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Yep. > "HB11 Energy’s research demonstrated that its hydrogen-boron energy technology is now four orders of magnitude away from achieving net energy gain when
by yetihehe 5y ago
Yep.
> "HB11 Energy’s research demonstrated that its hydrogen-boron energy technology is now four orders of magnitude away from achieving net energy gain when catalyzed by a laser," reads the press release. "This is many orders of magnitude higher than those reported by any other fusion company, most of which have not generated any reaction despite billions of dollars invested in the field.
> HB11 claims is a "world-first 'material' number of fusion reactions by a private company
So they have a result which is 10x better than they thought will be, but still way lower than stellarator etc.
- eightails 5y agoAnd still lower than other laser systems using inertial confinement. If I'm reading NIF's recent paper right, they're claiming Q_a of above ~1.4, or Q = ~0.28 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8791836/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8791836/ Edit: Wikipedia suggests that they were using a different method to calculate Q, only measuring the power input to plasma vs output from fusion, not including system losses. So that figure is probably not directly comparable. > the NIF used ~477 MJ of electrical energy to get ~1.8 MJ of energy into the target to create ~1.3 MJ of fusion energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility#Burning_plasma_achieved https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility#Bur...
- neltnerb 5y agoThe spin is also a bit weird... suggesting that their experimental results were ten times better than their theory predicted doesn't exactly lend a ton of confidence to me in their theory. It's interesting, at that scale. But just imagine if someone designing a power plant said that their reactor generated 10x the power calculated. Neat, at that scale. But very strong spin.