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Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?

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

#121

Post by nkrisc »

andreiklochko wrote: post #109

To shed a different light on this: think of temperature as walking through mud. Your legs lose energy trying to slowly pull a lot of mud behind you. Now think about skiing. A lot less snow is dragged with you but it flies fast. Here, what is interesting is if one fusion reaction does happen, then the alpha (helium) particles leave at 2.9 MeV. After two collisions with protons, if the second proton they have hit hits…

> This is like "the ultra rich (very fast particles) manage to create value among themselves without having to cascade their wealth down to the crowd (cold particles), and then upload that value to hyperspace (the electric field from the electrodes), without ever interacting with the mass of the crowd (the mass of the target), until a sufficient amount of fusion reactions have been realized"

This was actually a helpful analogy for me. I'll have to take your word on the accuracy of it, though.

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

#122

Post by bbojan »

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…

Actually, converting kinetic energy of fast moving ions to electricity is a very efficient process. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion.

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

#123

Post by DennisP »

DeusExMachina wrote: post #103

Can somebody with more understanding tell me if this idea I had is stupid or has some merit? Fusion will deliver an incredible amount of energy, making it cheap. Everybody then turns up their energy consumption since it costs nothing. Raise heating in houses, use AC everywhere, longer showers, more transportation, etc. All this energy eventually becomes heat. Can it get to a threshold where it can influence temperatu…

There's waste heat from our power plants today, but it's an extremely minor factor compared to carbon emissions. However, if we were to continue our current rate of exponential energy growth on this planet, we would boil the oceans in 400 years.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...

On the other hand, compact fusion power would make for some great rockets, so by the time it's common it would probably make sense to move most of the growth off planet.

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

#124

Post by dfsegoat »

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…

FWIW as an aside: I always scan comments on nuke-related HN posts to find yours first. Super informative and easy to digest. Thanks again.

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

#125

Post by Tade0 »

DeusExMachina wrote: post #103

Can somebody with more understanding tell me if this idea I had is stupid or has some merit? Fusion will deliver an incredible amount of energy, making it cheap. Everybody then turns up their energy consumption since it costs nothing. Raise heating in houses, use AC everywhere, longer showers, more transportation, etc. All this energy eventually becomes heat. Can it get to a threshold where it can influence temperatu…

Orders of magnitude. Total Earth solar irradiance is in the order of hundreds of petawatts, while total world installed power plant capacity sits in at a few terawatts.

We're simply unable to measurably increase the amount of heat on the surface of Earth directly.

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

#126

Post by willis936 »

rcollyer wrote: post #63
phkahler wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I thought the electrical output seemed fishy too. Why are the electrons stripped from the helium? And is that actually due to the energy of the fusion reaction? And how much of the fusion energy is left after? These are IMO the fundamental questions.

Only the helium nucleus is formed as part of the fusion reaction, so it starts off being positively charged, and not later stripped of its electrons. That, in principle, creates a current which can be used almost directly.

Well, it creates a region in space with a high charge density that can be accelerated to a plate that has a voltage applied to it which it bumps into which then causes a current.

Importantly, this doesn't have to happen in the reactor vessel. The charged gas can be pumped somewhere else.

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

#127

Post by EthanHeilman »

moneytide1 wrote: post #112
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"

Yeah I've become wary of "scientific breakthrough" articles that never seem to materialize into anything. But ITER uses huge tower cranes and trucks in the thousands of tons of material required to sustain a temperature hotter than the surface of Sol because of their fuel selection. It seems the small player with a new approach that perhaps demands less complexity in their scaled up commercial reactor could win a com…

As a researcher I really like 'scientific breakthrough" articles where the impact never seems to materialize. It reminds me that technology development works very differently on earth than it does in my imagination.

Breakthroughs happen everyday but the road to real impact is longer and more failure prone after you make the breakthrough than before it.

- with some exceptions

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

#128

Post by njarboe »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #92
anonuser123456 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 t…

I really hope that fusion power can become a major power source in the future and humanity really needs it to expand off planet, but like you said above, nuclear fission power got to stage 7 and then stalled. I think the nuclear fusion community should drop the word nuclear completely from their vocabulary or they are likely to end up with the same fate, if they ever get to stage 7.

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

#129

Post by 1958325146 »

I am just learning about this reaction, but can anyone explain what is wrong with the following naive idea?

- Fire a stream of hydrogen ions with a particle accelerator at a chunk of Boron 11. - The hydrogen and boron combine and release heat and helium. - Use the heat from that to run a turbine and keep running your particle accelerator.

It seems like you would be ending up with lower-energy collection of atoms. Does that work but it is just not efficient enough to keep running the accelerator, or what?

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

#130

Post by Dumblydorr »

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…

Just a writing critique. I think your post could use paragraph breaks, it's hard to discern the logical structure without breaks.
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