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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 Rich on Monday February 24 2020, @12:31AM (2 children)
Well, let's assume any of the current fusion experiments would yield sustainable energy output. A few magnets for plasma confinement, maybe a laser here or there for ignition. Now build a power plant from it, say in the 3000 MWt, 1000 MWe region, big enough for some economies of scale. That's going to be a massive blob of ultra-high-tech somewhere in the landscape. What would it cost? Would it be cheaper than a fission plant that's practically just a big water kettle? I don't think so, and the only economically viable fission plant now is the WWER-1000 with privatized profits, socialized teardown and waste storage cost, and no accident.
Could it ever be cheaper than stored renewables? The naive solution within the existing framework is building a Gas+Steam CC Plant ($1B), buying three huge hydrogen tankers ($300M), plastering 30 square km of desert with cheap solar (4500 MWp, $4.5B). Assume 1/3 sun availability in the desert, 60% efficiency of the CCPP, and there's your schedulable Gigawatt (roughly, or factoring in a bit of process heat). Total bill is $5.8B. Already cheaper than western EPR-style fission plants, especially factoring in the follow-up cost of the nuclear stuff. The two reasons why this doesn't happen is that as long as natural gas can be had, they'd rather burn that than the silly expensive self-made hydrogen - and even natural gas is too expensive for baseline supply.
But that's your baseline. Or alternatively use battery storage of electricity, which probably will end up in a similar ballpark. Anything above those crude approaches is a non-starter. Smarter solutions involving residential CHP units would be an even harder competition to beat.
So if someone suggests a fusion plant, ask them whether they will ever be able to deliver the GW at under $5B.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bradley13 on Monday February 24 2020, @11:41AM (1 child)
You complain about people relying on tech that doesn't exist, for large-scale production. Then you ask "Could it ever be cheaper than stored renewables?"
Which also doesn't exist.
There is no current path to large scale energy storage. You talk about 1GW-3GW range, so you need to store at least 10GWh. That would require a lithium-ion battery one-third of a kilometer on a side. Nuts, and let's not even get into the required raw materials. That's only a single installation. What else is there? Pumped hydro? Existing GW-range hydroelectric dams are required to let water flow - they certainly aren't allowed to stop the river and pump it back up. So you need a couple of new, rather large valleys that you can put underwater. Let me know when you find them, and do remember to add in the environmental impact of flooding those valleys.
Like it or not, nuclear power is the safest, most efficient, most environmentally friendly large-scale power generation technology in existence. More people die every year installing solar than have ever died in all of the nuclear accidents in history. Another point worth considering: there is actually no reason to go through the pain of disassembling a deactivated nuclear reactor. The reactor building itself isn't all that large. Take out the fuel, and anything useful. Then close it up and lock it. Build the successor plant next to it, and you automatically have security to prevent tampering. Nothing is going to happen, except that the old reactor will get safer - all by itself - over the coming decades.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 1) by jurov on Tuesday February 25 2020, @02:24PM
10GWh battery at 100$/kWh is just a ~ mere billion dollars and ~ monthly production of one Gigafactory.
This makes me pretty sure such storage plants already are under serious consideration.