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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday February 23 2020, @07:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the fire-it-up dept.

"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 ?


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Hartree on Sunday February 23 2020, @08:45PM (5 children)

    by Hartree (195) on Sunday February 23 2020, @08:45PM (#961545)

    Though notably absent in the glowing Wikipedia entry on him, Hora has a series of papers over the years on low energy nuclear reactions, AKA cold fusion. He also has an entry in The Worldwide List of Alternative Theories and Critics.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 23 2020, @10:04PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 23 2020, @10:04PM (#961583)

    They laughed at Einstein too. His hair, its a joke.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Sunday February 23 2020, @10:42PM (3 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Sunday February 23 2020, @10:42PM (#961600) Journal

    What is in the Wikipedia entry:

    Against established knowledge, he discovered electron acceleration in vacuum by lasers based on nonlinearity.[1] His derivation of the nonlinear (ponderomotive) forces of laser-plasma interaction including dielectric effects in the Maxwellian stress tensor led to the prediction of ultrahigh acceleration of plasma blocks[2] being confirmed experimentally by Sauerbrey[3] with application to a new laser fusion energy scheme as block ignition of uncompressed fuel[4] resulting in a possible nuclear energy production with less radioactivity than burning coal.[5][6] He discovered the general mechanism of ponderomotive and relativistic self-focusing. His theory for crossing electron and laser beams within media (Schwarz-Hora effect)[7][8] led to the discovery of the correspondence principle of electromagnetic interaction and following Nathan Rosen to nonlocality and quantum entangling. Based on the importance of including usually neglected very tiny quantities as the longitudinal field components of laser beams led to the formulation of the nonlinearity principle showing how nonlinear physics is changing from wrong linear physics into correct understanding.[9][10]

    I tend to see a person with non-conventional thinking but whose ideas have a tendency towards being confirmed - at least some of those ideas.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 2) by Hartree on Monday February 24 2020, @02:05AM (2 children)

      by Hartree (195) on Monday February 24 2020, @02:05AM (#961661)

      That's why I said it's "probably" snake oil. I'm not slamming the door, but surprisingly positive results even from the best often turn out more surprising than positive. He's been investigating relatively fringe areas and though sometimes those work out, more often than not they don't.

      I hope he's right. But I suspect it's not going to work out, much like many ideas haven't worked out. That, by the way, is not a reason to do good quality science on topics that are kind of on the fringe. Sometimes you have people with weird ideas about fogged photographic plates or the preposterous idea that magnetism and electricity interact in funny ways when they're giving lectures.

      • (Score: 2) by Hartree on Monday February 24 2020, @02:08AM

        by Hartree (195) on Monday February 24 2020, @02:08AM (#961663)

        That should read: "That, by the way, is not a reason to never do good quality science on topics that are kind of on the fringe."

      • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday February 24 2020, @07:15AM

        by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 24 2020, @07:15AM (#961744) Journal

        But I suspect it's not going to work out, much like many ideas haven't worked out.

        National Ignition Facility [wikipedia.org] showed some initial promises, but then the politiheads thought they knew better and cut the funding [wikipedia.org].

        And then, the European Extreme Light Infrastructure [wikipedia.org] started to come online - with powers in the PW scale (yeap, 1015) and electric field intensities in the order of 1015V/m. That is to say, those European lunatics don't believe the matter is just dead, and even if the ignition is not there, there are other good things™ that show promise.

        More recently, the same politiheads slightly increased budgets [aip.org] for NIF + Sandia's Z machine [wikipedia.org]. Coincidence? Guess what was one of the reason?

        The assessment is also to assess the status of international competition in the field and the ability of the U.S. to “avoid technological surprise.”

        --
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford