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Energy From Fusion In 'A Couple Years,' CEO Says, Commercialization In Five
TAE Technologies will bring a fusion-reactor technology to commercialization in the next five years, its CEO announced recently at the University of California, Irvine.
"The notion that you hear fusion is another 20 years away, 30 years away, 50 years away—it's not true," said Michl Binderbauer, CEO of the company formerly known as Tri Alpha Energy. "We're talking commercialization coming in the next five years for this technology."
[...] For more than 20 years TAE has been pursuing a reactor that would fuse hydrogen and boron at extremely high temperatures, releasing excess energy much as the sun does when it fuses hydrogen atoms. Lately the California company has been testing the heat capacity of its process in a machine it named Norman after the late UC Irvine physicist Norman Rostoker.
Its next device, dubbed Copernicus, is designed to demonstrate an energy gain. It will involve deuterium-tritium fusion, the aim of most competitors, but a milestone on TAE's path to a hotter, but safer, hydrogen-boron reaction.
Binderbauer expects to pass the D-T fusion milestone soon. "What we're really going to see in the next couple years is actually the ability to actually make net energy, and that's going to happen in the machine we call Copernicus," he said in a "fireside chat" at UC Irvine.
Also at NextBigFuture.
Related: Lockheed Martin's Patent for a Fusion Reactor the Size of a Shipping Container
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(Score: 2) by RedGreen on Thursday January 17 2019, @03:19AM (2 children)
Amazing what Google can come up with when typing a question into it. Apparently nothing radioactive according to the Wackypedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion#Proton-boron [wikipedia.org]
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 17 2019, @04:56AM (1 child)
The eco-Nazis will never let this one get off the ground. The waste product is carbon. :-)
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday January 17 2019, @02:56PM
Clearly you didn't bother reading anything - the fusion products are not carbon, they're helium-4 - technically p-B fusion is a fusion-fission reaction, and is desirable because it's one of the easiest aneutronis reactions, which produce no neutron radiation to activate the reactor walls (though some neutron radiation will still produced by incidental H-H fusion side reactions)
Also, carbon isn't an environmental problem - carbon *dioxide* is.