James Dark is a Postdoctoral Associate at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, working on how tritium moves through fusion systems. Tritium is scarce, radioactive, and highly mobile in metals, so predicting where it diffuses, becomes trapped, and permeates is central to demonstrating fuel self-sufficiency and to licensing future devices.
His work spans simulation and experiment. He is a core developer and maintainer of FESTIM, an open-source finite element framework for hydrogen isotope transport, and led its v2.0 release. He is part of the LIBRA team, developing tritium transport and accountancy models for molten salt breeding blankets, and manages SHIELD, a gas-driven permeation rig for measuring hydrogen transport in structural alloys and testing barrier coatings.
He holds a PhD from Sorbonne Université, completed at CEA Cadarache, and is an active advocate for open, reproducible scientific software in fusion research.
Tritium transport and fuel cycle modelling; hydrogen isotope diffusion, trapping, and permeation in metals; finite element methods and multiphysics coupling; molten salt breeding blankets and tritium accountancy; permeation barrier coatings; open-source scientific software.