"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, Informative) by Hartree on Sunday February 23 2020, @08:45PM (5 children)
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 23 2020, @10:04PM
They laughed at Einstein too. His hair, its a joke.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Sunday February 23 2020, @10:42PM (3 children)
What is in the Wikipedia entry:
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)
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
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
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?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford