Quantum computers model nine fusion fuel material configurations for first time

Scientists from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Cleveland Clinic and IBM calculated nine molecular configurations of a promising material to produce fuel for fusion energy on quantum computers for the first time on July 7, 2026, according to a Phys.org report. The work represents the first known instance of such computations on quantum computers. Quantum computers are well suited to computing the atomic level chemistry of a liquid salt that contains fluorine, lithium and beryllium known as FLiBe. FLiBe is one of the leading candidate materials for extracting tritium fuel in fusion reactors. In the work the researchers pulled nine configurations of the molten salt FLiBe out of their simulations. Each was a small cluster of 21 ions. They computed their energies with and without tritium using quantum centric supercomputing to enable quantum and classical computers to work together. The team is already looking to scale the quantum step in the workflow.