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

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

#281

Post by microtherion » Mon, Feb 24, 2020, 11:01 PM UTC

mcswell wrote: post #280

microtherion wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the article, the energy is generated by alpha particles, which are in principle a very dangerous form of radiation. It's not clear to me, though, whether the radiation stops as soon as the fusion does or not.

Up until a decade or two ago, tritium--which emits alpha radiation--was commonly on wristwatch dials, precisely because they were not dangerous. Alpha radiation is easily stopped; it's only dangerous if you breathe it (or drink it, if that's even possible).

Tritium emits beta radiation. It would be an interesting trick for an atom to emit radiation with a higher weight than itself.

It might also be worth pointing out that "It must be safe! They even put it on wristwatch dials!" is not, historically, a sound argument.

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

#282

Post by pfdietz » Tue, Feb 25, 2020, 2:19 AM UTC

zgramana wrote: post #118

anonsivalley652 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell

Not promising at all. Basically, the idea cannot work. EMC2 is defunct, btw.

https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/dmqgd5/is_the_polyw...

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

#283

Post by pfdietz » Tue, Feb 25, 2020, 2:19 AM UTC

marktangotango wrote: post #274

DennisP wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but Rider based that on various assumptions, and included an appendix on various ways those assumptions might be violated to achieve net power with aneutronic fuels. I think this reactor would qualify, since it doesn't rely on thermal heating.

Polywell claimed to circumvent it as well, I was never clear on their basis for that belief. At least Brussard seemed adamant when he was alive.

There was no basis for the belief. Read some of the comments in this reddit thread.

https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/dmqgd5/is_the_polyw...

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

#284

Post by labawi » Tue, Feb 25, 2020, 7:42 PM UTC

nnq wrote: post #131

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…

> energy [...] costs nothing. Raise heating in houses, use AC everywhere, longer showers, more transportation Yey, can we get to this future faster ?! Joking aside, all the current eco-friendly tech diminishes comfort by a loooot ... we need low-energy habitats that are actually comfortable ffs. For example, traveling around Europe, I see that the new trend in the developed/western part is to shiver you ass out durin…

Are you actually serious and would heat your house in winter to a temperature 5-15(!!) ℃ more¹ than you would cool it to during summer?

I mean - it can be enjoyable for short periods, to warm up/cool off, but why would you do that for extended periods, instead of going for a sauna or swimming? Do you wear coats inside during summer?

If you are comfortable at 25 ℃ (humans are highly adaptable), then why go for the opposite of outside temperature? You are probably doing yourself a disservice, making the outside temperature way less tolerable (adaptation takes time), and the temperature shock can be dangerous for less resilient people.

¹ If you are in a high humidity area, the temperature is not the only factor - you need to get the humidity to acceptable levels, which is often done via AC/heating.

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

#285

Post by phkahler » Wed, Feb 26, 2020, 7:10 PM UTC

robocat wrote: post #254

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.

> Why are the electrons stripped from the helium? Hydrogen + Boron -> 3×Helium + energy The energy is mostly 2900keV kinetic energy for each Helium ion i.e. the He ions just fuck off really fast and leave the elections behind. If a He ions hits H atoms a couple of times, the second H hit has just the right energy to then hit another Boron and create an an avalanche of reactions. https://aip.scitation.org/na101/home/l…

>> If a He ions hits H atoms a couple of times, the second H hit has just the right energy to then hit another Boron and create an an avalanche of reactions. https://aip.scitation.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/aip....

Well that's frightening.