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US-Japan team hails H2-boron plasma fusion breakthrough
- Jeff_Brown 4y agoBreathless as usual, and as usual I can't judge. Experts, how big a deal is this?
- xwdv 4y agoIt doesn’t scale.
- etothepii 4y agoAren't we supposed to "do things that don't scale"?
- xwdv 4y agoI really don’t understand the downvotes, but the full version of that famous quote is “do things that don’t scale right away.” Not “do things that don’t scale and will never scale.”
- adwn 4y agoYou were probably downvoted because you made a strong statement without further explanation, or at least references that support your claim.
- einpoklum 4y agoI pressed the zoom button and it scaled just fine. Or perhaps you mean something else which you have not bothered to explain?
- Animats 4y agoRight. This is either huge, Nobel Prize / multi-billion dollar industry huge, or a gross exaggeration of a lab result. Which?
- Dalewyn 4y agoConsidering this comes from Japan, I'm going to lean on hot air exaggeration until demonstrated otherwise. Not taking away from the fact this is an interesting achievement in the science of nuclear fusion, of course.
- georgewsinger 4y ago> Considering this comes from Japan... Can you explain to me why this follows? I don't usually associate "hot air exaggeration" with Japanese culture.
- Dalewyn 4y agoI reflected on this once before[1], but basically I've seen Japan design great things only for them to fail on execution time and time again. I'm sick and tired of them at this point, so I simply refuse to hold my breath on anything coming from Japan until I see it in action. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34803445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34803445
- mulmen 4y agoBy any economic measure Japan is an advanced productive nation. Like top five in the world. At the same time they have maintained a high quality of life over decades and a unique culture.
- Dalewyn 4y agoThat is tangent to whether Japan can bring projects to fruition. The recent termination of the Mitsubishi Regional Jet is a perfect example (among many others) of what I'm sick and tired about with Japan: Lots of bold claims to start, absolute failure when time comes to execute.
- cpleppert 4y agoI'm not sure why this seems to be hyped up in media reports and I'm skeptical this is a big deal. They used NIFS's stellarator to observe proton boron fusion in a magnetic plasma. The way they accomplished this is by bombarding the plasma with massively energetic particles. The energy produced through fusion is almost undetectable. I'm not sure what relevance this has to their proposed FRC reactor and the paper doesn't make that clear either. They do talk about a wealth of data that could inform their research but since the scale here is so astronomically different from a hypothetical reactor that produces energy it is hard to see how the knowledge gained from what is essentially a single experiment has any relevance to their eventual goal of producing net energy gain. Most of the work to make fusion energy work is engineering and engineering is very sensitive to scale.
- gary_0 4y agoThe article is light on details. This is aneutronic fusion, right? Hydrogen ions and boron?
- neom 4y agoSlightly better article: https://phys.org/news/2023-02-hydrogen-boron-fusion-magnetically-confined-plasma.html https://phys.org/news/2023-02-hydrogen-boron-fusion-magnetic...
- fghorow 4y agoThe actual journal article (Magee, et al. 2023) is Creative Commons licensed. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-36655-1 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-36655-1
- Projectiboga 4y agoWhat is cool about Fusing Hydrogen to Boron is there is relatively low amounts of radioactive particles, the only emission is Helium nucleuses and those have a charge that can make electricity directly without a heat cycle. Other fusion types make neutrons which then can make materials they hit become radioactive or at least weaken them. This is still proof of concept but they are estimating putting power into the grid in the next 10-15 years, which is a big jump from the constant 30-40 year timeframe fusion has been stuck in up to recently.
- jiggawatts 4y agoAll known fusion reaction types produce some neutrons due to undesired side-reactions. Hydrogen-Boron has lower neutron flux, but not zero. > This is still proof of concept but they are estimating putting power into the grid in the next 10-15 years There is literally zero chance of this occurring, unless aliens have landed on Earth and secretly shared their fusion technology with this team.
- JohnBooty 4y agoDepends on the field in question but generally, any timeframe greater than 2-3 years generally means "we have absolutely no idea because there are multiple major things to solve and a nonzero number of unknown unknowns." 10-15 years is preposterous. If they had a reliable, sustainable, net-energy-positive, commercialization-ready process today, I think 10-15 years would be an optimistic timeline for the safety and regulatory stuff alone.
- freeqaz 4y agoI'd like to be a bit more optimistic that we could move quickly on something that would greatly help us curb greenhouse gas emmisions!
- JohnBooty 4y agoI want your optimism. Democracy is probably the least-bad system of government but this is where it really falls down. It forces politicians to think in short-sighted, tiny blocks of time. They're just trying to make it through the next ~4 years. And if they don't get re-elected their replacement won't necessarily care about the projects they've inherited. But an effort like getting fusion to market is something that will take decades. It needs more sustained attention than an ADHD-addled government can produce. And even then, it's unclear if an Apollo-style national push would get us there much sooner. It could maybe cut through the red tape portions, but much like throwing more engineers at a software problem doesn't necessarily help, it's unclear that throwing even more money at fusion would clear the science and engineering hurdles more quickly.
- avalys 4y agoThis is not a "breakthrough", it's an announcement that they turned their machine on for the first time and took the first measurements, and measured a signal (i.e. reaction rate) so small that they have to go through some lengths in the paper to convince the reader it actually represents the reaction in question. This is certainly progress, a genuine accomplishment, and a necessary step along the way to their ultimate goal, but it's a bit of obnoxious puffery to call it a breakthrough, and I don't think it resolves any of the fundamental questions about whether this reaction (which is something like 100x harder than the typical DT fusion reaction) will lead to a viable system in our lifetimes.
- sigmoid10 4y agoYeah, the fundamental physics constraints of this approach are pretty wild. The cross section peak for the candidate Proton-Boron interaction is at about 10 times higher energy (i.e. temperature) and the peak itself is roughly a fifth of the Deuterium-Tritium cross section. Oh and each individual interaction produces less than half the energy. So 100x more difficult is actually not far off in that sense. That means you don't just need a lot more energy to sustain the reaction, you'll also get a lot less energy from it. This is a very long and steep road to net energy production and there are good reasons why noone has bothered with it so far. The only upside is that you produce more charged particles, which are easier to control and extract energy from and they also cause less radiation damage. But if anyone ever makes a reaction like this work, by bet is still on Helium-3. But we won't be able to make use of that until we have scalable mining industry on the moon's surface.
- u320 4y agoHelium-3 can be made on earth by fusing deuterium nuclei. Which is a lot easier than fusing Helium-3 nuclei, so if you can do the latter the former is probably a lot easier than going to the moon.
- sigmoid10 4y agoIf it was easy to create Helium-3 via fusion we wouldn't need it in the first place. The whole idea is that He-3 fusion might be easier to harness because it produces fewer neutrons. And if we can't create it as byproduct in a net energy gain scenario this approach is only useful for spaceship fuel at best.
- kristianp 4y agoThe polywell also aimed to eventually use pB fusion for direct power generation. There is still a forum to discuss at [1] [1] https://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/index.php https://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/index.php
- cromwellian 4y agoVery skeptical. Ever since the ball lightning-is-fusion craze of the 90s, lots of people were claiming to have done small scale p-B11 fusion. Being able to produce a few helium nuclei isn't the same thing as achieving a Q>2 or Q>10. I mean, NIF "achieved" fusion, but we all know it's not able to extract net power. I still believe Commonwealth Fusion Systems with their SPARC/ARC small tokamak design will be the first to achieve a viable commercial reactor.
- mojomark 4y ago[flagged]
- fellowmartian 4y agoInsane article with its focus on “clean” fusion as if we already have dirty fusion. > “Inventing fusion reactors that produce net energy is one thing, delivering it as a reliable, grid-ready source of electricity is another.” If it’s such not a big deal - can you send me plans for a net energy producing reactor, while you work on commercialization?
- kataklasm 4y agoWhile I don't agree 100% with everything in the article either, you are kind of twisting their words here. They didn't say producing net energy weren't a big thing. They only stated that reliable, grid-ready electricity was even more difficult than net energy production in the first place.
- readthenotes1 4y agoReady in 10 years. Just like every other fusion breakthrough since the 1960s
- baking 4y agoFusion is usually measured by the detection of neutrons at the proper energy level for the fusion reaction you are looking for. H-Boron fusion does not release neutrons (or at least enough to measure) but alpha particles instead. TAE tested an alpha particle detector in a Japanese stelarator with Hydrogen plasma with Boron injected in and they successfully detected a small amount of alpha particles, and confirmed they were coming from H-Boron fusion. All this proves is that their alpha particle detector works, which TAE will need for their later devices. The H-Boron fusion was detectable, but nowhere near enough to get excited about. People make fusors in their garages that make small amounts of fusion everyday, but just with deuterium. TLDR; their alpha particle detector works. That is all.
- jabl 4y agoTodd Rider's 1995 PhD thesis poured cold water on all these exciting aneutronic fusion approaches. He maintains to this day a good presentation covering various approaches and what is feasible and what isn't. Current version at https://secureservercdn.net/198.71.233.129/f5o.aea.myftpupload.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/BetterRouteToFusion2023-01-19.pdf https://secureservercdn.net/198.71.233.129/f5o.aea.myftpuplo... (You can find links to the thesis and papers and the latest presentation at https://riderinstitute.org/research/ https://riderinstitute.org/research/ ) tl;dr: Fusion of heavier nuclei (like pB11 discussed here) are not feasible due to the bremsstrahlung output being higher than the fusion output. Ways around that would be, in theory, non-thermal plasmas, but these are very hard to do because the thermalization time constant is much lower than the fusion time constant. Alternatively one could, at very high efficiency, recycle the bremsstrahlung energy via some apparatus to heat the plasma. It's very unclear if any of these approaches are even remotely feasible. Now for this particular approach in TFA, described in the open access (as a former scientist who no longer has institutional access I'm very happy about the open access trend!) article https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36655-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36655-1 (thanks to user fghorow for providing the link in a sibling comment). Quoting: > And the physics challenges can be overcome. As demonstrated in ref. 2, by using the recently updated values for the p11B fusion cross-section3 and properly accounting for kinetic effects, it can be shown that a thermal p11B plasma can produce a high Q (where Q = fusion power/input power), and even reach ignition (where the plasma is sustained by the fusion reactions alone). So they claim the old values that e.g. Rider used for dismissing pB11 fusion as infeasible have recently changed sufficiently to make it feasible. Further continuing: > By employing a plasma with a low internal magnetic field and operating in a regime in which the electrons are kept at a lower temperature than the ions, the radiation losses can be further reduced1; and by maintaining a non-equilibrium population of energetic reacting ions, the fusion power further increased4. This, again, is about non-thermal plasmas. Theoretically possible, but very hard to do in practice.
- dontwearitout 4y agoI read some interesting work about picosecond laser driven pB11 fusion [0]. There doesn't seem to be a huge amount of research into picosecond lasers, but it strikes me as the logical step past NIF's work. What are your thoughts on this? [0] 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...
- phtrivier 4y ago"Major breakthrough in the World Cup final between Flabinisthan and Giberrishland. The game has been going on for 88 minutes and Flabinisthan is leading 789e10 to 0. It would be historical for Giberrishland to overcome such a lead, and win their first ever tournament. Thankfully, in a pre-print of an article brief submitted to an open-access server, an anonymous team of Giberrishians strategists claim they are now able to spell the name 'Flabinisthan' correctly, in less than 6 tries (range 5-78.) They are now considering getting a map of Flabinisthan, and are actively seeking funds to teach someone how to read a map."
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rationalist 4y agoThat's not as bad as CNN issuing a "Breaking News" report that the "Titanic sunk 102 years ago tonight" (at the time of the report). https://www.businessinsider.com/cnn-breaking-news-titanic-sinking-2014-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/cnn-breaking-news-titanic-si...
- rob74 4y agoWow, that's 1.5 billion goals. Per second!
- phtrivier 4y ago"Sure, the situation seems dire. But as I said, once we have someone able to read a map, it's only going to be a matter of time until we win the game. All you have to do is fund our startup ! No need to make hard decisions, like "learning how to play". That's for ideologists !" I'm just kidding, of course, I understand the enthousiasm. Fusion is the kind of things we need yesterday. It's probably as clickbaity as writing "Breakthrough in finding a cure for pneumonia" back in the 1900s - people really needed that, at the time. Then, someone discovered Penicilin, half by accident (at least, according to legend), and completely failed to gardner interest (at least, according to wikipedia [1].) So, I really hope someone is _actually_ having a real breakthrough somewhere, right now, the kind that gets completely ignored until the world is changed forever. And I wish the clickbaiter an early week-end - they do the less harm when they're _not_ working. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin#Discovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin#Discovery
- gregfjohnson 4y agoThere are a number of different approaches that are currently being worked on. I'm curious to know how they rank in terms of likelihood of getting power onto the grid. First Light Fusion of Britain is pursuing a novel approach, as is TAE. The MIT folks are pursuing a compact tokamak I believe. Any thoughts on what approaches have a fighting chance of eventual success?