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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: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday February 24 2020, @12:26AM (1 child)
Around 2003, I was first exposed to the concept of trans-cranial magnetic neuro stimulation (TMS). The press releases and company PR did a very poor job of differentiating their technology from woo woo snake oil magic energy crystals. I was looking for work at the time, maybe if the company had been in Palm Beach instead of Pennsylvania I would have looked closer at TMS, as it was I dismissed them after about 15 minutes of consideration. (there was a cryopreservation company in Palm Beach, hiring at the time, I did take a long hard look at them - sadly that enterprise did not seem worth interviewing, but it is kind of an interesting body of lore...) Back nearer to the point: around 2000, TMS pioneers fired off a whole slew of patents centered around the technology required to generate transient magnetic pulses strong enough to actually effect neurostimulation at a range of a few centimeters - at the time, without that tech, effective TMS wasn't really possible. Within a few years, they got their PR straightened out and lots of respectable people were getting fired up about the potential applications of TMS - it was real, and the patented tech made it possible.
One would hope that this slew of patents for what seems to amount to inertial containment fusion are coming at a time where commercialization is attainable before the patents expire. As compared with TMS, the potential for disruption of lucrative industry is several orders of magnitude larger, so they may be much more speculative here.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2020, @03:46AM
What's your point? One nutty sounding thing out of 10,000 nutty sounding things turned out to be legit so this random nutty sounding thing is also legit?