Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech? • Hacker News Board

Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?

#81

Post by willis936 » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 3:30 PM UTC

anonsivalley652 wrote: post #77

willis936 wrote: post #61

27 comments and not one hit of the word “inertial”! The line about not being thermonuclear and the description of the device in question (a sphere with lasers) points towards an inertial confinement fusion (ICF) device. Most of the fusion research eggs are in the thermonuclear basket, specifically magnetic confinement fusion. It is good to research a diverse set of approaches, but there are more engineering challenge…

It seems easy to conflate any or all approaches as fringe when no one's done it yet, and especially if there are political and program-$ecurity concerns overriding doing what's best, but some approaches scream magical thinking with unexplained reasoning more than others (like one or more cold fusion proposals in the early 1980's). OTOH, it seems like ICF and tokamak are the officially-sanctioned dogma and all other a…

Personally, without drawing from rigorous empirical proof that doesn’t exit, I don’t think things like unique IEC approaches are based in fairy tales. Fusion science used to be very tribal and dogma was important. That era has largely passed. Tokamak, stellarator, ps laser, steam machine, whatever. If you can find the money to make it and do the science to show its performance, great. Everyone wants you to do that. This idea of pulling resources away is tricky to navigate, because there is finite resources spent on research and getting any one design to work takes significant effort. That’s why so much is being poured into ITER instead of other promising leads. Humans are ready to see a machine work. It’s painful to get there. It’s not my first pick on a machine. But in order to keep progress moving a real reactor needs to be made of some kind.

Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?

#82

Post by DennisP » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 3:31 PM UTC

homonculus1 wrote: post #78

shireboy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That shortage is mostly a myth: https://www.wired.com/2016/06/dire-helium-shortage-vastly-in...

So what happens after 117 years?

If we get compact working fusion reactors, what probably happens is we import as much helium as we want from Jupiter.

Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?

#83

Post by russfink » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 3:33 PM UTC

anonuser123456 wrote: post #71

multiplegeorges wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Helium is limited on earth and we need it to cool things like MRIs and other massive electromagnets. Apart from literally saving humanity from a climate disaster, we can still use our MRIs!

You're not going to make an appreciable amount of helium with this process. And MRIs of the future will be constructed with REBCO magnets and cooled with liquid nitrogen.

Start looking for unexplained helium signatures among the exoplanets, as evidence of a civilization that applied this method successfully.

Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?

#84

Post by logfromblammo » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 3:34 PM UTC

jabl wrote: post #35

StavrosK wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All fusion produces helium, though. I don't think anyone is looking into fusing heavier atoms.

If you look at the nuclear binding energy curve (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_binding_energy#/media/... ) you'll see a nice bump there for He4. So there's no gain in fusing heavier stuff.

Not unless you could somehow bang three of them together at once to get to C-12. That seems unlikely with current technology. We can't even get C-N-O cycle fusion in the dinky little star we live next to.

So that's at least 20 years away from being 20 years away from being 20 years away. And you could just make more alpha particles, anyway. It's not like the universe is short on hydrogen.

Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?

#85

Post by acidburnNSA » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 3:36 PM UTC

eveningcoffee wrote: post #23

Cool thing about this is that it will be a direct energy capture if I understand it correctly. "The hydrogen/boron fusion creates a couple of helium atoms," he continues. "They're naked heliums, they don't have electrons, so they have a positive charge. We just have to collect that charge. Essentially, the lack of electrons is a product of the reaction and it directly creates the current."

Presumably the lasers have produced enough energy to ionize helium generated in the target. It's quite unclear how a net energy gain will be extracted simply by grabbing the moving ions electrically. That sounds like a huge extra challenge on top of achieving net positive controlled fusion.

There will inevitably be a lot of heat produced that has to be cooled. Generally people plan to use the coolant as the working fluid in the power cycle.

If there's an innovation here it'd be cool if they put it way more up front.

In any case there will still be a coolant.

Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?

#86

Post by moron4hire » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 3:39 PM UTC

detritus wrote: post #2

This 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"

I don't know. I think a really flashy website would be more concerning. This is a serviceable website that gets it's point across without consuming a gig of bandwidth on a video in the header background.

Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?

#87

Post by DennisP » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 3:42 PM UTC

anonsivalley652 wrote: post #77

willis936 wrote: post #61

27 comments and not one hit of the word “inertial”! The line about not being thermonuclear and the description of the device in question (a sphere with lasers) points towards an inertial confinement fusion (ICF) device. Most of the fusion research eggs are in the thermonuclear basket, specifically magnetic confinement fusion. It is good to research a diverse set of approaches, but there are more engineering challenge…

It seems easy to conflate any or all approaches as fringe when no one's done it yet, and especially if there are political and program-$ecurity concerns overriding doing what's best, but some approaches scream magical thinking with unexplained reasoning more than others (like one or more cold fusion proposals in the early 1980's). OTOH, it seems like ICF and tokamak are the officially-sanctioned dogma and all other a…

IEC is a different fusion scheme.

"Millions" is pretty much a shoestring budget for fusion projects. There is some experimental data, but without actual fusion since the lasers weren't powerful enough yet.

This team didn't invent the lasers. They've been waiting for the lasers to get sufficiently powerful to attempt fusion with them. Those lasers are finally becoming available for researchers to use, so it should be quite inexpensive to test this idea. Worst case, they have to build one for tens of millions, which is comparable to other private fusion projects, but hopefully they can run the experiment on other people's lasers.

Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?

#88

Post by anonuser123456 » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 3:42 PM UTC

acidburnNSA wrote: post #76

Always happy to see people doing new and interesting stuff with fusion. I got into nuclear technology because of ITER back in the early 2000s. Worked on it continuously (mostly in advanced fission) ever since. > "The timeline question is a tricky one," he says. "I don't want to be a laughing stock by promising we can deliver something in 10 years, and then not getting there. First step is setting up camp as a company…

>I got into nuclear technology because of ITER back in the early 2000s. Worked on it continuously (mostly in advanced fission) ever since.

What is your opinion on SPARC and tokamak energy?

Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?

#89

Post by jimbokun » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 3:44 PM UTC

> the design is "a largely empty metal sphere, where a modestly sized HB11 fuel pellet is held in the center, with apertures on different sides for the two lasers. One laser establishes the magnetic containment field for the plasma and the second laser triggers the ‘avalanche’ fusion chain reaction. The alpha particles generated by the reaction would create an electrical flow that can be channeled almost directly into an existing power grid with no need for a heat exchanger or steam turbine generator."

> HB11 says its generators would be compact, clean and safe enough to build in urban environments.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxEX8UueZ4U

Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?

#90

Post by archeantus » Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 3:45 PM UTC

Seems like the jury is still out on whether they can reliably generate more energy than it takes to initiate the reaction? It won’t go anywhere if it can’t clear that hurdle.