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"We are sidestepping all of the scientific challenges that have held fusion energy back for more than half a century," says the director of an Australian company that claims its hydrogen-boron fusion technology is already working a billion times better than expected.
HB11 Energy is a spin-out company that originated at the University of New South Wales, and it announced today a swag of patents through Japan, China and the USA protecting its unique approach to fusion energy generation.
Fusion, of course, is the long-awaited clean, safe theoretical solution to humanity's energy needs. It's how the Sun itself makes the vast amounts of energy that have powered life on our planet up until now. Where nuclear fission – the splitting of atoms to release energy – has proven incredibly powerful but insanely destructive when things go wrong, fusion promises reliable, safe, low cost, green energy generation with no chance of radioactive meltdown.
It's just always been 20 years away from being 20 years away. A number of multi-billion dollar projects are pushing slowly forward, from the Max Planck Institute's insanely complex Wendelstein 7-X stellerator to the 35-nation ITER Tokamak project, 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). This is where HB11's tech takes a sharp left turn.
[...] This is big-time stuff. Should cheap, clean, safe fusion energy really be achieved, it would be an extraordinary leap forward for humanity and a huge part of the answer for our future energy needs. And should it be achieved without insanely hot temperatures being involved, people would be even more comfortable having it close to their homes. We'll be keeping an eye on these guys.
Radical hydrogen-boron reactor
[Source]: Laser-boron fusion
Snake Oil or the Real Deal ? What do you think ?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by RandomFactor on Sunday February 23 2020, @08:19PM (2 children)
It's not a new concept, but requires an order of magnitude higher energies. Hopefully the 'swag of patents' is on something innovative rather than trying to lock down what may just be the natural progression of fast pulsed laser energies bringing this into realistic range.
Here's a 2009 article on it https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228628966_Nonlinear_force_driven_plasma_blocks_igniting_solid_density_hydrogen_boron_Laser_fusion_energy_without_radioactivity. [researchgate.net]
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 23 2020, @10:24PM (1 child)
"Hopefully the 'swag of patents' is on something innovative rather than trying to lock down what may just be the natural progression of fast pulsed laser energies bringing this into realistic range."
This is an annoying thing about the patent system. The company should have a demonstrable product BEFORE receiving any patents. They shouldn't get the patent first and if their product fails sue someone else that may succeed. That deters others from creating anything.
and it should be a use it or lose it thing as well, you can't just do nothing and sue others for infringement. Perhaps their product can be patent pending until they have a demonstrable product but the company that first creates the product itself, not the one that thinks of a broad concept to lock out others, should get the patent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2020, @06:21AM
You register your inventions to be eligible for the awards and so people can more easily figure out who is the first one to come up with the idea.
Have some categories for each area (medical, aerospace, computing, electronics, overall, Best of the Decade, etc), then have awards by experts in the field and awards by random selected members of the public.