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Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?

• detritus 7y ago
  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/ https://www.hb11.energy/ - ed re: last line - "books and covers, and all that"
  • saagarjha 7y ago
    Not a physicist, but I thought it seemed fishy as well. I’m curious how they plan to sustain a reaction, since their setup didn’t seem to be useful for more than a single shot…
    • lab-notes 7y ago
      This reads like a type of ICF which normally has a stream of pellets being fed in after the initial pellet has reached a hot enough temperature to sustain the fusion reaction.
      • londons_explore 7y ago
        I don't think the goal is to sustain the reaction here... I think the goal is to make a pulsed reactor, where you start the reaction on each pellet in turn. You could imagine a laser firing at 1000 pulses per second, and firing a stream of 1000 pellets per second into the reaction vessel that each pulse hits. Pellets could turn out to be the size of a grain of sand.
    • tic_tac 7y ago
      At https://www.hb11.energy/our-technology https://www.hb11.energy/our-technology they list a number of papers they've published supporting their approach. On ignoring the H B-11 reaction with high intensity lasers: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms3506 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms3506 On the reaction avalanche: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/laser-and-particle-beams/article/fusion-energy-using-avalanche-increased-boron-reactions-for-blockignition-by-ultrahigh-power-picosecond-laser-pulses/10862E4B3C4AABD09AC8BF21A2E66487 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/laser-and-particle-b... On the conversion of alpha particles to electricity: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/laser-and-particle-beams/article/road-map-to-clean-energy-using-laser-beam-ignition-of-boronhydrogen-fusion/8BE057DC1BC9E0A588FB3ABAA993078C https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/laser-and-particle-b...
  • randallsquared 7y ago
    The Hydrogen Boron reaction is real and well-known to be a way to do fusion without lots of stray neutrons. The sticking point has always been that it's more difficult to cause that reaction than deuterium/tritium or deuterium/deuterium.
    • jwbwater 7y ago
      So the fusion here is where two protons form an alpha particle? They show a proton hitting B11 and generating two alpha particles and another proton. 1 proton + (5 protons, 6 neutrons) -> 3 * (2 protons, 2 neutrons) https://www.hb11.energy/our-technology https://www.hb11.energy/our-technology
  • DennisP 7y ago
    Check the publications page for the encouraging part. They might be wrong but they're doing real science. I've personally spoken to a fusion scientist who thought they might be on to something. Exponential progress does sometimes have results that seem too good to be true. In this case the progress has been in picosecond lasers, which for a while have been getting ten times more powerful every three years or so. What's great about this is it should be pretty cheap to test. The petawatt lasers only cost tens of millions in the first place, and China is finishing up a 30PW laser which they plan to let other researchers use. If Hora is right then that should be powerful enough. Even more powerful lasers are being planned elsewhere. HB11 isn't the only company working on aneutronic fusion. The largest is TAE (formerly Tri Alpha), with about $700 million invested. There's also Helion and LPP.
    • detritus 7y ago
      Thanks to yourself and randallsquared below for your responses - I'd since posting read the following Abstract by the authors, which hinted that the underlying science was viable: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/laser-and-particle-beams/article/road-map-to-clean-energy-using-laser-beam-ignition-of-boronhydrogen-fusion/8BE057DC1BC9E0A588FB3ABAA993078C https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/laser-and-particle-b... , however my only awareness of existing 'laser fusion facilities' was the American National Ignition Facility (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility) , which I think I'd always written off as a covert testing facility for weapons that skirted Nuclear Testing limitation treaties.
      • dragonshed 7y ago
        The science is difficult for a layperson (such as myself) to pick apart, but the above-mentioned publications page[0] links directly to at least one paper[1] which contains some promising detail. [0] https://www.hb11.energy/news-and-publications https://www.hb11.energy/news-and-publications [1] https://aca3d9dd-3b9c-446b-8797-0ba1cdb49ccb.filesusr.com/ugd/1f895b_8767a9007788465aa82df205895197cb.pdf https://aca3d9dd-3b9c-446b-8797-0ba1cdb49ccb.filesusr.com/ug...
      • 7y ago
  • jabl 7y ago
    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 these fancy fusion reactor schemes are interesting. Just make them work on boring old D-T fuel first, then lets see if these other fuels are usable, no?
    • DennisP 7y ago
      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.
      • marktangotango 7y ago
        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.
        • pfdietz 7y ago
          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_polywell_fusion_approach_still_under/ https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/dmqgd5/is_the_polyw...
    • Lev1a 7y ago
      > brehmsstrahlung Bremsstrahlung FTFY
      • jabl 7y ago
        Indeed, you're correct. Thanks.
  • pxhb 7y ago
    I can’t tell for sure from the article but I think they are accelerating protons with TNSA (target normal sheath acceleration). I worked in a lab in undergrad that was doing something similar, except with lithium instead of boron. The main challenges that I recall from a decade ago with TNSA are (WARNING: there almost certainly has been progress since a decade ago): -Conversion efficiency of laser energy into ion (proton) kinetic energy -TNSA accelerates mainly the contaminated layer on the back of targets, which may not be a big deal if you are interested in accelerating protons -TNSA protons are not beam like. They do not have a uniform kinetic energy, and they have a wide angular divergence. -Various laser related issues (prepulse, focal spot size/shape). I also anticipate that it will have the same engineering problem as ICF/NIF, in that it will need to continuously replenish targets.
    • DennisP 7y ago
      Here's their publications page, if you're interested in looking into it further. https://www.hb11.energy/news-and-publications https://www.hb11.energy/news-and-publications
  • deleted 7y ago
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  • moron4hire 7y ago
    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.
    • jwbwater 7y ago
      Agreed, I do not see their "budget" website as sign they lack credibility, I see it as a sign that they are focused on their work.
  • moneytide1 7y ago
    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.
    • EthanHeilman 7y ago
      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
  • deleted 7y ago
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  • Accujack 7y ago
    Do a google search for "laser induced fission". Generating plasmas with CPA lasers is becoming more common, but isn't widespread yet because the technology is very new. These plasmas can be the source for all kinds of particles and energy in particular forms, so they may have lots and lots of uses. One person in particular is proposing to use a CPA laser to accelerate nuclear decay, to allow radioactive waste to decay faster and become less toxic more quickly. Of course, my own concern would be that being able to induce fission with a table top laser means that the tech may eventually exist to create a fission or fusion bomb without a nuclear trigger....
    • grogers 7y ago
      If they succeed in creating a viable p-B11 fusion power plant and that gets developed into a bomb, wouldn't it be a good thing in the sense that it could replace many thousands of fission-based bombs that have huge fallout risk?
  • superkuh 7y ago
    After reading the article and skimming some of the innumberable references (the article is all references) it seems like the unobtanium part of using laser pondermotive force to accelerate blocks high density plasma from solid state is that the laser "contrast ratio" has to be very high. In the paper it cites many failed replication efforts to use this particular laser pondermotive force due to lack of "contrast ratio". I have no idea what "contrast ratio" means, it isn't defined, and isn't in the references. Does anyone know what "contrast ratio" means in terms of high power pulsed lasers? edit: To answer my own question, ref: https://cdn.intechweb.org/pdfs/24813.pdf https://cdn.intechweb.org/pdfs/24813.pdf > the laser pulse contrast ratio (LPCR) is a crucial parameter to take into consideration. Considering the laser pulse intensity temporal profile, the LPCR is the ratio between its maximum (peak intensity) and any fixed delay before it. A low contrast ratio can greatly modify the dynamics of energy coupling between the laser pulse and the initial target by producing a pre-plasma that can change the interaction mechanism. It seems to be how fast the laser turns on, the rate of change of intensity.
• ycombonator 7y ago
  Now that’s science
• foreigner 7y ago
  As a bonus it produces helium, which we've been running low on right? Break out the party balloons!
  • StavrosK 7y ago
    All fusion produces helium, though. I don't think anyone is looking into fusing heavier atoms.
    • jabl 7y ago
      If you look at the nuclear binding energy curve (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_binding_energy#/media/File:Binding_energy_curve_-_common_isotopes.svg 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.
      • logfromblammo 7y ago
        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.
  • shireboy 7y ago
    That shortage is mostly a myth: https://www.wired.com/2016/06/dire-helium-shortage-vastly-inflated/ https://www.wired.com/2016/06/dire-helium-shortage-vastly-in...
    • homonculus1 7y ago
      So what happens after 117 years?
      • DennisP 7y ago
• jl6 7y ago
  > First milestone is demonstrating the reactions, which should be easy. They haven’t even demonstrated the reaction? What’s all the talk about results being “billions” of times better than expected?
  • deleted 7y ago
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  • noselasd 7y ago
    Simulations.
  • willis936 7y ago
    As someone who works on a stellarator: no plasma experiment in fusion research is easy to do.
• redm 7y ago
  “ This cascading avalanche of reactions is an essential step toward the ultimate goal: reaping far more energy from the reaction than you put in. The extraordinary early results lead HB11 to believe the company "stands a high chance of reaching the goal of net energy gain well ahead of other groups." Its a great read, but it sounds like its still a net energy loss.. one more brick on the road though.
• tln 7y ago
  It would be awesome to know what experiments they've done, or if this is all simulation
  • DennisP 7y ago
    There have been experiments, but only at lower power than required for fusion. From their latest paper: > A significant case of nonlinear deviation from classical linear physics was seen by the measurements, how the laser opened the door to the principle of nonlinearity and could be seen from the effect measured by Linlor [9] followed by others (see [7] p. 31) when irradiating solid targets with laser pulses of several ns duration. At less than one MW power, the pulses heated the target surface to dozens of thousand °C and the emitted ions had energies of few eV as expected in the usual way following classically. When the power of the nanosecond laser pulses was exceeding a significant threshold of few MW, the ions – suddenly – had thousand times higher energies. These keV ions were separated with linear increase on the ion charge indicating that there was not a thermal equilibrium process involved. Lasers adequate for fusion are just now becoming available. https://www.hb11.energy/news-and-publications https://www.hb11.energy/news-and-publications
• tartoran 7y ago
  This proves once again what could happen if one is not to follow the herd.
  • melling 7y ago
    “He called this in the 70s, he said this would be possible. It's only possible now because these brand new lasers are capable of doing it.“ He knew it would work 50 years ago. I imagine there are ideas being discussed today that will come to fruition 50 years from now. ... or 30 years. Our choice.
    • jsilence 7y ago
      Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage come to mind.
    • dlsso 7y ago
      Yes. This was my favorite quote. With slightly more context: You know what's amazing? Heinrich is old, he's 84 or so. He called this in the 70s, he said this would be possible. It's only possible now because these brand new lasers are capable of doing it. That, in my mind, is awesome.
• crusso 7y ago
  Here's a video explaining the reaction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy0kHQASsX8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy0kHQASsX8
  • dctoedt 7y ago
    Upvoted — the first minute or so of the video is very helpful; it shows (what looks like) PowerPoint slides with drawings of a proton (1H nucleus) hitting a boron nucleus (5B11); the proton fuses into the boron nucleus to create what presumably is a single carbon nucleus (6C12), which then splits into three helium nuclei (each 2He4) without emitting free neutrons. (The very-crude video technique was fascinating to this non-artistic person: Create PowerPoint slides, add subtitles for "narration" that float in and out, and finally add stock music for background. That might be useful for flipped-classroom courses.)
    • jobseeker990 7y ago
      Why would the carbon split? Why not stay carbon? And wouldn't this technically be fission energy then?
      • dctoedt 7y ago
        > Why would the carbon split? Why not stay carbon? Don't know — I'm not knowledgeable enough in this area to do more than take WAGs about it. The sequence might be different: For example, the 1H proton might not ever fuse with the 5B11 to form 6C12; instead, the fusion reaction might be that the 5B11 fissions into two 2He4 and one tritium 1H3, after which the 1H proton fuses to the tritium to form the third 2He4. > And wouldn't this technically be fission energy then? See the explanation in this thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22383199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22383199 — it makes as much sense as anything.
      • grogers 7y ago
        The rough explanation I've heard before is to satisfy conservation of momentum and energy together. But on doing some more digging this seems wrong. C12+gamma is an output, just only for 0.01% of reactions. No idea why the different byproducts have different rates though.
• RandomWorker 7y ago
  Google polywell the US military has been funding this for the past 20 years. There are some issues that might be solved with scaling the device. A company called emc2 was spun off this US military project.
  • DennisP 7y ago
    Polywell is a completely different method.
• eveningcoffee 7y ago
  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."
  • javajosh 7y ago
    Yes it seems like you could generate extreme levels of electrostatic force by collecting the Helium nuclei. Do that on one side of a capacitor, periodically short it out (producing ordinary Helium) to clear both plates, and repeat. So yeah a machine which takes hydrogen and boron and emits helium gas and electricity. Sounds like it's worth doing, at least for the sake of children's birthday parties.
    • multiplegeorges 7y ago
      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!
      • anonuser123456 7y ago
        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.
        • russfink 7y ago
          Start looking for unexplained helium signatures among the exoplanets, as evidence of a civilization that applied this method successfully.
          • anonuser123456 7y ago
• nickik 7y ago
  I have long thought this fuel was a far better fit. Really in a practical sense, you don't get that much benefit from most tritium fusion reactors compared to fission. Meaning that compared to what we have now, fusion and fission are so much more efficient anyway. The primary problem for fission is state regulation and large cost even if you didn't have to pass regulation. And most fusion concepts can't really address that much better. Directly creating current rather then having a whole heat to electricity transformation might allow the whole thing to be much cheaper.
• wefarrell 7y ago
  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.
  • DennisP 7y ago
    The explanation I've heard from a fusion scientist is that as far as they're concerned, if you're initiating the reaction by colliding nuclei, it's fusion, and if you're initiating it by hitting a large nucleus with a neutron, it's fission.
    • wefarrell 7y ago
      Makes sense, thanks!
  • cstross 7y ago
    Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion (TLDR version: proton-boron fusion is a less energetically efficient alternative to 3He fusion, but with the howlingly significant advantage that boron -- the fuel -- is lying around in heaps and drifts on Earth, rather than being so exotic a substance that annual global production is measured in single-digit kilograms and a significant energy economy would require mining it from the Lunar regolith. It's not as well-known as 3He fusion, though, because the space cadets don't see the point -- there are no Moon colonies required. Advantages of 3He or B + p fusion over D-T fusion: it doesn't produce a surplus of neutrons, so there's less radioactive waste created as a by-product of the process.)
    • baq 7y ago
      space cadets would love to have that kind of a reactor on a deep solar system exploration mission, especially if you could make it into a rocket engine by spitting the resulting super high energy helium out of the business end without negative side effects.
  • acidburnNSA 7y ago
• penetrarthur 7y ago
  > and most rely on a deuterium-tritium thermonuclear fusion approach that requires the creation of ludicrously hot temperatures, much hotter than the surface of the Sun, at up to 15 million degrees Celsius (27 million degrees Fahrenheit). Surface of the Sun - 6000 C Center of the Sun - 15000000 C
  • dmos62 7y ago
    It's not often that the child in me goes "that's awesome!", but this is one of those times.
    • SamBam 7y ago
      Assuming you're talking about the temperature, it's always been a source of human pride to me that the hottest place in the entire universe, as far as we are aware, has been created at the LHC on Earth. Barring other species as intelligent as ours elsewhere (which is of course possible, but unknown), the very hottest thing in the entire unimaginably-large universe full of exotic stars and black holes and supernovae, was created by a tiny group of apes on a minuscule planet orbiting a smallish, boring star on the unfashionable side of a galaxy.
      • miscPerson 7y ago
        That strikes me as... a strange claim, considering how fast the OMG particle whizzed by. Per Wiki: > The energy of this particle is some 40 million times that of the highest energy protons that have been produced in any terrestrial particle accelerator. Presumably wherever these extreme energy protons are coming from is rather warm. Is there some reason to think the LHC has higher temperature? Not a physicist; could be something like LHC having larger bunch sizes... but since we don’t know what causes these particles, it seems like we don’t really know the source temperature.
  • FredrikMeyer 7y ago
    I think they might be thinking of the corona of the sun > The temperature in the corona is more than a million degrees, surprisingly much hotter than the temperature at the Sun's surface which is around 5,500° C https://scied.ucar.edu/solar-corona https://scied.ucar.edu/solar-corona
• yufeng66 7y ago
  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 carry about 50 eV energy. So vast majority of the energy generated will be kinetic energy or photon energy which translate into very hot temperature at macro level.
  • danmaz74 7y ago
    I suppose the idea is that most of the energy will be expelled as kinetic energy of the alpha particles, that then can be converted into electric potential energy?
  • phkahler 7y ago
    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.
    • rcollyer 7y ago
      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.
      • willis936 7y ago
        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.
• TomMarius 7y ago
  My nuclear fusion physicist friend is very sceptical.
  • throwaway9d0291 7y ago
    On its own, this isn't a very substantial comment. Can you elaborate on why your friend is sceptical and what effort they put in to come to that conclusion?
    • TomMarius 7y ago
      He says it's a wild dream which everyone who has studied it knows due to the physical properties. He has a Ph.d. and worked on the Prague-based fusion reactors. I think it's useful to know that people with expertise consider it wild even though they're not exactly sure why themselves. You don't need to take it into consideration if you know better.
• annoyingnoob 7y ago
  I hope they get their voodoo to work. The world could sure use it.
• wokkel 7y ago
  What i find disturbing is when I start looking for other sources, google gives me a news item on https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/pioneering-technology-promises-unlimited-clean-and-safe-energy https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/pioneering-te... but there the article has been retracted? Also another one that is behind a paywall it seems (cannot tell as the paywall is broken). So I have 1 story on 1 website and the company website itself. The news-site claims on their about page that they value old-school journalistic values (I assume they mean, they investigate a story before publishing) but it's hard to take that claim seriously without more credible sources. For me this is interesting technology to keep an eye on, but without more confirmation and research, this is cold-fusion for now.
  • DennisP 7y ago
    For the credible sources look at their publications in scientific journals. They might be wrong but this is nothing like cold fusion.
• willis936 7y ago
  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 challenges to ICF reactors than there are to MCF reactors. Pulses on the order of 1-2 Hz requires a mechanical system that can cycle out the exhaust and replace the pellet in that time. Going to reactor scales also requires high load thermal cycles. MCF ain’t easy, and brings it’s own engineering challenges. The ones I always hear are things like wall materials and fuel recycling, but these are largely solved or in the process of being solved. The engineering challenge I see as the most difficult for MCF are related to steady state operation. Tokamaks have no way of being steady state. Stellarators do, but now the next problem is wall conditioning. Wall materials outgas in hot plasma. A lot. Like more than the fuel puffed in. The way this is handled in science machines is with glow discharges of various species: plasma just below the temperature to cause wall sputtering, coating the wall with carbon and boron for their absorptive properties, etc. No one’s run a steady state hot plasma before, so no one knows if these will be a non issue in reactors. Keeping the plasma clean may be a challenge to keep the plasma from terminating. Aside from that MCF is ready for prime time. It needs a big reactor for scaling laws to make it energy profitable (and potentially money profitable). We just need some very expensive test reactors to smooth out these issues.
  • pxhb 7y ago
    One reason you might not find ‘inertial’ is because the only thing they have in common is a laser. For ICF, a long-pulse laser is used like a hammer to heat and compress the material to fusion conditions. This scheme, as far as I can tell, uses the large EM fields of a short-pulse laser to accelerate a ‘beam’ of ions into cold material to induce fusion.
  • anonsivalley652 7y ago
    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 approaches are discounted automatically. Q0: Without bias from my opinion, how fringe or potentially legitimate does IEC seem? Q1: Props to the article's team that they invented some awesome lasers. Is there enough experimental data yet on their novel approach to backup their claims to justify funding a prototype? Would such a team be able to test this on a shoestring budget without spending millions?
• missosoup 7y ago
  So is there a way to invest in this?
  • DennisP 7y ago
    It's a private company in Australia that likely needs more funding, so probably so, if you meet your government's requirements for investing in that sort of thing.
• andymoe 7y ago
  So... what is their Current Q number? “The fusion energy gain factor, usually expressed with the symbol Q, is the ratio of fusion power produced in a nuclear fusion reactor to the power required to maintain the plasma in steady state.” [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor
  • DennisP 7y ago
    Currently zero, because the necessary lasers are just now becoming available. In theory, they've got a kJ laser to generate the magnetic field, a 30kJ laser hitting the fuel, and a GJ energy output, for Q over 30,000 minus whatever losses you have in the lasers and electricity harvesting. https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1016/j.mre.2017.05.001 https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1016/j.mre.2017.05.001
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• taneq 7y ago
  Indeed, the four elements, like Man alone, are weak, but together the form the strong fifth element. https://youtu.be/2IfCUsBpR-I https://youtu.be/2IfCUsBpR-I
• Robotbeat 7y ago
  Headline is misleading. Should be "hopes to leapfrog".
• acidburnNSA 7y ago
  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 and getting started. First milestone is demonstrating the reactions, which should be easy. Second milestone is getting enough reactions to demonstrate an energy gain by counting the amount of helium that comes out of a fuel pellet when we have those two lasers working together. That'll give us all the science we need to engineer a reactor. So the third milestone is bringing that all together and demonstrating a reactor concept that works." The fourth step is to deliver the reactor concept as promising machine. The fifth step is to attach it to power generating equipment and demonstrate the power plant. The sixth step is to scale up a supply chain capable of delivering multiple units that compete with other sources of commodity electricity (or other energy products). The seventh step is to scale to large scale without being unduly burdened by either supply chain (raw material, skilled labor) or regulatory impact/public concern that inevitably scales with any large fleet of any new tech. Fission made it to step 7 and then faltered and is now teetering depending on where you look. It never scaled past 5% of total world primary energy. The promise of fusion is to deliver nuclear energy with less public concern than fission because it makes less radiologically hazardous material. The challenge is to go through the physical, engineering, and commercial viability phases as a power plant.
  • anonuser123456 7y ago
    >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?
    • acidburnNSA 7y ago
      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.
• jimbokun 7y ago
  > 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxEX8UueZ4U
  • galangalalgol 7y ago
    How do alpha particles get turned into current on a line?
• archeantus 7y ago
  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.
• pier25 7y ago
  Is fusion capable of replacing all our energy systems? If it works, is it the energy miracle humanity needs?
  • acidburnNSA 7y ago
    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?
    • pier25 7y ago
      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
      • acidburnNSA 7y ago
        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.
• DeusExMachina 7y ago
  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 temperature on a global scale even if it lowers carbon emissions? What am I missing?
  • Vysero 7y ago
    No the idea has no merit.
  • andys627 7y ago
    Use free energy to sequester infinite carbon!
  • DennisP 7y ago
    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/ 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.
  • Tade0 7y ago
    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.
  • nnq 7y ago
    > 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 during the cold months and to melt your brains out during the hot ones in almost all public spaces! Like we're back in the pre-AC era! You need to get to Eastern Europe's bigger cities to enjoy comfy heating/cooling habits like proper heating in the winter (yes, I want my >25 C in winter!) and proper cooling in the summer (<18 C please!)... It's wasteful, but very much enjoyable! Snow fighting after/before coming out/in of a 30+ C heated house is bliss :D Same a blasting through an enjoyable heatwave after jumping out of a 15 C office and then back in. Life's little pleasures. After we invest so much of our lives in developing technology, we should at least enjoy the simple comforts and pleasures it freaking offers!
• andreiklochko 7y ago
  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 in turn a boron nucleus, then it will have exactly the right energy (612 keV) to have maximum chances at initiating a second fusion reaction. 612 keV is like almost 7 billion degrees °C if considered as thermal energy, and no experiment anywhere will get that hot for long. But compared to the energy of the exiting helium nuclei, it's still much lower (0.612 MeV vs 2.9 MeV). In other words, instead of cascading all the energy down and hoping the sea of particles rises to a few billion degrees so enough particles do fusion to keep the sea of other particles hot, here, the energy is preempted by proton atoms after just 2 collisions and used immediately to start a second reaction, which yields more helium nuclei at 2.9 MeV, essentially producing an "avalanche" effect. Finally, yes, they seem to have devised a way to obtain at least a small part of the energy electrically, without relying on thermal energy, via direct electric field deceleration of very fast charged particles. 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" The avalanche process is explained in Hora's 2016 publication, with a schematic page 9: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1016/j.mre.2017.05.001 https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1016/j.mre.2017.05.001 And yes, a petawatt (the energy of present day ultra-fast lasers) is a lot of power. It was just chance that there was very little practical use to this kind of power - until now. That being said, I am not a true expert myself of this topic, so the true barriers laying in front of this concept might be better explained by the other comments here.
  • nkrisc 7y ago
    > 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.
• JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  Why a pellet? Why not a gas of boron and hydrogen? Easier to feed continuously.
  • kamesstory 7y ago
    Probably had to do with density, if the target is cascading reactions by nuclei to nuclei contact. Solids have a higher chance of contact.
    • ncmncm 7y ago
      Better yet, a wire feed.
    • JoeAltmaier 7y ago
      Not convinced. The excited atom will travel in a straight line without slowing until it contacts another atom same as in a pellet. The mean free path is longer, but the chance of collision is about the same?
  • grogers 7y ago
    The paper says the fuel is a low energy plasma of "solid state density". It's not a solid chunk of HB11, which AFAIK doesn't exist. The primary factor limiting the feed is the repetition rate of the laser.
• thinkcontext 7y ago
  The title is profoundly misleading. Fusion has not been achieved using this method, the "leapfrog" results are from simulations.
• 1958325146 7y ago
  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?
  • Accujack 7y ago
    >fire a stream of hydrogen ions with a particle accelerator at a chunk of Boron 11. This is what's wrong. The energy required to accelerate the ions is much higher than the energy which can be harvested this way. The concept under discussion substitutes a simpler setup that accelerates particles using laser induced plasmas from a very small table top laser. The thing could "almost" be battery powered.
  • sam 7y ago
    The problem with firing a stream of hydrogen ions at a chunk of Boron 11 is that most of the collisions between the hydrogen and the Boron are glancing blows that will dissipate the energy very quickly. Only a small fraction of the collisions result in a fusion reaction. This is the reason why most fusion approaches rely on thermal systems. In a thermal system, the ions have a bell-shaped distribution of energies and undergo many collisions before they leave the region in which they are confined and their energy leaves the system. To achieve net gain, the temperature, density and energy confinement time must be above a certain threshold. If the system is non thermal, like a stream of hydrogen ions where the distribution of energies is a spike, the energy in the hydrogen ions that are deflected by glancing blows must be recaptured somehow.
    • 1958325146 7y ago
      Thank you!
• moneytide1 7y ago
  Straight from fusion to electricity without a steam turbine with helium to harvest? I've seen it said here on HN that the amount of helium out of a deuterium/tritium is so small it is negligible. From article: "My question is: Would that setup produce a continuous fusion for some period with positive net energy generation? Here is my argument why I think it would: Since Boron is solid at room temperature, it's density is high, so I think the fusion rate per nucleon would be quite high. As far as I know 100keV is the energy needed for Hydrogen-1 and Boron-11 to fuse, while the resultant three He-4 nuclei should have about 8MeV of energy. So indeed if all accelerated protons fuse then the energy produced should be quite higher than the input. The problem that immediately comes to mind is that as the container starts to rapidly heat up as a result of the reactions the Boron inside would no longer be solid and may even start to leak through the opening. But before that happens, would there be at least a brief period where an efficient fusion can be sustained?"
• teilo 7y ago
  This article reads like a press release for a startup.
• gautamcgoel 7y ago
  Not to be a downer, but if you say your technology is working a billion times better than expected, one of two things is probably true: you are trying to stir up media hype, or you don't really understand the underlying technology to begin with.
• sam 7y ago
  If new fusion startups like this one are interesting to folks on this thread, here's a list of companies working on fusion energy that I've compiled: https://www.fusionenergybase.com/organizations/ https://www.fusionenergybase.com/organizations/
  • baddash 7y ago
    thanks :D
  • Vinceo 7y ago
    Thank you. Your site in general is a great resource on fusion.
• hnewsshadowbans 7y ago
  I'll believe it when I see it. Radical new technology is always leapfrogging conventional fusion and has been overtaking and rendering it 'obsolete' for the past 30-40 years.
• cfv 7y ago
  On paper, this sounds absolutely awesome and a huge game changer. I'm super concerned about the military applications tho. Giving functionally endless, mostly free power to warmonger countries with the ability to field drones is something extremely concerning for me.
  • foobiekr 7y ago
    they basically already have endless, mostly free power in the sense you are getting at. that it isn't clean is irrelevant to their use case. china, iran, the united states, etc. militaries are not hurting for energy and already make heavy use of small nuclear reactors where just hauling fuel is not an easier choice.
• hajile 7y ago
  "Naked Helium" -- What a nice way to say "we output alpha radiation" > "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."
• ChuckMcM 7y ago
  Sigh: Second milestone is getting enough reactions to demonstrate an energy gain by counting the amount of helium that comes out of a fuel pellet when we have those two lasers working together. That'll give us all the science we need to engineer a reactor. I love the work, I love that they have exploited the fact that we can build things (lasers) now that we could not economically build before. But the fact is that so many many things die on the aforementioned step from the article. That is the step wherein the science doesn't give you a way to engineer a reactor, instead it illuminates something you didn't know before and so that you now realize you can't ever build a reactor that way. So when I read these papers and the science isn't all figured out, I temper my enthusiasm. High hopes, low expectations, that's a good motto here. Unlike the stellerator where all the science is "known" and they are engineering an implementation step by step by step. I've added it to my fusion project collection under "interesting long shots", check back in 5 years to see what the science taught them.
• kragen 7y ago
  I think he's dechirping a convergent laser wavefront to get a 10-petawatt pulse with which to accelerate hydrogen into a ¹¹B target to run an alphavoltaic battery from an aneutronic p-¹¹B fusion avalanche resulting within a plasma sphere contained by optical tweezers. Is that right?
• excalibur 7y ago
  > a swag of patents Is this the correct term for a group of wild patents? What do you call a group of wild patent trolls?
• pfdietz 7y ago
  I am very skeptical of this approach. The big problem I have is the direct conversion approach being suggested. The idea, as I understand it, was that the target is placed at the center of a large sphere, and is negatively charged, so the alpha particles from fusion slow down as they go up the potential to the surrounding spherical collector. You see the problem with this, I hope. The violent and energetic event at the target will produce gas and plasma, and lots of free electrons. What is stopping that from shorting out this megavolt vacuum capacitor?
  • jabl 7y ago
    The direct conversion stuff doesn't seem that critical. If that doesn't work out immediately, surely the first generation can use good old steam rankine power conversion (or sCO2 Brayton, if that is deemed mature enough). My worry is whether the specific fusion reactor concept itself is viable.
    • pfdietz 7y ago
      It's very critical. Without direct conversion, it's just another source of heat, and all externally heated power cycles are becoming uncompetitive now. And yes, the physics of the target is also something that needs external verification.
• toptal 7y ago
  Can someone provide a list of how much each item that is relevant to this technology is likely to cost? I’d really like to know how much each laser, pellet, metal case, etc will likely cost in this and how difficult it will be to create each one. I would have to imagine that these lasers will be the most difficult part of all of this. It will also be good to know how long each laser lasts and how much power they require to operate effectively.
• caymanjim 7y ago
  Can we lose the question mark in the headline? It's not in the original.
• sonium 7y ago
  I don't want to be a nay-sayer but I did my PhD on Hydrogen implantation and spentt enough time as a PostDoc to find a few thing odd here: - All work seems to be purely theoretical although the setup needed is not that hard to come by. For 1000 USD / hour you can rent a proton implanter and check the principle mechanisms of the reaction. - Everything is published in realativly low impact journals. There are a ton of smart people in academia that love to "think outside the box" but nobody seems to think that this is promising. This basicaly seems to be a one man show of H. Hora. - It doesn't seem to be that radically new but the first paper was published. I have not found what they have done in the meantime.