Nuclear Fusion confinement from a different angle:

[beecee]

https://newatlas.com/energy/hb11-laser-fusion-demonstration/

Australian company HB11 says it's well on the way to nuclear fusion energy generation without the radioactive fuels or super-high temperatures

kuligssen/Depositphotos

HB11 is approaching nuclear fusion from an entirely new angle, using high power, high precision lasers instead of hundred-million-degree temperatures to start the reaction. Its first demo has produced 10 times more fusion reactions than expected, and the company says it's now "the only commercial entity to achieve fusion so far," making it "the global frontrunner in the race to commercialize the holy grail of clean energy."

We've covered Australian company HB11's hydrogen-boron laser fusion innovations before in detail, but it's worth briefly summarizing what makes this company so different from the rest of the field. In order to smash atoms together hard enough to make them fuse together and form a new element, you need to overcome the incredibly strong repulsive forces that push two positively-charged nuclei apart. It's like throwing powerful magnets at each other in space, hoping to smash two north poles together instead of having them just dance out of each other's way.

The Sun accomplishes this by having a huge amount of hydrogen atoms packed into a plasma that's superheated to tens of millions of degrees at its core. Heat is a measure of kinetic energy – how fast a group of atoms or molecules are moving or vibrating. At these temperatures, the hydrogen atoms are moving so fast that they smack into each other and fuse, releasing the energy that warms our planet.

Most fusion reactor designs aim to replicate these conditions, by magnetically confining hydrogen atoms in a plasma, and then using gyrotrons and other specialized equipment to create small pockets of insane temperatures – over 100 million °C (180 million °F) – in which they hope they'll get enough random collisions between nuclei to create a chain reaction. This is the basic idea underpinning the multi-billion dollar stellarator and tokamak projects that have dominated fusion research for decades.

more at link........................

previous article....

https://newatlas.com/energy/hb11-hydrogen-boron-fusion-clean-energy/?itm_source=newatlas&itm_medium=article-body

Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech

extract:

It's just always been 20 years away from being 20 years away. A number of multi-billion dollar projects are pushing slowly forward, from the Max Planck Institute's insanely complex Wendelstein 7-X stellerator to the 35-nation ITER Tokamak project, 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). This is where HB11's tech takes a sharp left turn.

This is big-time stuff. Should cheap, clean, safe fusion energy really be achieved, it would be an extraordinary leap forward for humanity and a huge part of the answer for our future energy needs. And should it be achieved without insanely hot temperatures being involved, people would be even more comfortable having it close to their homes. We'll be keeping an eye on these guys.

Source: University of New South Wales

An interesting video, 13 minutes long, that fully describes this process, its advantages such as *No radioactive waste: * No possibility of any meltdown: * Unlimited safe fuel: * Lower infrasctructure costs: * Smaller Plant footprint: 

https://hb11.energy/our-story/

FIRST MEASURED, CONTROLLED IGNITION OF A FUSION BURN VIA LASER

In the experiment conducted at National Ignition Facility (NIF), laser beams targeting a capsule of hydrogen isotopes sparked a fusion explosion that produced 1.35 megajoules (MJ) of energy.

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OK, need some constructive criticism or otherwise, along viability lines and comparisons to other methodologies etc. 

[beecee]

OK, OK I know that controlled nuclear fusion has always been 20 years away, but does this new approach make that estimate more real?

Some constructive criticism or otherwise, along viability lines and comparisons to other methodologies etc would be appreciate. Afterall it will certainly be a history changing game breaker if successful.

[studiot]

As I understand the technological requirements, there is a trade off between temperature, time and fuel quantity/density.

The lower the temperature the longer you have to wait for fusion to start / and the larger the require sized of your fuel quantity.

The longer you have to wait means the longer you have to 'contain' the nascent reactants, whilst maintaining their (high) temperature.

And the temperatures  achieved by these lasers are lower than some other methods.

But lasers are getting better and better so perhaps they will be able to laze a target for long enough to activate the fusion at lower temperatures.

This is not the first time it has been tried, but certainly the best I have heard of so far.

[mistermack]

You have to look very carefully at what people say, about fusion. They tend to make exaggerated claims, or cleverly deceptive words, to dress up their work and results. Often it's specially bad, when they are looking for investment money. 

With this, the describe it as a new approach, but I have a feeling that it's not the approach that's new, but the technical performance of new lazer types. That seems to have pepped upt what was going before.

On the face of it, the claim that the "avalanche reaction" furthur increases reaction yield by "approx a billion times more than previously thought" really sounds like a dramatic game-changer. But if you look at the wording carefully, what does it mean? If they previously thought that the avalanche reaction increase would be close to zero, then a billion times zero is still zero. So a hugely encouraging claim could actually mean nothing at all. 

And it probably does, because if they previously thought it was going to be a useful effect, then useful effect x 1,000,000,000 would be game set and match.

[beecee]

On 4/2/2022 at 1:48 AM, mistermack said:

You have to look very carefully at what people say, about fusion. They tend to make exaggerated claims, or cleverly deceptive words, to dress up their work and results. Often it's specially bad, when they are looking for investment money. 

100% correct on all counts. Still to achieve controlled nuclear fusion, would be a welcomed game changer.

[exchemist]

I can't immediately see what makes this project fundamentally different from the other inertial confinement fusion systems that have already existed for a number of years. It's certainly not a new idea at all to blast pellets of fuel with lasers, instead of confining  the plasma magnetically in a tokamak.

Is it the use of boron that is new? 

It looks to me as if there is a good dose of hype in this article. 

[mistermack]

Fusion relies on slamming hydrogen atoms into another element at insanely high speeds, overcoming the natural repulsive forces. The usual approach to achieving these speeds through phenomenal temperatures, which accelerates the molecules in random directions, and hopefully, you get enough collisions to score enough fusion events, to pay for the energy you put in and more. Lazer/pellet approaches produce very high instantaneous pressures, that multiply the number of collisions.

This approach, as I read it, doesn't rely on temperature to acclerate the hydrogen. I don't know how, but they say that the lazers directly acclerate the hydrogen, rather than heating it to acclerate it. So presumably, the acceleration is in the direction of the lazer and can be focussed on the target. 

They also say that the fusion reaction produces Helium atoms that are positively charge, so instead of collecting heat from the reaction, you are directly collecting charge, which can produce a current without steam turbines and generators being necessary. That's not actually a new approach, others are working on something similar.

It's all great stuff if it works, but the language used sounds a bit hyper to me, and it's lacking in any detail. 

[swansont]

At a conversion efficiency of 0.005%, I think they have a long way to go, and I didn't see a discussion of how this scales up. They were an order of magnitude better than they thought, but they have more than 4 orders of magnitude to go.

[exchemist]

26 minutes ago, swansont said:

At a conversion efficiency of 0.005%, I think they have a long way to go, and I didn't see a discussion of how this scales up. They were an order of magnitude better than they thought, but they have more than 4 orders of magnitude to go.

So still 20 years off, then, as ever. 

[Moontanman]

I read about this 40+ years ago, although it was named boron proton fission then. 

[Eise]

In 1976 I visited a talk about lasers, for interested laypeople. One of the applications of lasers that were presented was nuclear fusion. I remember the presenter told that in fact the only problem that had to be resolved was to fire the lasers at exactly the right time, to avoid that the pellet would be thrown out of the mid-point of the lasers. That is 46 years ago... 

Just to add another anecdote to Moontanman's.

I think when we had invested all the money in durable energy sources and develop technologies that use less energy, instead of nuclear fusion (including Tokamak and other methods), we would have solved our CO₂ emission problems...

Edited April 6, 2022 by Eise