openmc VS simsopt

It was actually invented for this.

Open source radiation transport Monte Carlo code here if you'd like to play around:

https://github.com/openmc-dev/openmc

Even given their nuclear weapons origin, we lowly civil nuclear power engineers still use Monte Carlo methods all day every day. We all make our employers buy big supercomputers or get us access to the national lab leadership class HPC to just pound the hell out of our reactor design problems with random particle transport chains. Sure there are (dramatically) faster deterministic methods that are generally good enough, but Monte Carlo allows you to use exact geometry and not bother too much with the pesky art of computing average nuclear interaction probabilities.

Heck, my buddy at MIT made an open-source Monte Carlo code called OpenMC that's now run by Argonne National Lab [1]. Now everyone can do truly legit reactor design with Monte Carlo!

[1] https://github.com/openmc-dev/openmc

openmc source code

Coil configurations are typically obtained numerically. You might know https://github.com/hiddenSymmetries/simsopt already, but if not, it's worth having a look at their example problems and understanding what's going on

It sounds like to me that you are tied to a specific region or university? If so it might be difficult to get involved. However, a lot of work, especially on stellarator optimization, is done remotely, and tools are somewhat easy to get. For example, the simsopt project is fully open source, but it does involve compiling VMEC which is a pain. If you're willing to share your university/area of the country, then I can see if I know anyone involved in fusion research in your area.