology