Posted on 01/12/2022 1:06:45 PM PST by BenLurkin
Physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, working with Japanese researchers, made the observation on the Large Helical Device (LHD) in Japan, a twisty magnetic facility that the Japanese call a "heliotron." The results demonstrated for the first time a novel regime for confining heat in facilities known as stellarators, similar to the heliotron. The findings could advance the twisty design as a blueprint for future fusion power plants
Researchers produced the higher confinement regime by injecting tiny grains of boron powder into the LHD plasma that fuels fusion reactions. The injection through a PPPL-installed dropper sharply reduced turbulent swirls and eddies and raised the confined heat that produces the reactions.
Stellarators, first constructed in the 1950s...are a promising concept that have long trailed symmetrical magnetic facilities called tokamaks as the leading device for producing fusion energy. A history of relatively poor heat confinement has played a role in holding back stellarators, which can operate in a steady state with little risk of the plasma disruptions that tokamaks face.
Although boron has long been used to condition walls and improve confinement in tokamaks, scientists have not previously seen "a widespread turbulence reduction and temperature increase like the one reported in this article," ... Moreover, absent from the observations were damaging bursts of heat and particles, called edge localized modes (ELMs), that can occur in tokamaks and stellarators during high-confinement, or H-mode, fusion experiments.
The remarkable heat and confinement improvement in LHD plasma may have resulted from the reduction of what is called the ion temperature gradient (ITG) instability, the paper said, which produces turbulence that causes plasma to leak from confinement. The reduction of turbulence contrasts with a type of heat loss called "neoclassical transport," the other main cause of particles escaping from stellarator confinement.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
At least it will be CLEAN ENEGRY!........................馃榿
Boron is hardly a “common household cleaner”
Borax (sodium borate decahydrate or sodium tetraborate decahydrate) is a moderately common mineral, used as a household cleaner. Takes a lot of refining to get actual Boron metaloid out of it.
If all the boron is used up on fusion, we won’t have it any more ro kill ants
“If all the boron is used up on fusion, we won鈥檛 have it any more ro kill ants”
But, we could build a fast enough spaceship to take us to a planet without ants!
But we'll be limited to going no faster than about 0.2 c without being killed (or the spaceship melting) from the radiation produced in collisions with the occasional H atom in every cubic centimeter of space.
I think the Aureon effort will bear fruit far sooner.
They’re still digging that stuff out there. Their quarry blasts shake the hovel from time to time.
STELLA!馃槒
“It’s a Floor Wax And a Fusion Generator”
Not a chemistry major, and not all that good a the sciences, since I'm math incapacitated, but my reading comprehension is reasonably good and there is something very wrong with this article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borax
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boron
You left out “dessert topping”.
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