As a bonus it produces helium, which we've been running low on right? Break out the party balloons!
All fusion produces helium, though. I don't think anyone is looking into fusing heavier atoms.
Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?
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Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?
#12This seems.. too good to be true? I don't have the Physics chops to untangle the likelihood of this tech and the credibility of the process and its authors, so I'm hoping the HN crowd will be able to pad out the story behind this. Certainly, from my layperson's perspective, their website isn't exactly encouraging... https://www.hb11.energy/ - ed re: last line - "books and covers, and all that"
Check the publications page for the encouraging part. They might be wrong but they're doing real science. I've personally spoken to a fusion scientist who thought they might be on to something.
Exponential progress does sometimes have results that seem too good to be true. In this case the progress has been in picosecond lasers, which for a while have been getting ten times more powerful every three years or so.
What's great about this is it should be pretty cheap to test. The petawatt lasers only cost tens of millions in the first place, and China is finishing up a 30PW laser which they plan to let other researchers use. If Hora is right then that should be powerful enough. Even more powerful lasers are being planned elsewhere.
HB11 isn't the only company working on aneutronic fusion. The largest is TAE (formerly Tri Alpha), with about $700 million invested. There's also Helion and LPP.
Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?
#13This seems.. too good to be true? I don't have the Physics chops to untangle the likelihood of this tech and the credibility of the process and its authors, so I'm hoping the HN crowd will be able to pad out the story behind this. Certainly, from my layperson's perspective, their website isn't exactly encouraging... https://www.hb11.energy/ - ed re: last line - "books and covers, and all that"
Not a physicist, but I thought it seemed fishy as well. I’m curious how they plan to sustain a reaction, since their setup didn’t seem to be useful for more than a single shot…
At https://www.hb11.energy/our-technology they list a number of papers they've published supporting their approach.
On ignoring the H B-11 reaction with high intensity lasers: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms3506
On the reaction avalanche: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/laser-and-particle-b...
On the conversion of alpha particles to electricity: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/laser-and-particle-b...
Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?
#14It would be awesome to know what experiments they've done, or if this is all simulation
There have been experiments, but only at lower power than required for fusion. From their latest paper:
> A significant case of nonlinear deviation from classical linear physics was seen by the measurements, how the laser opened the door to the principle of nonlinearity and could be seen from the effect measured by Linlor [9] followed by others (see [7] p. 31) when irradiating solid targets with laser pulses of several ns duration. At less than one MW power, the pulses heated the target surface to dozens of thousand °C and the emitted ions had energies of few eV as expected in the usual way following classically. When the power of the nanosecond laser pulses was exceeding a significant threshold of few MW, the ions – suddenly – had thousand times higher energies. These keV ions were separated with linear increase on the ion charge indicating that there was not a thermal equilibrium process involved.
Lasers adequate for fusion are just now becoming available.
Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?
#15This seems.. too good to be true? I don't have the Physics chops to untangle the likelihood of this tech and the credibility of the process and its authors, so I'm hoping the HN crowd will be able to pad out the story behind this. Certainly, from my layperson's perspective, their website isn't exactly encouraging... https://www.hb11.energy/ - ed re: last line - "books and covers, and all that"
Check the publications page for the encouraging part. They might be wrong but they're doing real science. I've personally spoken to a fusion scientist who thought they might be on to something. Exponential progress does sometimes have results that seem too good to be true. In this case the progress has been in picosecond lasers, which for a while have been getting ten times more powerful every three years or so. What…
Thanks to yourself and randallsquared below for your responses - I'd since posting read the following Abstract by the authors, which hinted that the underlying science was viable: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/laser-and-particle-b... , however my only awareness of existing 'laser fusion facilities' was the American National Ignition Facility (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility) , which I think I'd always written off as a covert testing facility for weapons that skirted Nuclear Testing limitation treaties.
Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?
#16This proves once again what could happen if one is not to follow the herd.
Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?
#17This seems.. too good to be true? I don't have the Physics chops to untangle the likelihood of this tech and the credibility of the process and its authors, so I'm hoping the HN crowd will be able to pad out the story behind this. Certainly, from my layperson's perspective, their website isn't exactly encouraging... https://www.hb11.energy/ - ed re: last line - "books and covers, and all that"
The big problem with H-B11 and other heavier fusion processes is that the energy radiated away as brehmsstrahlung is greater that the energy gain from the fusion. This was worked out by Todd Rider in his 1995 PhD thesis.
Yeah, in theory it might be possible to capture the brehmsstrahlung and pump it back into the reactor with sufficiently high efficiency, but we're pretty far away from that.
That being said, all these fancy fusion reactor schemes are interesting. Just make them work on boring old D-T fuel first, then lets see if these other fuels are usable, no?
Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?
#18> First milestone is demonstrating the reactions, which should be easy. They haven’t even demonstrated the reaction? What’s all the talk about results being “billions” of times better than expected?
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Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?
#19Here's a video explaining the reaction:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy0kHQASsX8
Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?
#20Google polywell the US military has been funding this for the past 20 years. There are some issues that might be solved with scaling the device. A company called emc2 was spun off this US military project.