
Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech? - chris_overseas
https://newatlas.com/energy/hb11-hydrogen-boron-fusion-clean-energy/
======
acidburnNSA
Always happy to see people doing new and interesting stuff with fusion. I got
into nuclear technology because of ITER back in the early 2000s. Worked on it
continuously (mostly in advanced fission) ever since.

> "The timeline question is a tricky one," he says. "I don't want to be a
> laughing stock by promising we can deliver something in 10 years, and then
> not getting there. First step is setting up camp as a company and getting
> started. First milestone is demonstrating the reactions, which should be
> easy. Second milestone is getting enough reactions to demonstrate an energy
> gain by counting the amount of helium that comes out of a fuel pellet when
> we have those two lasers working together. That'll give us all the science
> we need to engineer a reactor. So the third milestone is bringing that all
> together and demonstrating a reactor concept that works."

The fourth step is to deliver the reactor concept as promising machine. The
fifth step is to attach it to power generating equipment and demonstrate the
power plant. The sixth step is to scale up a supply chain capable of
delivering multiple units that compete with other sources of commodity
electricity (or other energy products). The seventh step is to scale to large
scale without being unduly burdened by either supply chain (raw material,
skilled labor) or regulatory impact/public concern that inevitably scales with
any large fleet of any new tech.

Fission made it to step 7 and then faltered and is now teetering depending on
where you look. It never scaled past 5% of total world primary energy.

The promise of fusion is to deliver nuclear energy with less public concern
than fission because it makes less radiologically hazardous material. The
challenge is to go through the physical, engineering, and commercial viability
phases as a power plant.

~~~
tinco
Off-topic question: is there some software part in nuclear energy systems that
is restricting plants or research? I'd like to contribute to the industry as a
non-physicist, but it's hard for me to imagine what kind of software might be
missing or is being sold by too expensive specialist companies.

I imagine most software is tied to the specific devices they run on, but
perhaps there's coupling or analytical software that could be better geared
towards the problem domain. Is there any fundamental issue that is waiting for
a good software solution?

~~~
ttul
I'm not an expert at all, but I follow news about fusion energy with keen
interest. Getting to conditions where fusion reactions can take place requires
modeling the physics with supercomputers. I think the physicists have a handle
on the software required to do that modeling; they also have access to the
computers.

I think if you have a software background and want to contribute, you should
consider applying for a job with one of the projects themselves. General
Atomics lists 135 software jobs ([https://www.ga-careers.com/search-
jobs/software/499/1](https://www.ga-careers.com/search-jobs/software/499/1))
for instance.

~~~
LaMarseillaise
I think it must be mentioned that in addition to fission and fusion (ITER)
work, General Atomics is the creator of the MQ-9 Reaper, which is commonly
used for drone strikes. A software job at this company may involve work on
these aircraft.

~~~
eloff
And that's bad because drones are evil? I'm sure I don't agree with a blanket
statement to that effect. They're a tool of warfare and I don't see how
they're particularly worse than other ways of killing your enemies. I can
think of a few ways they're better.

~~~
lovemenot
While you may not agree, you can surely recognise that others may appreciate
the heads-up. I can easily imagine some people may be pleased to work on
fusion, but not on drones.

Your parent merely notified us that more than one type of product is in
development at that company and one that is not fusion is specifically
designed to kill people.

~~~
eloff
Yes, that's fair. I think the subtext of the OPs post is that drones are evil,
but he didn't write that.

~~~
LaMarseillaise
lovemenot is correct. I do not think drones are evil.

------
willis936
27 comments and not one hit of the word “inertial”! The line about not being
thermonuclear and the description of the device in question (a sphere with
lasers) points towards an inertial confinement fusion (ICF) device. Most of
the fusion research eggs are in the thermonuclear basket, specifically
magnetic confinement fusion. It is good to research a diverse set of
approaches, but there are more engineering challenges to ICF reactors than
there are to MCF reactors. Pulses on the order of 1-2 Hz requires a mechanical
system that can cycle out the exhaust and replace the pellet in that time.
Going to reactor scales also requires high load thermal cycles. MCF ain’t
easy, and brings it’s own engineering challenges. The ones I always hear are
things like wall materials and fuel recycling, but these are largely solved or
in the process of being solved. The engineering challenge I see as the most
difficult for MCF are related to steady state operation. Tokamaks have no way
of being steady state. Stellarators do, but now the next problem is wall
conditioning. Wall materials outgas in hot plasma. A lot. Like more than the
fuel puffed in. The way this is handled in science machines is with glow
discharges of various species: plasma just below the temperature to cause wall
sputtering, coating the wall with carbon and boron for their absorptive
properties, etc. No one’s run a steady state hot plasma before, so no one
knows if these will be a non issue in reactors. Keeping the plasma clean may
be a challenge to keep the plasma from terminating. Aside from that MCF is
ready for prime time. It needs a big reactor for scaling laws to make it
energy profitable (and potentially money profitable). We just need some very
expensive test reactors to smooth out these issues.

~~~
anonsivalley652
It seems easy to conflate any or all approaches as fringe when no one's done
it yet, and especially if there are political and program-$ecurity concerns
overriding doing what's best, but some approaches scream magical thinking with
unexplained reasoning more than others (like one or more cold fusion proposals
in the early 1980's). OTOH, it seems like ICF and tokamak are the officially-
sanctioned dogma and all other approaches are discounted automatically.

Q0: Without bias from my opinion, how fringe or potentially legitimate does
IEC seem?

Q1: Props to the article's team that they invented some awesome lasers. Is
there enough experimental data yet on their novel approach to backup their
claims to justify funding a prototype? Would such a team be able to test this
on a shoestring budget without spending millions?

~~~
willis936
Personally, without drawing from rigorous empirical proof that doesn’t exit, I
don’t think things like unique IEC approaches are based in fairy tales. Fusion
science used to be very tribal and dogma was important. That era has largely
passed. Tokamak, stellarator, ps laser, steam machine, whatever. If you can
find the money to make it and do the science to show its performance, great.
Everyone wants you to do that. This idea of pulling resources away is tricky
to navigate, because there is finite resources spent on research and getting
any one design to work takes significant effort. That’s why so much is being
poured into ITER instead of other promising leads. Humans are ready to see a
machine work. It’s painful to get there. It’s not my first pick on a machine.
But in order to keep progress moving a real reactor needs to be made of some
kind.

~~~
wolfram74
The 2015 paper cites 3 other groups with experimental results supporting their
claims though.

~~~
willis936
You misinterpreted what I said. I said that I don't have evidence that
inertial electrostatic confinement is _not_ based in fairy tales. As in, they
are a reasonable route to explore.

~~~
rebuilder
Double negatives are tricky! Now you seem to be saying they probably _are_
based in fairy tales, or at least have no reason to think otherwise. The first
time around, you seemed to mean the opposite, which is what you say you
actually meant.

------
detritus
This seems.. too good to be true?

I don't have the Physics chops to untangle the likelihood of this tech and the
credibility of the process and its authors, so I'm hoping the HN crowd will be
able to pad out the story behind this.

Certainly, from my layperson's perspective, their website isn't exactly
encouraging... [https://www.hb11.energy/](https://www.hb11.energy/)

\- ed re: last line - "books and covers, and all that"

~~~
jabl
The big problem with H-B11 and other heavier fusion processes is that the
energy radiated away as brehmsstrahlung is greater that the energy gain from
the fusion. This was worked out by Todd Rider in his 1995 PhD thesis.

Yeah, in theory it might be possible to capture the brehmsstrahlung and pump
it back into the reactor with sufficiently high efficiency, but we're pretty
far away from that.

That being said, all these fancy fusion reactor schemes are interesting. Just
make them work on boring old D-T fuel first, then lets see if these other
fuels are usable, no?

~~~
DennisP
Yes, but Rider based that on various assumptions, and included an appendix on
various ways those assumptions might be violated to achieve net power with
aneutronic fuels. I think this reactor would qualify, since it doesn't rely on
thermal heating.

~~~
marktangotango
Polywell claimed to circumvent it as well, I was never clear on their basis
for that belief. At least Brussard seemed adamant when he was alive.

~~~
pfdietz
There was no basis for the belief. Read some of the comments in this reddit
thread.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/dmqgd5/is_the_polyw...](https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/dmqgd5/is_the_polywell_fusion_approach_still_under/)

------
andreiklochko
To shed a different light on this: think of temperature as walking through
mud. Your legs lose energy trying to slowly pull a lot of mud behind you. Now
think about skiing. A lot less snow is dragged with you but it flies fast.

Here, what is interesting is if one fusion reaction does happen, then the
alpha (helium) particles leave at 2.9 MeV. After two collisions with protons,
if the second proton they have hit hits in turn a boron nucleus, then it will
have exactly the right energy (612 keV) to have maximum chances at initiating
a second fusion reaction.

612 keV is like almost 7 billion degrees °C if considered as thermal energy,
and no experiment anywhere will get that hot for long. But compared to the
energy of the exiting helium nuclei, it's still much lower (0.612 MeV vs 2.9
MeV).

In other words, instead of cascading all the energy down and hoping the sea of
particles rises to a few billion degrees so enough particles do fusion to keep
the sea of other particles hot, here, the energy is preempted by proton atoms
after just 2 collisions and used immediately to start a second reaction, which
yields more helium nuclei at 2.9 MeV, essentially producing an "avalanche"
effect.

Finally, yes, they seem to have devised a way to obtain at least a small part
of the energy electrically, without relying on thermal energy, via direct
electric field deceleration of very fast charged particles.

This is like "the ultra rich (very fast particles) manage to create value
among themselves without having to cascade their wealth down to the crowd
(cold particles), and then upload that value to hyperspace (the electric field
from the electrodes), without ever interacting with the mass of the crowd (the
mass of the target), until a sufficient amount of fusion reactions have been
realized"

The avalanche process is explained in Hora's 2016 publication, with a
schematic page 9:
[https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1016/j.mre.2017.05.001](https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1016/j.mre.2017.05.001)

And yes, a petawatt (the energy of present day ultra-fast lasers) is a lot of
power. It was just chance that there was very little practical use to this
kind of power - until now.

That being said, I am not a true expert myself of this topic, so the true
barriers laying in front of this concept might be better explained by the
other comments here.

~~~
pas
Is there any description of how the "hit a capacity coil with a laser to
generate a magnetic field" thing works?

[https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-
core/c...](https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-
core/content/view/8BE057DC1BC9E0A588FB3ABAA993078C/S0263034617000799a.pdf/road_map_to_clean_energy_using_laser_beam_ignition_of_boronhydrogen_fusion.pdf)
I found this overview a bit confusing and sort of low quality, but at least it
references a lot of papers. (But haven't started hunting down any of them.)

~~~
grogers
[https://www.nature.com/articles/srep01170](https://www.nature.com/articles/srep01170)
ehich is the first linked paper in that section explains it well. The laser
fires through the hole and ablates material from the back disc. The electrons
from the created plasma reach the other side of the disc first before the ions
because they are lighter, causing a buildup of negative charge on the other
side. This charge differential drives a current between the two plates, which
creates a magnetic field inside the coil.

------
ChuckMcM
Sigh: _Second milestone is getting enough reactions to demonstrate an energy
gain by counting the amount of helium that comes out of a fuel pellet when we
have those two lasers working together. That 'll give us all the science we
need to engineer a reactor._

I love the work, I love that they have exploited the fact that we can build
things (lasers) now that we could not economically build before. But the fact
is that so many many things die on the aforementioned step from the article.

That is the step wherein the science doesn't give you a way to engineer a
reactor, instead it illuminates something you didn't know before and so that
you now realize you can't ever build a reactor that way.

So when I read these papers and the science isn't all figured out, I temper my
enthusiasm. High hopes, low expectations, that's a good motto here. Unlike the
stellerator where all the science is "known" and they are engineering an
implementation step by step by step.

I've added it to my fusion project collection under "interesting long shots",
check back in 5 years to see what the science taught them.

------
jl6
> First milestone is demonstrating the reactions, which should be easy.

They haven’t even demonstrated the reaction? What’s all the talk about results
being “billions” of times better than expected?

~~~
willis936
As someone who works on a stellarator: no plasma experiment in fusion research
is easy to do.

------
crusso
Here's a video explaining the reaction:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy0kHQASsX8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy0kHQASsX8)

~~~
dctoedt
Upvoted — the first minute or so of the video is very helpful; it shows (what
looks like) PowerPoint slides with drawings of a proton (1H nucleus) hitting a
boron nucleus (5B11); the proton fuses into the boron nucleus to create what
presumably is a single carbon nucleus (6C12), which then splits into three
helium nuclei (each 2He4) without emitting free neutrons.

(The very-crude video technique was fascinating to this non-artistic person:
Create PowerPoint slides, add subtitles for "narration" that float in and out,
and finally add stock music for background. That might be useful for flipped-
classroom courses.)

~~~
jobseeker990
Why would the carbon split? Why not stay carbon? And wouldn't this technically
be fission energy then?

~~~
grogers
The rough explanation I've heard before is to satisfy conservation of momentum
and energy together. But on doing some more digging this seems wrong.
C12+gamma is an output, just only for 0.01% of reactions. No idea why the
different byproducts have different rates though.

------
penetrarthur
> 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).

Surface of the Sun - 6000 C

Center of the Sun - 15000000 C

~~~
FredrikMeyer
I think they might be thinking of the corona of the sun

> The temperature in the corona is more than a million degrees, surprisingly
> much hotter than the temperature at the Sun's surface which is around 5,500°
> C

[https://scied.ucar.edu/solar-corona](https://scied.ucar.edu/solar-corona)

~~~
willis936
Fusion happens in the core of stars but is powered by gravity. “Temperature”
in this case is individual particle speed (in eV) because the particle speed
distribution is not necessarily Boltzman. Higher particle speeds are needed
because our confinement fields are weaker than the force of gravity inside a
star.

~~~
DonHopkins
Most SF stories have artificial gravity generators, because it simplifies
plots and lowers production costs. But is there actually a chance in hell that
we'll ever have that kind of control over gravity?

~~~
ekimekim
The Expanse offers a more realistic take to the same effect:

With sufficiently efficient fuel, the fastest path from A to B is by
constantly accelerating (more or less) towards it until you reach halfway,
then flipping and constantly decelerating until you arrive.

Under this kind of trajectory, you're under constant acceleration of, say, 1g
the whole time. This means you effectively have gravity for the entire trip,
as long as you've designed your ship such that the floor is in the same
direction as you apply thrust - think less traditional ship decks and more
like a skyscraper.

Another realistic option, of course, is a rotating section. But this generally
requires massive, "ugly" ships to work so it's pretty rare in fiction.

------
eveningcoffee
Cool thing about this is that it will be a direct energy capture if I
understand it correctly.

 _" The hydrogen/boron fusion creates a couple of helium atoms," he continues.
"They're naked heliums, they don't have electrons, so they have a positive
charge. We just have to collect that charge. Essentially, the lack of
electrons is a product of the reaction and it directly creates the current."_

~~~
javajosh
Yes it seems like you could generate extreme levels of electrostatic force by
collecting the Helium nuclei. Do that on one side of a capacitor, periodically
short it out (producing ordinary Helium) to clear both plates, and repeat. So
yeah a machine which takes hydrogen and boron and emits helium gas and
electricity. Sounds like it's worth doing, at least for the sake of children's
birthday parties.

~~~
multiplegeorges
Helium is limited on earth and we need it to cool things like MRIs and other
massive electromagnets.

Apart from literally saving humanity from a climate disaster, we can still use
our MRIs!

~~~
anonuser123456
You're not going to make an appreciable amount of helium with this process.

And MRIs of the future will be constructed with REBCO magnets and cooled with
liquid nitrogen.

~~~
russfink
Start looking for unexplained helium signatures among the exoplanets, as
evidence of a civilization that applied this method successfully.

~~~
anonuser123456
And when you don't find them because said civilizations were smart enough to
just go build Dyson spheres around red dwarfs then what?

~~~
ncmncm
Nobody will bother with Dyson spheres, or any sort of solar power collection,
once they have portable fusion generation. Once you have that, stars and
planets are superfluous except as raw material.

------
yufeng66
There is a warning sign. Without actually running the number, I believe the
energy generated by the proposed HB11 fusion should be several order of
magnitude higher compared to the electric energy alpha particle can carry. So
extreme hot temperature will be created regardless.

Edit: actually read the paper :) From the paper: H + 11B = 3 x 4He + 8.7 MeV

when alpha particle absorb the electron to become helium, it can carry about
50 eV energy. So vast majority of the energy generated will be kinetic energy
or photon energy which translate into very hot temperature at macro level.

~~~
phkahler
Yeah, I thought the electrical output seemed fishy too. Why are the electrons
stripped from the helium? And is that actually due to the energy of the fusion
reaction? And how much of the fusion energy is left after?

These are IMO the fundamental questions.

~~~
robocat
> Why are the electrons stripped from the helium?

Hydrogen + Boron -> 3×Helium + energy

The energy is mostly 2900keV kinetic energy for each Helium ion i.e. the He
ions just fuck off really fast and leave the elections behind.

If a He ions hits H atoms a couple of times, the second H hit has just the
right energy to then hit another Boron and create an an avalanche of
reactions.
[https://aip.scitation.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/aip...](https://aip.scitation.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/aip/journals/content/mre/2017/mre.2017.2.issue-4/j.mre.2017.05.001/20181217/images/large/j.mre.2017.05.001.figures.online.f9.jpeg)

~~~
phkahler
>> If a He ions hits H atoms a couple of times, the second H hit has just the
right energy to then hit another Boron and create an an avalanche of
reactions.
[https://aip.scitation.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/aip...](https://aip.scitation.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/aip..).

Well that's frightening.

------
1958325146
I am just learning about this reaction, but can anyone explain what is wrong
with the following naive idea?

\- Fire a stream of hydrogen ions with a particle accelerator at a chunk of
Boron 11. \- The hydrogen and boron combine and release heat and helium. \-
Use the heat from that to run a turbine and keep running your particle
accelerator.

It seems like you would be ending up with lower-energy collection of atoms.
Does that work but it is just not efficient enough to keep running the
accelerator, or what?

~~~
sam
The problem with firing a stream of hydrogen ions at a chunk of Boron 11 is
that most of the collisions between the hydrogen and the Boron are glancing
blows that will dissipate the energy very quickly. Only a small fraction of
the collisions result in a fusion reaction.

This is the reason why most fusion approaches rely on thermal systems. In a
thermal system, the ions have a bell-shaped distribution of energies and
undergo many collisions before they leave the region in which they are
confined and their energy leaves the system.

To achieve net gain, the temperature, density and energy confinement time must
be above a certain threshold. If the system is non thermal, like a stream of
hydrogen ions where the distribution of energies is a spike, the energy in the
hydrogen ions that are deflected by glancing blows must be recaptured somehow.

~~~
1958325146
Thank you!

------
wefarrell
Can someone explain why this is considered fusion? The reaction involves
shooting a proton (hydrogen) at a boron nuclei and outputting 3 alpha
particles. That seems more like the nuclei being split apart than fused
together.

~~~
DennisP
The explanation I've heard from a fusion scientist is that as far as they're
concerned, if you're initiating the reaction by colliding nuclei, it's fusion,
and if you're initiating it by hitting a large nucleus with a neutron, it's
fission.

~~~
wefarrell
Makes sense, thanks!

------
sonium
I don't want to be a nay-sayer but I did my PhD on Hydrogen implantation and
spentt enough time as a PostDoc to find a few thing odd here:

\- All work seems to be purely theoretical although the setup needed is not
that hard to come by. For 1000 USD / hour you can rent a proton implanter and
check the principle mechanisms of the reaction.

\- Everything is published in realativly low impact journals. There are a ton
of smart people in academia that love to "think outside the box" but nobody
seems to think that this is promising. This basicaly seems to be a one man
show of H. Hora.

\- It doesn't seem to be that radically new but the first paper was published.
I have not found what they have done in the meantime.

------
moneytide1
Straight from fusion to electricity without a steam turbine with helium to
harvest?

I've seen it said here on HN that the amount of helium out of a
deuterium/tritium is so small it is negligible.

From article: "My question is: Would that setup produce a continuous fusion
for some period with positive net energy generation?

Here is my argument why I think it would: Since Boron is solid at room
temperature, it's density is high, so I think the fusion rate per nucleon
would be quite high. As far as I know 100keV is the energy needed for
Hydrogen-1 and Boron-11 to fuse, while the resultant three He-4 nuclei should
have about 8MeV of energy. So indeed if all accelerated protons fuse then the
energy produced should be quite higher than the input. The problem that
immediately comes to mind is that as the container starts to rapidly heat up
as a result of the reactions the Boron inside would no longer be solid and may
even start to leak through the opening. But before that happens, would there
be at least a brief period where an efficient fusion can be sustained?"

------
sam
If new fusion startups like this one are interesting to folks on this thread,
here's a list of companies working on fusion energy that I've compiled:

[https://www.fusionenergybase.com/organizations/](https://www.fusionenergybase.com/organizations/)

~~~
Vinceo
Thank you. Your site in general is a great resource on fusion.

------
kragen
I think he's dechirping a convergent laser wavefront to get a 10-petawatt
pulse with which to accelerate hydrogen into a ¹¹B target to run an
alphavoltaic battery from an aneutronic p-¹¹B fusion avalanche resulting
within a plasma sphere contained by optical tweezers. Is that right?

------
jimbokun
> the design is "a largely empty metal sphere, where a modestly sized HB11
> fuel pellet is held in the center, with apertures on different sides for the
> two lasers. One laser establishes the magnetic containment field for the
> plasma and the second laser triggers the ‘avalanche’ fusion chain reaction.
> The alpha particles generated by the reaction would create an electrical
> flow that can be channeled almost directly into an existing power grid with
> no need for a heat exchanger or steam turbine generator."

> HB11 says its generators would be compact, clean and safe enough to build in
> urban environments.

Video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxEX8UueZ4U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxEX8UueZ4U)

~~~
galangalalgol
How do alpha particles get turned into current on a line?

------
pfdietz
I am very skeptical of this approach.

The big problem I have is the direct conversion approach being suggested. The
idea, as I understand it, was that the target is placed at the center of a
large sphere, and is negatively charged, so the alpha particles from fusion
slow down as they go up the potential to the surrounding spherical collector.

You see the problem with this, I hope. The violent and energetic event at the
target will produce gas and plasma, and lots of free electrons. What is
stopping that from shorting out this megavolt vacuum capacitor?

~~~
jabl
The direct conversion stuff doesn't seem that critical. If that doesn't work
out immediately, surely the first generation can use good old steam rankine
power conversion (or sCO2 Brayton, if that is deemed mature enough).

My worry is whether the specific fusion reactor concept itself is viable.

~~~
pfdietz
It's very critical. Without direct conversion, it's just another source of
heat, and all externally heated power cycles are becoming uncompetitive now.

And yes, the physics of the target is also something that needs external
verification.

------
missosoup
So is there a way to invest in this?

~~~
DennisP
It's a private company in Australia that likely needs more funding, so
probably so, if you meet your government's requirements for investing in that
sort of thing.

------
Robotbeat
Headline is misleading. Should be "hopes to leapfrog".

------
DeusExMachina
Can somebody with more understanding tell me if this idea I had is stupid or
has some merit?

Fusion will deliver an incredible amount of energy, making it cheap. Everybody
then turns up their energy consumption since it costs nothing. Raise heating
in houses, use AC everywhere, longer showers, more transportation, etc.

All this energy eventually becomes heat. Can it get to a threshold where it
can influence temperature on a global scale even if it lowers carbon
emissions? What am I missing?

~~~
nnq
> energy [...] costs nothing. Raise heating in houses, use AC everywhere,
> longer showers, more transportation

Yey, can we get to this future _faster_?! Joking aside, all the current eco-
friendly tech _diminishes comfort by a loooot_... we need low-energy habitats
that are actually _comfortable_ ffs.

For example, traveling around Europe, I see that the new trend in the
developed/western part is to _shiver you ass out during the cold months_ and
to _melt your brains out during the hot ones_ in _almost all public spaces!_
Like we're back in the pre-AC era! You need to get to Eastern Europe's bigger
cities to enjoy comfy heating/cooling habits like _proper heating in the
winter_ (yes, I want my >25 C in winter!) and proper cooling in the summer
(<18 C please!)... It's wasteful, but very much enjoyable! Snow fighting
after/before coming out/in of a 30+ C heated house is bliss :D Same a blasting
through an enjoyable heatwave after jumping out of a 15 C office and then back
in. Life's little pleasures.

 _After we invest so much of our lives in developing technology, we should at
least enjoy the simple comforts and pleasures it freaking offers!_

~~~
labawi
Are you actually serious and would heat your house in winter to a temperature
5-15(!!) ℃ more¹ than you would cool it to during summer?

I mean - it can be enjoyable for short periods, to warm up/cool off, but why
would you do that for extended periods, instead of going for a sauna or
swimming? Do you wear coats inside during summer?

If you are comfortable at <18 ℃ and at >25 ℃ (humans are highly adaptable),
then why go for the opposite of outside temperature? You are probably doing
yourself a disservice, making the outside temperature way less tolerable
(adaptation takes time), and the temperature shock can be dangerous for less
resilient people.

¹ If you are in a high humidity area, the temperature is not the only factor -
you need to get the humidity to acceptable levels, which is often done via
AC/heating.

------
toptal
Can someone provide a list of how much each item that is relevant to this
technology is likely to cost?

I’d really like to know how much each laser, pellet, metal case, etc will
likely cost in this and how difficult it will be to create each one.

I would have to imagine that these lasers will be the most difficult part of
all of this. It will also be good to know how long each laser lasts and how
much power they require to operate effectively.

------
hajile
"Naked Helium" \-- What a nice way to say "we output alpha radiation"

> "The hydrogen/boron fusion creates a couple of helium atoms," he continues.
> "They're naked heliums, they don't have electrons, so they have a positive
> charge. We just have to collect that charge. Essentially, the lack of
> electrons is a product of the reaction and it directly creates the current."

------
andymoe
So... what is their Current Q number?

“The fusion energy gain factor, usually expressed with the symbol Q, is the
ratio of fusion power produced in a nuclear fusion reactor to the power
required to maintain the plasma in steady state.” [1]

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor)

~~~
DennisP
Currently zero, because the necessary lasers are just now becoming available.

In theory, they've got a kJ laser to generate the magnetic field, a 30kJ laser
hitting the fuel, and a GJ energy output, for Q over 30,000 minus whatever
losses you have in the lasers and electricity harvesting.

[https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1016/j.mre.2017.05.001](https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1016/j.mre.2017.05.001)

------
tln
It would be awesome to know what experiments they've done, or if this is all
simulation

~~~
DennisP
There have been experiments, but only at lower power than required for fusion.
From their latest paper:

> A significant case of nonlinear deviation from classical linear physics was
> seen by the measurements, how the laser opened the door to the principle of
> nonlinearity and could be seen from the effect measured by Linlor [9]
> followed by others (see [7] p. 31) when irradiating solid targets with laser
> pulses of several ns duration. At less than one MW power, the pulses heated
> the target surface to dozens of thousand °C and the emitted ions had
> energies of few eV as expected in the usual way following classically. When
> the power of the nanosecond laser pulses was exceeding a significant
> threshold of few MW, the ions – suddenly – had thousand times higher
> energies. These keV ions were separated with linear increase on the ion
> charge indicating that there was not a thermal equilibrium process involved.

Lasers adequate for fusion are just now becoming available.

[https://www.hb11.energy/news-and-publications](https://www.hb11.energy/news-
and-publications)

------
JoeAltmaier
Why a pellet? Why not a gas of boron and hydrogen? Easier to feed
continuously.

~~~
kamesstory
Probably had to do with density, if the target is cascading reactions by
nuclei to nuclei contact. Solids have a higher chance of contact.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Not convinced. The excited atom will travel in a straight line without slowing
until it contacts another atom same as in a pellet. The mean free path is
longer, but the chance of collision is about the same?

------
caymanjim
Can we lose the question mark in the headline? It's not in the original.

------
archeantus
Seems like the jury is still out on whether they can reliably generate more
energy than it takes to initiate the reaction? It won’t go anywhere if it
can’t clear that hurdle.

------
nickik
I have long thought this fuel was a far better fit. Really in a practical
sense, you don't get that much benefit from most tritium fusion reactors
compared to fission. Meaning that compared to what we have now, fusion and
fission are so much more efficient anyway.

The primary problem for fission is state regulation and large cost even if you
didn't have to pass regulation. And most fusion concepts can't really address
that much better.

Directly creating current rather then having a whole heat to electricity
transformation might allow the whole thing to be much cheaper.

------
teilo
This article reads like a press release for a startup.

------
excalibur
> a swag of patents

Is this the correct term for a group of wild patents? What do you call a group
of wild patent trolls?

------
wokkel
What i find disturbing is when I start looking for other sources, google gives
me a news item on [https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/pioneering-
te...](https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/pioneering-technology-
promises-unlimited-clean-and-safe-energy) but there the article has been
retracted? Also another one that is behind a paywall it seems (cannot tell as
the paywall is broken). So I have 1 story on 1 website and the company website
itself. The news-site claims on their about page that they value old-school
journalistic values (I assume they mean, they investigate a story before
publishing) but it's hard to take that claim seriously without more credible
sources. For me this is interesting technology to keep an eye on, but without
more confirmation and research, this is cold-fusion for now.

~~~
DennisP
For the credible sources look at their publications in scientific journals.
They might be wrong but this is nothing like cold fusion.

------
cfv
On paper, this sounds absolutely awesome and a huge game changer.

I'm super concerned about the military applications tho. Giving functionally
endless, mostly free power to warmonger countries with the ability to field
drones is something extremely concerning for me.

~~~
foobiekr
they basically already have endless, mostly free power in the sense you are
getting at. that it isn't clean is irrelevant to their use case.

china, iran, the united states, etc. militaries are not hurting for energy and
already make heavy use of small nuclear reactors where just hauling fuel is
not an easier choice.

------
thinkcontext
The title is profoundly misleading. Fusion has not been achieved using this
method, the "leapfrog" results are from simulations.

------
foreigner
As a bonus it produces helium, which we've been running low on right? Break
out the party balloons!

~~~
Throwaway984332
It's a bit weird to say we're running out of He, not unless we're running out
of CH4. Which, theoretically we are.

But practically, with CH4, our modern concern is not running out of it, but
the associated GHG emissions of producing and burning it.

So we won't run out of He, so much as stop producing it.

~~~
escape_goat
It might be less confusing to refer to 'natural gas' in this context, rather
than CH4.

~~~
SamBam
'Natural gas' and not 'cow burps'?

~~~
escape_goat
Not cow burps. Cow burps do not contain helium gas. Helium is formed as a
product of natural radioactive decay. It tends to get trapped within the earth
in the same ways that natural gas does. Thus, helium is often present as an
impurity in natural gas. This is what the previous commentator was referring
to, but of course, CH4 is not actually a very good source of helium.

------
pier25
Is fusion capable of replacing all our energy systems?

If it works, is it the energy miracle humanity needs?

~~~
acidburnNSA
There certainly is enough fusion fuel on earth to power humanity at 10 or 100x
current consumption until the sun explodes without emitting any CO2.

Same can be said for fission, but it only powers 5% of the world due to what
can be called complications (even though many scientists insist that it's safe
and responsible).

Fusion is expected to have fewer complications, but we won't know until we
scale up a fleet of fusion power plants and understand all the nuance.

How's that for an answer?

~~~
pier25
Good answer!

> _Same can be said for fission, but it only powers 5% of the world due to
> what can be called complications_

But weren't these complications obvious before deciding to scale up fission
power plants?

The ones I know about:

\- Radioactive waste

\- Risk of failure

\- Unavoidable EOL

~~~
acidburnNSA
Certainly the generation of radioactive material in fission plants was
considered potentially fatal all the way back to Fermi, who said way back
when:

> It is not clear that the public will accept an energy source that produces
> this much radioactivity and that can be subject to diversion of material for
> bombs.

However, the nuclear fission industry has arguably shown that it can
technically manage radioactive wastes without undue harm to the populace.
Fission plants have killed up to 4000 people while producing 5% of the world's
energy. Fossil kills 4.2M people/year at 84% total energy. The math suggests
that nuclear fission has been highly successful. But the public largely still
doesn't like it.

Fusion indeed has a better going-in position. Potential complications involve
how hard/complex/expensive it is to realize the engineering challenges.

Aneutronic fusion plants, like fossil plants, will likely also have an EOL
from a thermal creep, corrosion, cracking, etc. POV. Normal fusion plants will
definitely have a EOL from neutron doses to structural materials.

~~~
coda_
Appreciate all your comments here. As someone that knows a lot about this
stuff, may I ask... would you have any concerns living near (say 5 miles) from
a deep geological repository, like what is described here:

[https://www.nwmo.ca/en/A-Safe-Approach/Facilities/Deep-
Geolo...](https://www.nwmo.ca/en/A-Safe-Approach/Facilities/Deep-Geological-
Repository/)

~~~
acidburnNSA
I spent the first 17 years of my life 5 miles from an operating nuclear power
plant. The stored nuclear waste from this plant is still there (though the
plant itself was decommissioned). When I visit my family, I am right there
next to it. It sits in dry casks exactly like these [1]. I feel 100% safe
being in that situation at all times, and I know in elaborate detail the
characteristics of nuclear waste and radiation in general.

If the waste was 500m below ground in a designed deep geologic repository I
wouldn't feel that much safer (because I already feel totally safe from the
dry casks). But it would be at least a little more out of reach for terrorists
and whatnot so from that perspective, yeah I'd prefer if it was underground.

I would gladly put my house and raise my family directly on top of a deep
geologic nuclear waste repository. This really isn't reckless. I have a Geiger
counter. I know what levels of radiation are safe. I know the risks. It's
exceedingly low. I am far more worried about hamburgers.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUvvIzH2W6g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUvvIzH2W6g)

~~~
coda_
Amazing. Thank you very much for your message on this.

------
hnewsshadowbans
I'll believe it when I see it. Radical new technology is always leapfrogging
conventional fusion and has been overtaking and rendering it 'obsolete' for
the past 30-40 years.

------
annoyingnoob
I hope they get their voodoo to work. The world could sure use it.

------
ycombonator
Now that’s science

------
tartoran
This proves once again what could happen if one is not to follow the herd.

~~~
melling
“He called this in the 70s, he said this would be possible. It's only possible
now because these brand new lasers are capable of doing it.“

He knew it would work 50 years ago.

I imagine there are ideas being discussed today that will come to fruition 50
years from now.

... or 30 years. Our choice.

~~~
dlsso
Yes. This was my favorite quote. With slightly more context:

You know what's amazing? Heinrich is old, he's 84 or so. He called this in the
70s, he said this would be possible. It's only possible now because these
brand new lasers are capable of doing it. That, in my mind, is awesome.

------
TomMarius
My nuclear fusion physicist friend is very sceptical.

~~~
throwaway9d0291
On its own, this isn't a very substantial comment. Can you elaborate on why
your friend is sceptical and what effort they put in to come to that
conclusion?

~~~
TomMarius
He says it's a wild dream which everyone who has studied it knows due to the
physical properties. He has a Ph.d. and worked on the Prague-based fusion
reactors. I think it's useful to know that people with expertise consider it
wild even though they're not exactly sure why themselves. You don't need to
take it into consideration if you know better.

------
gautamcgoel
Not to be a downer, but if you say your technology is working a billion times
better than expected, one of two things is probably true: you are trying to
stir up media hype, or you don't really understand the underlying technology
to begin with.

------
taneq
Indeed, the four elements, like Man alone, are weak, but together the form the
strong fifth element.

[https://youtu.be/2IfCUsBpR-I](https://youtu.be/2IfCUsBpR-I)

------
RandomWorker
Google polywell the US military has been funding this for the past 20 years.
There are some issues that might be solved with scaling the device. A company
called emc2 was spun off this US military project.

~~~
DennisP
Polywell is a completely different method.

------
redm
“ This cascading avalanche of reactions is an essential step toward the
ultimate goal: reaping far more energy from the reaction than you put in. The
extraordinary early results lead HB11 to believe the company "stands a high
chance of reaching the goal of net energy gain well ahead of other groups."

Its a great read, but it sounds like its still a net energy loss.. one more
brick on the road though.

