Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?

newatlas.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 285 posts

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

#91

Post by derefr »

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…

Complete layman to this, but are these approaches fundamentally incompatible with one-another, or is it just that each one on its own seems to be “enough” to get a reactor to work? Could you have a reactor that just combines all these confinement approaches at once?

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

#92

Post by acidburnNSA »

anonuser123456 wrote: post #88
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?

High temperature superconductors are absolutely an interesting pathway to make magnetic confinement fusion significantly easier than the big tokamaks like ITER. I have friends working at Commonwealth Fusion who are good people and I wish them much success. That said there are still a lot of phases to go through, from physical viability at stage 1 to scaled commercial fleet at stage 7, and that pathway is impossible to predict without getting on the ground and going through the stages. I certainly think it's worth running through the stages.

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

#93

Post by acidburnNSA »

wefarrell wrote: post #27

Can someone explain why this is considered fusion? The reaction involves shooting a proton (hydrogen) at a boron nuclei and outputting 3 alpha particles. That seems more like the nuclei being split apart than fused together.

I has to do with something called the Binding Energy Per Nucleon. If you march up the curve from small numbers to get energy you are fusion. If you march down the curve from high numbers, you are fission. If you march up the curve from small numbers and go all the way to large numbers even though that's endothermic, you are a supernova.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_binding_energy#Nuclear...

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

#94

Post by DennisP »

derefr wrote: post #91
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…

Complete layman to this, but are these approaches fundamentally incompatible with one-another, or is it just that each one on its own seems to be “enough” to get a reactor to work? Could you have a reactor that just combines all these confinement approaches at once?

In a way, this new design does combine the approaches, since it combines a laser that hits the fuel directly with an extreme magnetic field.

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

#96

Post by Lev1a »

jabl wrote: post #17
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"

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 thes…

> brehmsstrahlung

Bremsstrahlung

FTFY

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

#97

Post by acidburnNSA »

pier25 wrote: post #95

Is fusion capable of replacing all our energy systems? If it works, is it the energy miracle humanity needs?

There certainly is enough fusion fuel on earth to power humanity at 10 or 100x current consumption until the sun explodes without emitting any CO2.

Same can be said for fission, but it only powers 5% of the world due to what can be called complications (even though many scientists insist that it's safe and responsible).

Fusion is expected to have fewer complications, but we won't know until we scale up a fleet of fusion power plants and understand all the nuance.

How's that for an answer?

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

#98

Post by steerablesafe »

yufeng66 wrote: post #36

There is a warning sign. Without actually running the number, I believe the energy generated by the proposed HB11 fusion should be several order of magnitude higher compared to the electric energy alpha particle can carry. So extreme hot temperature will be created regardless. Edit: actually read the paper :) From the paper: H + 11B = 3 x 4He + 8.7 MeV when alpha particle absorb the electron to become helium, it can…

I think the idea is to capture the kinetic energy of the Helium ions not through cooling but slowing them down with electromagnets. The high-speed Helium ions carry a large current, it's not about the ionization energy.

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

#99

Post by wolfram74 »

derefr wrote: post #91
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…

Complete layman to this, but are these approaches fundamentally incompatible with one-another, or is it just that each one on its own seems to be “enough” to get a reactor to work? Could you have a reactor that just combines all these confinement approaches at once?

They're not incompatible in the sense that they assume different physics, but they are very different strategies.

The fusion triple product is the go to figure of merit for napkin calculations, it's temperature X confinement time X ion density

MCF strategies go in on maximizing confinement time, while ICF jack up temperature and ion density. This particular ICF approach, (if I'm understanding their paper correctly) is going so high on both that they're leaving the thermal regime behind and doing an honest to glob nuclear chain reaction with having the alpha products prompt other boron nuclei to accelerate up to fusion speed causing more reactions, which is pretty exciting.

Post reply on HN