From the UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES and the “coming to a power plant near you in 30 to 50 years” department
A laser-driven technique for creating fusion that dispenses with the need for radioactive fuel elements and leaves no toxic radioactive waste is now within reach, say researchers
Dramatic advances in powerful, high-intensity lasers are making it viable for scientists to pursue what was once thought impossible: creating fusion energy based on hydrogen-boron reactions. And an Australian physicist is in the lead, armed with a patented design and working with international collaborators on the remaining scientific challenges.
In a paper in the scientific journal Laser and Particle Beams today, lead author Heinrich Hora from the University of New South Wales in Sydney and international colleagues argue that the path to hydrogen-boron fusion is now viable, and may be closer to realisation than other approaches, such as the deuterium-tritium fusion approach being pursued by U.S. National Ignition Facility (NIF) and the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor under construction in France.
“I think this puts our approach ahead of all other fusion energy technologies,” said Hora, who predicted in the 1970s that fusing hydrogen and boron might be possible without the need for thermal equilibrium. Rather than heat fuel to the temperature of the Sun using massive, high-strength magnets to control superhot plasmas inside a doughnut-shaped toroidal chamber (as in NIF and ITER), hydrogen-boron fusion is achieved using two powerful lasers in rapid bursts, which apply precise non-linear forces to compress the nuclei together.
Hydrogen-boron fusion produces no neutrons and, therefore, no radioactivity in its primary reaction. And unlike most other sources of power production – like coal, gas and nuclear, which rely on heating liquids like water to drive turbines – the energy generated by hydrogen-boron fusion converts directly into electricity. But the downside has always been that this needs much higher temperatures and densities – almost 3 billion degrees Celsius, or 200 times hotter than the core of the Sun.
However, dramatic advances in laser technology are close to making the two-laser approach feasible, and a spate of recent experiments around the world indicate that an ‘avalanche’ fusion reaction could be triggered in the trillionth-of-a-second blast from a petawatt-scale laser pulse, whose fleeting bursts pack a quadrillion watts of power. If scientists could exploit this avalanche, Hora said, a breakthrough in proton-boron fusion was imminent.
“It is a most exciting thing to see these reactions confirmed in recent experiments and simulations,” said Hora, an emeritus professor of theoretical physics at UNSW. “Not just because it proves some of my earlier theoretical work, but they have also measured the laser-initiated chain reaction to create one billion-fold higher energy output than predicted under thermal equilibrium conditions.”
Together with 10 colleagues in six nations – including from Israel’s Soreq Nuclear Research Centre and the University of California, Berkeley – Hora describes a roadmap for the development of hydrogen-boron fusion based on his design, bringing together recent breakthroughs and detailing what further research is needed to make the reactor a reality.
An Australian spin-off company, HB11 Energy, holds the patents for Hora’s process. “If the next few years of research don’t uncover any major engineering hurdles, we could have prototype reactor within a decade,” said Warren McKenzie, managing director of HB11.
“From an engineering perspective, our approach will be a much simpler project because the fuels and waste are safe, the reactor won’t need a heat exchanger and steam turbine generator, and the lasers we need can be bought off the shelf,” he added.
###
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
NIF is intertial confinment, not magnetic confinement like ITER. It has zero chance of success for reasons explained in essay Going Nuclear.
NIF uses inertial not magnetic confinement. Target gets hit from all sides simultaneously. Very different than ITER.
If Nicola Tesla were here today it would have been figured out
Actually he wouldn’t as he believed that atoms were the basic building blocks of everything and could not be split in any way
He died two years before the first atom bomb where he would have realized his theory was rubbish. He thought he could do make energy using his own theory from New York Herald Tribune, July 9th, 1933
https://teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/articles/tesla-predicts-new-source-power-year
So as much as a genius as he was he would have been of no help at all 🙂
The abstract promises the conversion of the output charged alpha particles directly to electricity. I am extremely interested in details – but the article is paywalled. Do they somehow create positive alpha particles without creating electrons as well?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion
The easier form is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_generator
Electrons are very cheap. You can get them from Twitter for almost nothing.
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1704/1704.07224.pdf
The alpha particle cascade from the initial plasma created by the sub picosecond pulse interacts with the magnetic field created by the second laser — creating an electric current
Reading through the pdf and giving this nowhere near as much thought as it possibly deserves, it looks like there are several, different issues here:
1. Can they achieve fusion? It seems quite likely that they can. Not that hard I think. Strictly speaking, Farnsworth Fusors, Muon-catalyzers, and current Tokamaken all achieve some fusion. Just not enough.
2. Can they achieve sustained pulsed operation? (quite possibly?) For how long? A few seconds? A few minutes? Long enough to be useful commercially?
3. Can they tame the electric output? That’s not so clear. Reading through the pdf, it sounds like they are planning to toss a new negatively charged “reactor unit” into the grounded reactor shell every second and somehow capture the resulting Gigawatt(780A*1.4mV)? electric pulse.
Many questions:
..Current petawatt lasers are laboratory curiosities, not off the shelf tools? They have tiny foci? Therefore, the “reactor units” are also tiny?
. The ‘reactor unit’s need to be very precisely placed because the laser foci are very small?
. The grounded shell is the cathode?
..What are the charge carriers?
. Where’s the anode? The minute(?) ‘reactor units’?
. How do they get the used reactor units out of the reactor? (If they are small maybe they just vacuum them out in the wee hours of Sunday morning?)
. How do they actually capture the electricity. (A) coil(s)? Where?
. Sounds like they are going to be dealing with a lot of energy in a very small space. Any inefficiencies at all in the electrical part and they will be dealing with a VERY warm reactor?
Are there any pictures of the proposed device? That’d sure help.
@ur momisugly Don
I was incorrect earlier – they do identify destruction per shot.
However, the target need not be destroyed on each shot — there are petawatt class fusion experiments that show small amounts of material being turned to plasma
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms5149?message-global%3Dremove
Electron energies greater than about 2 mega-electronvolts produce gamma rays that can be transformed into pairs of electrons and positrons (pair production). But using some very thin gold targets, physicist Tom Cowan and others found more positrons than expected, which may indicate that they had created an electron-positron plasma.
https://str.llnl.gov/str/MPerry.html
EXAWATT lasers — Vulcan has 10E+21 cm^2 incident power — result in gamma excitation and electron-positron pair creation
Oh yeah, when I go shopping for laser pointers, I always make sure not to confuse them with the petawatt scale units sitting right next to them.
that would make for an interesting ppt presentation at least. You’d have the audience’s attention every time you blasted a small hole in the screen and the wall behind it.
The five megawatt laser in Real Genius did. And it cooked popcorn too.
And you show your ignorance — power = work/time
1kilojoule/10E-12 seconds = 1 PETAWATT
Yes they can now create picosecond (E-12) laser pulses
MikeW: “fusion will always be 30 – 50 years in the future”. That gave me a laugh, in 1964 I went to UT-Austin as a freshman physics major as they were starting work on their first Tokamak. Everybody said 20-30 years away and I wanted to get in on the ground floor. Two years later I realized I wasn’t cut out to be a physicist. Lucky me, otherwise I might still be chasing that dream …
If it paid the freight all those years it wouldn’t be so bad. Sort of like climate science.
Fusion-capable plasma is chaos in a bottle. If plasma physicists can’t manage that for a minute, how do climate scientists expect to manage the chaos that is the earth’s climate system for a hundred years?
Climate science left the realm of science 25 yeas ago with the arrival of the Clinton Administration and Al Gore as VP.
Wow. Only 5,400,000,032 degrees Fahrenheit. Can I use a welder?
Coming to a power plant near you in 30 to 50 years indeed. Thanks for the info. And the laugh. I won’t be holding my breath, but interesting.
I’m not sure how you convert the electricity generated into a feasible energy feed. Researchers would be better off figuring out how to convert lightning into a direct energy feed since (a) that’s natural (b) normal (c) deployable and (d) non-nuclear.
But not reliable or scheduleable/dispatchable.
20 years ago, or less, I never dreamed that shale oil would now be so accessible. In fact, I had significant ‘bets’ in the markets to back that up. We were told 20 years ago, that yes there was significant deposits of shale oil and gas, but it would not be recoverable for a very long time, if ever. Not…did I ever get my head handed to me. I was sure on the wrong site of the bet on that one.
Fusion energy has always been 30-50 years out, because we can’t yet manage the containment. It is not something we don’t understand about fusion itself: we understand fairly well what must be done to achieve the fusion process. It is a matter of the proper hardware, and the proper technique. I wouldn’t bet against fusion being made a deliverable at some point in the near to mid term future. Maybe beyond my lifetime, but will essentially be what replaces fossil fuels for a lot of stationary applications like electricity. This is why I think skipping some of the renewables that have fairly low capacity factors, in favour of really upgrading and hardening the electrical Grid. We will still need a grid to deliver any fusion powered electricity, unless of course, some kid in his basement figures out what Tesla was really fascinated about: Wireless Transmission of electricity.
Earthling2. There are different kinds of “shale oil”. For example, in Estonia they generate electricity (and presumably huge amounts of “ash”/clinker) by burning their local oil shale directly. Some oil shales will produce commercial quantities of liquid hydrocarbons when their permeability is improved by hydraulic fracturing. OTOH the vast “shale oil” deposits of the Rocky Mountain Green River formation remain largely intractable because the hydrocarbons are waxy solids entombed in impermeable rock.
As some commenters have already noted above, the Boron-Hydrogen reaction takes place in two stages. The first is the nuclear fusion of boron and hydrogen, which is endothermic and produces carbon nuclei. The second stage is the spontaneous fission of the excited carbon nuclei into helium nuclei, which is exothermic and releases more energy than was required to achieve the first, fusion reaction, so an over-unity process is theoretically possible.
My question: Why bother at all with the first, endothermic stage of the process – i.e. why not start off with carbon as the primary feedstock and simply work on finding ways of making it fission?
Sometimes there is no more efficient way to get from A to C without going through B.
True, Paul. But if B is the point where we have an excited carbon-12 nucleus at the threshold energy-level of fissioning into three stable helium-2 nuclei, what is point A?
Is it one unexcited boron-11 nucleus plus one unexcited hydrogen-1 nucleus? Or is it, perhaps, one unexcited carbon-1 nucleus? The pathway to B from one of these starting points is likely to be more efficient than the other, but unless we research both of them we won’t know which one actually is.
The energy does not come from carbon. The carbon nucleus is created in a highly excited – unstable – state by a H-B reaction. Then it splits into an alpha and boron, which in turn splits into two alphas.
You could also add energy to a C12 nucleus, forcing it into this process. But the energy needed is much higher than the energy of these three alphas. Carbon is more stable than helium.
Correction: … splits into an alpha and beryllium …
Curious George December 14, 2017 at 2:03 pm:
Thanks for those interesting details, George, but I think you’ve just demonstrated that the energy output does indeed come from carbon, albeit that the carbon is in a suitably excited state.
Why is that? Effectively, the boron–hydrogen fusion process is adding the required energy to a C12 nucleus, isn’t it? But is there an easier, more efficient and perhaps more controllable way of doing it? Perhaps by supplying electromagnetic radiation in precise resonance with specific energy-levels of the C12 nucleus?
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1704/1704.07224.pdf
This is not a thermal energy system
It is laser induced plasma jet of alpha particles interacting with a magnetic field potential generating a current
Cassio December 14, 2017 at 10:51 am
As some commenters have already noted above, the Boron-Hydrogen reaction takes place in two stages. The first is the nuclear fusion of boron and hydrogen, which is endothermic and produces carbon nuclei. The second stage is the spontaneous fission of the excited carbon nuclei into helium nuclei, which is exothermic and releases more energy than was required to achieve the first, fusion reaction, so an over-unity process is theoretically possible.
My question: Why bother at all with the first, endothermic stage of the process – i.e. why not start off with carbon as the primary feedstock and simply work on finding ways of making it fission?
Because we’re releasing the binding energy from the more tightly bound nuclei, if we started with C we’d have to put in as much energy as we would get out.
The nuclear binding energy curve. is below. The formation of nuclei with masses up to Iron-56 releases energy, while forming those that are heavier requires energy input. This is because the nuclei below Iron-56 have high binding energies, while the heavier ones have lower binding energies, as illustrated above.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Binding_energy_curve_-_common_isotopes.svg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion#Proton-boron
The Wikipedia piece mentions side-reactions which amount to a significant fraction of the energy generated. Granted, it’s only 0.1% of the total, but that’s a megaJoule for each gigaJoule produced. We’ll still need to deal with radioactive products.
Lop say that the side reactions will produce less radioactivity than burning coal – which apparently usually includes a small proportion of radionuclides. Don’t forget even people and bananas are radioactive.
Lop=LPP how is that even a spellcheck?
Great, now how does a person invest in this ? What to buy ?
I want to know who has petawatt lasers on their shelves. There are more and more drones buzzing around the neighborhood – I don’t want to just shoot them down, I want to vaporize ’em!
sub picosecond pulses = PETAWATT Lasers at a few hundred joules
For example a 500Joule (watt) laser using a .17 picosecond pulse = 3 Petwatts
5.0E+2 watts/1.7E-13 seconds = 3E+15
http://www.2laser.com/all_new_200_300_400_500_metal_cutting_laser_machines_–_financing_available
So I can’t just go up the street to Best Buy. Dang it. I was thinking since they already had the laser-armed drones on the shelf there (yes, really), they might have the AA for us groundlings.
Here’s a petawatt laser, but it’s not on a shelf:
https://phys.org/news/2015-07-japanese-team-world-powerful-laser.html
Suggest you contact Osaka University for a price quote.
Practical fusion in 20 years: Always has been; always will be.
When you talk about processes that revolve around the D-T reaction, I’d tend to agree with you. But some of these new ideas seem much more doable, and in my lifetime (I’m 55).
And with no thermal mass involved, the electrical output could be dispatchable on very short time scales, so useful for more than just baseload power.
Yawn! Wake me up when a demonstration fusion reaction (a) generates more power than it requires, and (b) is sustained for more that 1 minute.
Fusion is a complete dead end; it will never happen.
Fusion is, in essence, the conversion of mass to energy and depends on gravity. By the now classic formula E = mc². There are no substitutes known.
Stars convert potential energy to kinetic energy by gravity, which is a property of mass. It is true that mass can be converted to energy by Einstein’s equation. It’s also true that energy can be used as a proxy for mass by that same equation, which is what the experimenters are doing. They’re putting large amounts of energy in a small space and therefore creating gravity, which causes their “fuel” to fuse. But there’s always loss in that conversion. Hydrogen and Boron aren’t a fuel in this use, they’re simply reactants.
There can be no net energy gain in this reaction according to the second law of thermodynamics. This entire project is completely useless and a waste of time and energy; it cannot succeed.
So according to Bartleby the Hydrogen bomb is impossible!
Phil, I didn’t say anything of the sort. Hydrogen bombs are pumped by a fission reaction. Energy release from fission is amplified by the thermonuclear reaction. You still aren’t getting something for nothing.
I’m working on a Prius-Tesla collider. It yields crapolium and a high-energy particle of smug satisfaction.
LOL. I’ll take two.
Proton-boron fusion has been discussed in high-beta designs like FRCs and Polywells for decades. The “aneutronic” reactions might be as much as 1/100,000 as D-D or D-T reactions, but this buys you surprisingly little because the shielding requirements don’t actually change all that much (it basically saves you a few inches of concrete), even before you consider the side reactions that will occur in the tails of the thermal distribution.
What made p-b fusion compelling was the fact you could spin the resulting alphas into a deceleration grid and produce DC power directly — no steam turbines needed!
Of course, laser fusion is strictly a showy novelty and always has been — the three factors in a fusion reactor are density, containment (how fast you lose energy), and temperature. Tokamaks and related magnetic confinement devices have good containment, but are challenged on temperature and density. High-beta devices usually have good density, but struggle with containment and temperature. Lasers have temperature, but containment and density are basically ignored.
It’s very unlikely a laser system can repeatedly produce and harness more energy than it takes to generate the laser, but I look forward to some amusing and possible clever designs.
“simulations” There is that pie in the sky word again. You can make simulations do whatever you want with the proper input. The true point of the paper is “we need more money.”
Who is this guy “Bartleby”? A scrivener? I’m surprised few have called him out on the ridiculous claim that the sun is powered by gravitational collapse. The inability to account for its actual power output by this mechanism prompted Hans Bethe to propose hydrogen fusion. The physics of fission and fusion have been verified over the past half century by experiment and practice. There is no violation of the 2nd Law. And the jury is out on lasers, but no one doubts the utility of a spark plug in igniting the fuel and air in an Otto Cycle engine, or claims that the spark plug uses more energy than the combustion of the fuel. Same thing for laser ignition of a fusion reaction. Not having to deal with a 14 MeV neutron is a great convenience. I wish them success.
Energy conversion, direct through an electromagnetic field, or by running the resultant plasma through an MHD generator, or by some other method, is an engineering detail. Not a trivial one, but in principle one with technology options that have not been optimized yet.
“From an engineering perspective, our approach will be a much simpler project because the fuels and waste are safe …..”
Stop me if you have heard this sc@m before!!
Society needs a finite supply of energy. The power industry is not having a problem delivering it.
The premise presented by armchair quarterbacks is that there are terrible problems.
I am an engineer, I have checked, no terrible problems. I have observed many coal plants and even lived next to one. I have not seen a dirty one in 30 years. Natural gas works great too.
The nuclear industry has demonstrated that we can fill the gap.
Engineering is about the practical. If you want to debate hypothetical things like fusion and MSR, I am going to tell you it is not practical.
When your grandchildren have an operating prototype, they can compare it to the the 100 year old LWR that is still running.
I was initially puzzled by the question of why don’t the small fusion teams use D-T instead of p-B in their early experiments, as D-T should be able to work at lower temperatures and densities. Perhaps the answer is that T is unavailable to them, while H and B11 are simple to get. But then, what about D-D?
Here is a possibility: How do you make a pellet of deuterium and tritium? Frozen to solid form at 14 K? With hydrogen and boron, you can use decaborane (B10H14), which is solid at room temperature.
Also, what is the point? D-T results in the 14 MeV neutron, which is a gross inefficiency, and not nice to be around.
My thanks to Paul Penrose, Curious George, Karl and Phil. for replying to my question of December 14, 2017 at 10:51am as to why we cannot dispense with the first stage of the H-B reaction and simply start with excited Carbon instead. I now understand that this would be counterproductive energy-wise because the second stage of the process (i.e. from C¹² to 3xHe⁴) is in fact endergic and not exergic as I had thought.
I must say though, as a novice in the field of nuclear physics, that simply bashing atomic nuclei into one another in order to make some of them fuse together and express energy seems, to me, a very crude, hit-or-miss kind of approach that is almost certainly bound to produce all kinds of unwanted and problematic side-reactions, by-products and consequences. Surely, there must be an easier, more intelligent way of approach that exploits the intrinsic key properties of atomic nuclei to advantage, so that the participating nuclei will naturally do, of their own accord, what we want them to do and nothing else? Such an approach could lead to controllable cold fusion-power from small units, but it is hard to see how the current ultra-high temperature and pressure approach, which seeks to recreate the conditions that prevail in the sun’s core, ever could.
Here’s a suggestion. We understand from fundamental physics that atomic nuclei consist basically of particles (or “wavicles”, to be more precise) in various states of vibration and that it is the interlocking harmony of vibrations within them that holds each stable nucleus together as a single entity. In order for two nuclei to unite to form a third nucleus, their respective vibration-patterns must also harmonise. If they do harmonise, they will fuse together and cohere automatically as soon as they come close enough together for the attractive strong nuclear binding force to overcome the repulsive electromagnetic force of the protons in the respective nuclei.
So I think the challenge before us could be viewed as being to so arrange matters that the nuclei which we are wanting to unite are in compatible vibration-states and are not prevented from uniting by the protonic repulsion. Since bare atomic nuclei are electrically ionized they are susceptible to electromagnetic manipulation and this property may enable us to fulfil both of the necessary preconditions that I’ve just mentioned.
Suppose, for example, the nuclei were to be given just the right quantities of spin and aligned along a common spin-axis, pole-to-pole, and suppose they were made to spin in opposite directions so that their electromagnetic force of protonic repulsion turned into the electromagnetic force of attraction between two opposing electric currents, surely there would then be nothing to prevent them from fusing together along the spin axis. Voila: Cold fusion!
Of course, fusion could only happen in this way between vibrationally compatible nuclei and developing the techniques of electromagnetic manipulation that would bring those nuclei into the right vibrational and spin states might be a big challenge in itself, so quite a lot of R&D may still be needed before this method could yield results. But to me it looks potentially easier than hot fusion in the long run.