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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, Interesting) by bradley13 on Monday February 24 2020, @11:41AM (1 child)

    by bradley13 (3053) on Monday February 24 2020, @11:41AM (#961780) Homepage Journal

    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.

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  • (Score: 1) by jurov on Tuesday February 25 2020, @02:24PM

    by jurov (6250) on Tuesday February 25 2020, @02:24PM (#962369)

    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.