Re:Helion Energy achieves fusion milestone
by DennisP on Friday July 23, 2021 @08:24AM
(#27929893)
Here are a couple of small fusion projects that get a decent amount of peer-reviewed publications and respect from other fusion researchers. They're both attempting boron fusion, which is almost completely aneutronic.
https://lppfusion.com/: literally a garage-size experiment. The reactor core is the size of a coffee can and that's big enough for the production reactor. It's a "plasma focus," in which the plasma pinches itself into a tiny ball. Team is half a dozen people, and they have endless engineering issues that a bigger team would probably knock out a lot faster, but they keep at it and put out a detailed progress report every month or so. It's been pretty fun to watch over the years. They've gotten the plasma to boron fusion temperatures (a couple million degrees C), but density is still a challenge.
https://hb11.energy/: A terawatt nanosecond laser hits a target that generates a 4000-tesla magnetic field. Then a petawatt picosecond laser blasts the fuel pellet. It's not like normal laser fusion that compresses a target; it just hits from one side, so hard that it shoves the nuclei into their neighbors behind them. In theory this can kick off boron fusion, and according to some experiments (not entirely by HB11's team) this actually works a lot better than expected due to a cascading reaction.
What's great about that one is that the petawatt lasers have been improving exponentially, at a faster rate than Moore's Law. They're just now getting to the point where theoretically they'd produce net power from boron fusion, with a large energy gain. The lasers aren't even that big or expensive, they're basically tabletop devices in a medium-size room, costing a few tens of millions.
HB11 Energy, the company, just got seed funding, but their lead researcher (Hora) has been talking about this for decades and wrote a book about it, and experiments have been done by various independent researchers around the world.
https://lppfusion.com/: literally a garage-size experiment. The reactor core is the size of a coffee can and that's big enough for the production reactor. It's a "plasma focus," in which the plasma pinches itself into a tiny ball. Team is half a dozen people, and they have endless engineering issues that a bigger team would probably knock out a lot faster, but they keep at it and put out a detailed progress report every month or so. It's been pretty fun to watch over the years. They've gotten the plasma to boron fusion temperatures (a couple million degrees C), but density is still a challenge.
https://hb11.energy/: A terawatt nanosecond laser hits a target that generates a 4000-tesla magnetic field. Then a petawatt picosecond laser blasts the fuel pellet. It's not like normal laser fusion that compresses a target; it just hits from one side, so hard that it shoves the nuclei into their neighbors behind them. In theory this can kick off boron fusion, and according to some experiments (not entirely by HB11's team) this actually works a lot better than expected due to a cascading reaction.
What's great about that one is that the petawatt lasers have been improving exponentially, at a faster rate than Moore's Law. They're just now getting to the point where theoretically they'd produce net power from boron fusion, with a large energy gain. The lasers aren't even that big or expensive, they're basically tabletop devices in a medium-size room, costing a few tens of millions.
HB11 Energy, the company, just got seed funding, but their lead researcher (Hora) has been talking about this for decades and wrote a book about it, and experiments have been done by various independent researchers around the world.