The title is profoundly misleading. Fusion has not been achieved using this method, the "leapfrog" results are from simulations.
Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?
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Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?
#112This 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 commissioning contract with a lower bid during late 2020s early 2030s international bidding.
"First milestone is demonstrating the reactions, which should be easy."
And "chirped pulse laser amplification" is the recent discovery Hora says will make it possible.
Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fus…
Good answer! > Same can be said for fission, but it only powers 5% of the world due to what can be called complications But weren't these complications obvious before deciding to scale up fission power plants? The ones I know about: - Radioactive waste - Risk of failure - Unavoidable EOL
Certainly the generation of radioactive material in fission plants was considered potentially fatal all the way back to Fermi, who said way back when:
> It is not clear that the public will accept an energy source that produces this much radioactivity and that can be subject to diversion of material for bombs.
However, the nuclear fission industry has arguably shown that it can technically manage radioactive wastes without undue harm to the populace. Fission plants have killed up to 4000 people while producing 5% of the world's energy. Fossil kills 4.2M people/year at 84% total energy. The math suggests that nuclear fission has been highly successful. But the public largely still doesn't like it.
Fusion indeed has a better going-in position. Potential complications involve how hard/complex/expensive it is to realize the engineering challenges.
Aneutronic fusion plants, like fossil plants, will likely also have an EOL from a thermal creep, corrosion, cracking, etc. POV. Normal fusion plants will definitely have a EOL from neutron doses to structural materials.
Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?
#114> 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 int…
How do alpha particles get turned into current on a line?
Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. T…
The 2015 paper cites 3 other groups with experimental results supporting their claims though.
You misinterpreted what I said. I said that I don't have evidence that inertial electrostatic confinement is not based in fairy tales. As in, they are a reasonable route to explore.
Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?
#116This 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"
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Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?
#117As a bonus it produces helium, which we've been running low on right? Break out the party balloons!
It's a bit weird to say we're running out of He, not unless we're running out of CH4. Which, theoretically we are. But practically, with CH4, our modern concern is not running out of it, but the associated GHG emissions of producing and burning it. So we won't run out of He, so much as stop producing it.
CH4, aka Methane, is one Carbon atom and four Hydrogen atoms. There is no Helium in Methane, just Hydrogen.
Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?
#11827 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…
There’s been a lot of promising work done on IEC by a startup called EMC2. Their reactor/fusor design is called Polywell.
Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
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) i…
Laser inertial confinement causing a nonthermal chain reaction has been making headlines since 2015. I don't think that aspect of this approach is the exciting part. It's how promising their simulated performance improvement is from the use of a laser that causes additional magnetic confinement (I'm a little iffy on how that exactly happens).
Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?
#120Why a pellet? Why not a gas of boron and hydrogen? Easier to feed continuously.
Probably had to do with density, if the target is cascading reactions by nuclei to nuclei contact. Solids have a higher chance of contact.