Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech

New Atlas ^ | February 21, 2020 | Loz Blain

[Jonty30]

"We are sidestepping all of the scientific challenges that have held fusion energy back for more than half a century," says the director of an Australian company that claims its hydrogen-boron fusion technology is already working a billion times better than expected.

[AndyJackson]

Technically this whole scheme is utter fantasy from beginning to end.

[AndyJackson]

One of the places where these schemes all fall apart is that somehow or other you have to confine the fuel at high density as the nuclear processes proceed. That has proven to be impossible, but even if not, the confinement process requires a lot of energy, exceeding that produced by the fusion process itself, as it turns out.

[TexasGator]

” That has proven to be impossible,”

Not.

[TexasGator]

“Technically this whole scheme is utter fantasy from beginning to end.”

And your degree is in ?

[wareagle7295]

This sort of reminds me of something I read about 15 years ago, and to this day can’t believe it never took off. But a city down in Florida was building a large factory which basically had a core that could get hotter than the surface of the sun. Landfills would be dug up and thrown into this - basically vaporizing everything. It would also produce heat which would then generate electricity for the nearby towns. There was a small amount of leftover product which was basically carbon ash that would be compacted into bricks which would be sold various purposes. Enviros sued and it never took off that I know of.

[MrBambaLaMamba]

Once the lasers have done their stuff the millennials pull out their wands, point them at the sphere and shout Expecto Electricium.

Those sturgeon killing hydro-electric dams/power plants probably have to stick around to power the lasers.

[AndyJackson]

PhD Physics.

[CapnJack]

TexasGator,
How do you see this new process being possible? How do they “...reaping far more energy from the reaction than you put in.”?

Does their new process alter the equation of Temperature/Density/Confinement?

They talk about new lasers that can produce the temperatures needed, does that reduce one of the other components needed for fusion?

[TexasGator]

“hotter than the surface of the sun. “

I don’t think so!

[TexasGator]

Explain why it is garbage.

[AndyJackson]

So one horrendous inefficiency is the use of a CPA laser. The efficiency of this scheme is about as close to zero as you can get. You turn mega-joules of electrical energy into kilo-joules of short pulsed laser light, which you then use to accelerate a proton beam with less than 1% efficiency if you are lucky. Only a fraction [a few percent] of the resulting accelerated protons interact with the B11 to create fusion. So already you are operating at about 1 in a million inefficiency without accounting for a single watt to confine the B11 target.

Nor have we accounted for the thermal to electrical conversion efficiency.

Oh, and there is the problem of the cost of replacing the gratings in the CPA laser which have a very finite lifetime and are very expensive to fabricate.

[AndyJackson]

The temperature of the surface of the sun is about 1/2 of an electron volt. The temperature of an efficiently burning fusion plasma is 100 keV or so.

[AndyJackson]

In short, before investing read the prospectus very carefully and don’t put up money that you cannot afford to part with.

[volunbeer]

You are clearly educated in this field. Is it conventional wisdom that this is simply not possible or is it just that many have tried and failed (with many “investment” scams”) in the past?

The history of science is if something is theoretically possible it is more probable than not that eventually the problem will be solved.

I have been hearing about breakthroughs that would change everything for decades in this field so skepticism is justified. However, I still have hope that one day there will be the person (or computer AI) who thinks outside of the box and solves a riddle that will change everything.

[Redcitizen]

I read the headline too fast and came up with “Radical hydrogen born reactor frogs...”

[AndyJackson]

The fundamental problem with fusion is scaling. Nuclear weapons demonstrates that fusion works well at a very large scale using a fission weapon as a driver. Ever since, starting with folks involved in the Manhattan project people have been trying to figure out how to scale it down to useable levels. Unfortunately there are fundamental problems about stability of confinement schemes and it is just a lot harder than people originally envisioned. It is like trying to turn a glass of water upside down. Theoretically the pressure of the air can support the water in the glass. As a practical matter it is unstable - called the Rayleigh Taylor instability. Similar instabilities affect plasmas, made more complicated by the existence of magnetic fields in plasmas. But it’s an added complication, not a fundamental change in the nature of the problem.

[TexasGator]

As I 6nderstand your post, the theory is good, it is just not practical using present technology?

[Sgt_Schultze]

First, we need a source for stable dilithium crystals.

[TexasGator]

“The temperature of the surface of the sun is about 1/2 of an electron volt. The temperature of an efficiently burning fusion plasma is 100 keV or so.”

I really don’t think there was ever a factory in Florida running a fusion plasma where the were disposing of their garbage ...

[AndyJackson]

The theory is fine in the sense that it works in stars, the sun and nuclear bombs. But it does not scale to smaller scales. It used to be thought that it was a matter of technology, but it actually seems to be running into theoreticial limitations that were not recognized then and are not even well understood now, having to do not with nuclear physics, but turbulent [magneto]-hydrodynamics.

It's like the bumble-bee problem. According to classical aerodynamics it can't fly. But then it was discovered that it operates in a different regime and can fly. But then you discover that you can't scale up a bumble-bee to an airplane.