The dream of humanity to imitate the forces that created their habitat has been alive for at least as far back as the time when humans with a single language decided to build a city with a tower that reached the heavens. For such a people, “nothing they plan will be impossible to them,” it is recorded.
For at least the same time frame, humanity has sought comfort through technology. While primitive heat producers like coal and wood are still used today, the discovery that petroleum, natural gas, and even moving water could generate a newly discovered phenomenon known as “electricity” transformed the industrial revolution into the modern era.
Not until the 1930s did German scientists build on Enrico Fermi’s discovery that neutrons could split atoms to recognize that splitting atoms would release significant energy – energy that could be used for both bombs and electricity generation. By the 1950s, scientists began building nuclear fission-based power plants that today provide about a tenth of the world’s electricity.
Scientists and engineers also began to envision the potential of nuclear fusion — the reaction of light atomic nuclei powers the sun and the stars. Since that time, they have worked feverishly, but with little success, to replicate this energy-rich reaction using deuterium and tritium.
One group of scientists and engineers decided to try an alternative approach.
Founded in 1998, California-based TAE Technologies has been developing a reactor that runs on proton-boron aneutronic fusion – that is, a fusion reaction that fuses a hydrogen nucleus with non-radioactive boron-11 instead of fusing hydrogen isotopes of deuterium and tritium. Their goal is to develop commercial fusion power with the cleanest-possible environmental profile.
All efforts at fusion require chambers that can withstand temperatures of millions of degrees Celsius and immense pressure that are needed to fuse two isotopes together. To accomplish this requires huge amounts of energy – and until recently, more energy than the fusion produced.
Most fusion researchers, including those building the ITER project being built in France, rely on a donut-shaped tokamak reactor chamber, in which a stream of plasma must be held away from its walls by electromagnets for any energy to be produced. The tokamak design uses a toroidal magnetic field to contain the hydrogen plasma and keep it hot enough to ignite fusion.
Sadly, as with ITER, project costs have soared and timeframes have fallen by the wayside despite occasional breakthroughs. Over decades, tokamak designs became gigantic, with huge superconducting magnetic coils to generate containment fields; they also had huge, complex electromagnetic heating systems.
Spurred by the failures of wind and solar to fully satisfy the desire for “clean energy,” governments and private investors began investing heavily into fission and fusion projects. Oak Ridge, Tennessee, has tapped into a $60 million state fund intended to bolster both fission and fusion energy in atomic energy’s American birthplace.
New research at the University of Texas, in conjunction with Los Alamos National Laboratory and Type One Energy Group, uses symmetry theory to help engineers design magnetic confinement systems to reduce plasma leakage from tokamak magnetic fields.
The old method used for a stellarator reactor relied on perturbation theory. The new method, which relies on symmetry theory, is a game changer. It can also be used to identify holes in the tokamak magnetic field through which runaway electrons push through their surrounding walls and greatly reduce energy output.
The TAE Technology reactor is entirely different than any of the tokamak or stellarator fusion chambers. In 2017, the company introduced its fifth-generation reactor, named Norman, which was designed to keep plasma stable at 30 million C. Five years later the machine had proven capable of sustaining stable plasma at more than 75 million C.
That success enabled TAE to secure sufficient funding for its sixth-generation Copernicus reactor and to envision the birth of its commercial-ready Da Vinci reactor. But in between, TAE developed Norm.
Norm uses a different type of fusion reaction and a new reactor design that exclusively produces plasma using neutral beam injections. The TAE design dumps the toroidal field in favor of a linear magnetic field that is based on the “field-reversed configuration” (FRC) principle, a simpler, more efficient way to build a commercial reactor.
Instead of massive magnetic coils, FRC makes the plasma produce its own magnetic containment field. The process involves accelerating high-energy hydrogen ions and giving them a neutral charge, then injecting them as a beam into the plasma. That causes the beams to be re-ionized as the collision energy heats the plasma to set up internal toroidal currents.
Norm’s neutral beam injection system has cut the size, complexity, and cost, compared to that of Norman, by up to 50%. But not only is an FRC reactor smaller and less expensive to manufacture and operate, says TAE, it can also produce up to 100 times more fusion power output than a tokamak — based on the same magnetic field strength and plasma volume.
The FRC reactor also can run on proton-boron aneutronic fusion, which, instead of producing a neutron it produces three alpha particles plus a lot of energy. The fewer neutrons also do less damage to the reactor; the energy being released as charged particles is easier to harness. Less shielding is required, and, perhaps best of all, boron-11 is relatively abundant and not radioactive.
So, while “Norm” may not be the final step in developing commercial fusion energy, TAE’s hope is that fusion energy will the “norm” as early as the mid-1930s (sic, 2030s?). FRC technology has materially de-risked Copernicus, according to TAE CEO Michi Binderbauer.
If Norm is as advertised, it will accelerate the pathway to commercial hydrogen-boron fusion – a safe, clean, and virtually limitless energy source.
But is humanity ready for free energy to be the “norm?”
Duggan Flanakin is a senior policy analyst at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow who writes on a wide variety of public policy issues.
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
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Tokamak reactors have been around since the 1950s. They have gotten better over time, but still nowhere near continuous operation. Like the flying cars we were told we’d all have by the year 2000, fusion reactors providing us with abundant power has made the same unfulfilled promises.
Durable things that fly (high or for any amount of time) require massive amounts of energy to do so. The failure of one leads to the failure of the other?
I used to want flying cars. Then someone pointed out to me how windy they’d be. His argument went something like this.
A two-seat Robinson R22 has a rotor area of 500 sq ft. It weighs less than a ton. I have never stood next to an R22, but I have been near other larger helicopters, and I have every reason to believe an R22 puts out a lot of wind. Now imagine that all confined to a car’s footprint, 6 feet by 15 feet, 1/5 the R22’s rotor area. It would need 5 times the wind speed to lift itself if it were all rotors, and if it only had them at corners, probably 10-20 times the wind speed. You won’t park that in your garage with the engine and rotors running. Pedestrians won’t put up with that landing on streets. And that’s just a two-seater!
So no flying cars.
But it does make me curious what a more rigorous physics analysis would say.
Maybe those who made the “predictions” were expecting anti-gravity by now.
Also, the way people drive, giving them another dimension to screw up would be a very bad idea.
Oh, that second one is easy. It will all be automated by then. You’ll hop in and say, “Home, Jeeves,” and take a nap.
They aren’t going to fly that way. They’re going to use anti-gravity devices, like similar polar ends of a magnet repel one another. They’re really pretty easy to construct once you understand the concept. Happy to let you in on the ground floor of the business.
No thanks, I already subscribe to my own newsletter. It’s all I can afford.
Yes, aero effects are a major issue. But they are minor compared to the energy issue. Flying cars must use more energy than driving, if for no other reason than they must go faster to maintain flight. A car can go 45 mph, a Cessna cannot and still remain in the air. Sure, you can hover but all that does is spend the flight energy, not moving. Not a win.
And no, flying does not use less energy than driving – the bs comparison used are for a 747 vs. a personal car. Switch the comparison to a bus or a train, and you will see just how energy inefficient, flying is.
Yes, the energy costs are tremendous just for the luxury of not resting on wheels. Trains, though, are more efficient because of using less flexible steel wheels with flanges. The only reason they are inefficient per passenger mile is because they have to follow rails, and they have to follow rails because steel tires without flanges, on steel roads for efficiency, would kill more passengers than arrived safely.
Everything is a tradeoff. The obvious solution is a boat hull with two sets of retractable landing gear (rubber tires and flanged steel wheels), a dozen rotors for flight, and a giant gas bag for lift. The gas bag could of course be filled with hydrogen since the rotors and boat hull make it safe to detach in an emergency.
These are the kinds of insights in my newsletter. It’s all I can afford.
True, but not if time has value. Everything can in extremis be reduced to energy, or money or labour. When considering the combination of all three together there are many rational decisions that use some of each.
In China many trips are faster and cheaper by train than plane and a lot more convenient. You don’t have to deal with two frigging airports or pay $70 to take a suitcase with you.
If we ever get flying cars, they will be on autopilot. I’m sure by then we will have antigravity worked out and there will be neither roads nor rails. The power of science, not the science of power.
Magnetic confinement is a dead end theory. The problem is that magnetic fields fluctuate, particularly when the magnets themselves get hit with ionizing radiation.
Yes, nuclear fusion does release ionizing radiation stlll – just different types and amounts than fission. Furthermore, the majority of this ionizing radiation is neutrons i.e. no charge i.e. much harder to confine with magnetic fields.
The sun gets away with this because it uses gravity. Gravity works on all materials and even, apparently, light.
These latest efforts are just gaming research grants via tricks like “one shot” laser induced fusion: produces more energy than consumed if you don’t count the energy used to process the materials, the losses from charging the capacitors for the lasers, etc etc – basically anything which is not “energy on target” vs. “energy released”.
When the fax machine came out it gave hope for teleportation. First being able to fax goods, equipment, then people. It never happened. Are fax machines still a thing?
We now have 3-D printers which solves a slice of that desire.
Only need to develop an Entanglement protocol and the job is done.
Open-Read-Write-Close.
Like Tokamaks, I too have been around since the 1950’s. When I was 12, fusion power would be cheap, plentiful and only 20 years away. I am now 76 and it seems that fusion is still 20 years away.
I do not expect to live long enough to see successful, economical fusion power.
Bob, haven’t you been around since the 1940s?
I predict proton-boron aneutronic fusion will be so cheap that it will not be worth metering. It’s only thirty years away.
Instead we need to put up with boron-moron autoneurotic burrocrats running things.
Are you disparaging proton-boron aneutronic fusion, perchance, good sir?
“It’s only thirty years away.”
Always. !!
Except when it’s 40 years away
That is not a safe bet when you consider how long humans pursued powered flight. Flying machines of different types are now ubiquitous. The reason we talk about ‘breakthroughs’ is because technology doesn’t advance linearly. It is more like punctuated evolution. Once there is the crucial discovery of how to accomplish something, like powered flight, then it is reasonable to expect improvements that advance the technology. Up until that critical demonstration — think Wright brothers — there is only a growing list of what doesn’t work. With infinite possibilities, it may take a long time before the right approach is discovered. But, that is not evidence that it is impossible or will never happen. It makes for a good joke. However, the joke will be on you if assume that your joke and reality are the same.
Nah! It’s 93 million miles away.
Stars fuse elements because the containment is free—gravity, and a star needs a minimum mass of about 1/12 of a solar mass to fuse Hydrogen (the easiest fuel to fuse). I’ve heard claims of net energy production and “sustained” fusion, but am not sure of the accuracy of the energy ‘accounting’.
I’ve also been hearing that nuclear fusion is just around the corner—maybe in 50 years, for the past 50 years. Maybe when we are able to fold spacetime to simulate a strong gravitational field caused by a stellar mass then we will even be making small scale reactors, like the “Mr. Fusion” device in one of the Back to the Future films. Maybe.
Stars fuse from immense gravity creating the pressure and associated temperature required for fusion. Outside of stellar gravity, created fusion would require opposing forced constraint from the outside pressing the material inwards to create the pressure/temperature necessary. We just need Bigger electro-magnets
😉 🤔
“Outside of stellar gravity, created fusion would require opposing forced constraint from the outside pressing the material inwards to create the pressure/temperature necessary”
I bet there’s someone on you-tube doing that in his shed with an old mangle (:-))
O M G…
What a Hoot
Ok, I’m not stupid, and was actually able to follow some of that, but I can’t be the only one reminded of the Turbo Encabulator description??
One can hope that this is real, not another money grab….
Like the Steorn Orbo that was supposed to create Overunity but…🤷
The Interossiter.
The Interossiter is the only thing that can contain fusion reactions, though it does require the use of a Turbo Encabulator.
Thanks! I haven’t seen that one in years. Just as entertaining now.
Just give me a few billion dollars and I’ll hire my friends to pretend we’re making incredible advances and only need a few more billions and a few more decades.
Sounds like a wind turbine.
The aneutronic aspect is promising as the 14 MeV neutrons from DT reactions will be a bugger to deal with. OTOH, Boron 11 is probably no where near as abundant as deuterium, but the process to get enriched Boron 11 is probably simpler than what’s needed to get an equivalent enrichment of deuterium.
Having said, tell me when they get to break-even as what has been done with laser fusion (albeit when considering the laser output as opposed to the power applied to the lasers).
The energy expended to make the target and to run the National Ignition Facility exceeds the amount of energy derived from the device by orders of magnitude. The assertion that break even has been achieved is a lie.
That’s why I specifically mentioned the difference between laser output energy and the energy needed to create that laser out energy which is orders of magnitude higher. Getting more energy out of the reaction than the energy that was directed at the target is still a significant milestone, though a l-o-n-g way from useful energy production.
I’d like to see a similar milestone for the p-11B reaction before even thinking about it as a serious energy source.
Exactly. Let’s see the energy balance around the whole facility. Net power out of the building.
But even more importantly let’s see net dollars selling electricity at a price comparable to a combined cycle gas turbine.
Sounds like nonsense to me, but maybe my knowledge of hydrogen ions is deficient. Not to worry, when fusion plants produce saleable cheaper electricity, people will buy it.
Not to disparage the author, but –
I welcome all advances in nuclear fusion but the fact is it is not fit for commercial operation. Until it is we need to build fission reactors and many of them. We don’t need the best fission reactor we need the reactor that is economic, safe and produces lots of power. Pick out the Chevrolet of fission reactors and get busy building them.
Except that we don’t NEED that. We have centuries of coal and natural gas.
There is NO CLIMATE EMERGENCY!
So there is no urgency to build lots of nuclear power plants. When they’re cheaper and cleaner and safer and more reliable than a modern coal-fired or gas turbine, the market will build lots of them.
When it becomes clear that stable supplies of other fuel sources are no longer available, more nuclear will enter the mix—without any government meddling needed to ensure that cronies line their pockets.
Mother Earth with all her bounty does not offer an infinite quantity of any resource.
People will quibble about how long before this or that runs out, but that it can runout is something to be addressed.
This does not mean an emergency step transition to something unproven. It means keeping our eyes and our minds open to possibilities and applying sensible efforts to explore those that seem most promising.
Using reasonable metrics, building more fission reactors means oil, gas, and coal will have longer lifespans.
Will fusion become economically practical? No one can say.
I remember the days of room temperature super conductors.
I also remember the days of cold fusion.
This link has more detail on the technology:
https://tae.com/tae-technologies-exceeds-fusion-reactor-performance-goals-by-250-as-company-closes-250-million-financing-round-totaling-1-2-billion-to-date/
They have quite a war chest for the size of equipment they are using.
This article discusses other compact fusion technologies:
https://www.nuclearbusiness-platform.com/media/insights/compact-fusion-reactors
TAE’s Copernicus reactor is due for operation by the end of this year. So not long to wait to see if they can produce net energy. Then the long road to commercialisation starts.
The wind and solar facilities are not needed. Right?
I have been following fusion long enough to want to see that a real operating reactor exists, not just a design for one. Fusion has been vaporware.
More like plasmaware.
LPPfusion.com uses Boron in a plasma pinch to create fusion, “focus fusion” in a small plasmoid, Birkeland currents, the electric universe version of the sun. They are farther than any other private company and very close to the extremely expensive and unlikely JET, but far from the goal, having to overcome the inevitable problems that all startups face. Here is their latest report. https://www.lppfusion.com/storage/LPPFusion-Report-May-15-2025.pdf
“when humans with a single language”
Any evidence for that?
“They” always go on about the improving output power to input power ratio, but the output power is ALWAYS radiation NEVER electricity. “They” have NEVER demonstrated the ability to absorb deep X-ray and gamma-ray radiation to make steam to drive a turbine. Fusion energy based electrical power production has always been and will always be a lie or a fantasy, (whichever is worse.)
Bingo the energy in easy to calculate and is always units of electricity … the “power” out is NEVER given in units of electricity … fusion is a fantasy and a waste of money … fission is perfectly fine for power generation … spend the money there …
The energy release in most fusion reactions is in the kinetic energy of the daughter particles. For the proton-Boron reaction, the kinetic energy will be in the three alpha particles. It may be possible to directly convert much of the energy into electric energy – note “may” is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Come to think of it, the p-11B reaction sounds more like proton induced fission reaction than a fusion reaction.
If its private investors money then good luck to them. If it is taxpayers money…..
It has become obvious that ‘intermittent renewable energy’ (IRE) fails, and that nuclear energy is coming back. However, the road to Perdition is fully paved with fusion energy ‘game changers’. ITER is delayed to past 2035. NIF has tread water for a decade. Numerous other fusion projects are ready to go – at some unspecifiable future date.
Humanity needs to start to build a solution NOW, after wasting 15 $Trillion on renewable energy. Safe Gen III+ reactors can be built at a reasonable cost IF regulation is reasonable. China now has 54. The fuel for fission reactors exists in quantities to supply the energy needs of humanity for at least a millennium. Gen IV needs development, but ultra-super-critical and breeder technologies are engineering issues, not basic physics. ONE-PERCENT of the more than $2 Trillion being wasted annually on IREs (Bloomberg, 2024) is enough. Spend the rest building 1GWe Gen III+ reactors.
A little time capsule – if I may …
eqnio ggqai crpej ktfgl waiqn ekkee qtckk rgfea frzsl eitvs nmfys rhvow mpayc jrzlx qgahk twhlf llyjx nsuqt cfmom ztwjb mmlpc kphol wexju svnrc qbcae ixfxs phpkn dknaz iiglg qgucp fmswv oryaf xepqe ufjdc lditq fehoy cjfsq lnxuu xkrfy zrwrk adetf keasf iouxx afmvn qkdso dpqbv ebjzk iqjkh icimv qjqyw lmazo cgufi autvu zsxvx ymnsu eyyis fhjdc lkikj phddf fxcsy mkdff choze tj
Wtf
You may not.
Thanks again, Joe.
I was going to say that, but you beat me to it.
The one key question that none of these up-beat articles ever address is where will all the tritium they need come from?
A very appropriate question for D-T fusion reactors, but the p-11B reaction does not need any tritium. As I mentioned in another post, the p-11B reaction is really a proton induced fission reaction, producing three alpha particles (Helium nuclei). Unlike fission of Uranium or Plutonium, the 11B fission reaction produces no radioactive fission products, which is why it is worth investigating. I’m not holding my breath on it being a practical energy source.
Time saver:
In my experience, any time a headline has a question mark at the end, the answer is “No”. No reason to waste time reading the article.
You’re welcome.
“Predictions are hard…especially about the future” -Yogi Berra
The place where Norm operates from would be a good place for a local watering hole.
I vaguely recall that it takes about 50 years to attain utilization saturation following a successful initial demonstration of reliable continuous operation of a prototype system.
Fusion electric is far, far into our future.
There’s the usual skepticism about fusion energy being just 30 years away, but the reality has always been that difficult technical achievements always take a lot of time and investment to develop. This method of energy production being the most difficult technical development ever attempted by mankind should never have been expected to be quick, cheap, and easy.
How many thousands of years did it take before man achieved powered flight? How many thousands of years did it take to achieve most of our technological achievements, which typically evolved incrementally?
Edison’s development of an electric light of course required first that electrical power be discovered and producible on a large scale. Production of electrical power on a large scale required hundreds of years of experimentation and development of the necessary materials, such as steel and copper and wire insulation, that themselves took thousands of years to develop and exploit. On and on.
Skepticism of specific claims of advances is of course fine. But to dismiss all attempts to develop useful fusion energy production is no more accurate or sensible than those who dismissed all those prior thousands of inventions and technology developments – there were always armies of skeptics who said it couldn’t be done, whatever “it” was. It is a mistake to do that with fusion energy development too.
As Thomas Edison famously quipped in speaking of his long term development of the incandescent lamp, “I did not fail 10,000 times … I discovered 10,000 methods that did not work”.
‘How many thousands of years did it take before man achieved powered flight?’
Indeed. What if Spartacus had had a Piper Cub?
I’d bet that he would have swapped that Piper Cub for Piper Perabo.
There is a difference for Edison. He did not get a new government grant every time he failed. He was not obligated to continue pursuing the unworkable so as to please the grant givers who cannot admit that their theory was wrong.
Edison’s problem was much harder than merely making a light bulb. He had to design an entire electrical generation and distribution system at the same time. His bulb didn’t only have to shine for 40 hours, it had to match a practical electrical system. That’s why I laugh whenever someone says that Edison didn’t invent the light bulb, “so an so” is the real inventor. They have no idea just how great an accomplishment Edison’s bulb was.
“They have no idea just how great an accomplishment Edison’s bulb was.”
No, he successfully marketed someone else’s ...
On 24 July 1874, a Canadian patent was filed by Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans for a lightbulb; they then sold rights to their patent to Thomas Edison in 1879, and Edison re-patented on January 27, 1880.
1835, James Bowman Lindsay demonstrated a constant electric light at a public meeting in Dundee, Scotland; it was the first incandescent lamp as we know it.
In 1841, Frederick de Moleyns of England was granted the world’s first patent for an incandescent lamp, with a design using platinum wires contained within a vacuum bulb. He also used carbon.
The Literary and Philosophical Society building, Newcastle upon Tyne, was the first public building to be lit by electricity on 3 February 1879… lit by Swan lamps, these bulbs lasted about 40 hours.
The first street in the world to be lit by an incandescent lamps was Mosley Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom in 1880, again by Swan lamps.
Hope you get a good laugh !!
Um … Elise Meitner discovered that neutrons could split the nuclei of atoms. While Fermi did a great deal of very good, very important work, the credit for that accomplishment should go to her.
Henrietta Leavitt and Rosalind Franklin are two other women who made massive contributions to science that men ended up getting credit for.
Fusion reactor and fata morgana start with “f” and are the same type of illusion. But once we discover the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow we’ll all get our money back.
Proton-boron fusion is one of the “borderline” fusion reactions. Its peak fusion cross section is 0.8 barn at a particle energy of 600 keV. The reaction releases 8.7 MeV, so the maximum possible gain is 14.5 (energy out divided by energy in). I can’t imagine why anyone would try it with the fuels in plasma form. It would be much easier to use a linear accelerator to shoot a 600 keV proton beam at a solid boron 11 target. Okay, make it a neutral atomic hydrogen beam, just to up the odds a little bit. Deuterium-tritium fusion has been the holy grail because it has a cross section of 5 barns at 80 keV particle energy, and an yield of 17.6 MeV. That’s a gain of 220. Every other fusion reaction has to be measured against that one, because a) it’s by far the easiest to achieve, and b) we’ve actually achieved it with net gain on a large scale. That having been said, we’ve achieved it by setting off a nuclear fission bomb in a chamber which pumps X-rays into another chamber containing the fusion fuels in a very carefully arranged configuration, one which also has an additional fission bomb inside to help things along. So there’s that. If we could figure out how to do it without all of the fission bomb stuff, we’d be golden.
Of course, all it would ultimately provide is electricity. Only 16% of the energy we use is in the form of electricity. We can make electricity now with nuclear fission. The real problem is converting the other 84% of energy-driven devices we have to use electricity. Not all of them can be so converted. My guess is that most of them can’t.
With enough cheap enough energy we could make just about any compound we want in any quantity we want. Once energy becomes less than even trivial, making other forms of energy becomes trivial.
The first “successful” fusion reactor was the Princeton Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor. While the TFTR never hit breakeven, it did come close, and it did reach a record high 510 million degrees Celsius. But the real fatal flaw in all known fusion reactor designs is that the neutrons and other highly charged particles emitted render the reactor too radioactive to be approached by humans.
Indeed, the TFTR was decommissioned, first by shutting it down for several years to “cool off” radiation wise. Second, it was cut into tractor trailer compatible chunks with remotely operated abrasive wire saws. The chunks were remotely packaged and shipped to the Hanford Nuclear Waste landfill, where they remain to this day.
Looks like fusion power is at least 20 years away, again.