New research (more accessible) suggests that Boron-Hydrogen fusion may be viable, and doesn't leave behind a radioactive reactor.
our simulations show for example that 14 milligram HB11 can produce 300 kWh energy if all achieved results are combined for the design of an absolutely clean power reactor producing low-cost energy.
Now where did I leave my petawatt lasers?
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HB11 Fusion, Now With No Radioactive Waste
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(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @05:39PM (3 children)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Sunday December 17 2017, @04:33AM (2 children)
Melting boron is easy.
The hard part is step 2 (from TFA):
> ii) A plasma confinement by a magnetic field of the order of a few kiloteslas created by a second laser beam with a pulse duration of a few nanoseconds (ns).
Let me repeat that. A magnetic field of the order of a few kiloteslas. From what I can find, the current record for the most powerful magnetic field ever created is about 90 Teslas, and the fields in the LHC fields are closer to 9.
So all we need to do is to make a magnetic confinement field more than 30x more powerful than anything ever accomplished before, and their system may provide a viable form of p-B fusion.
Now sure, order-of-magnitude improvements are very often possible given enough effort. But... don't expect me to hold my breath waiting.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 17 2017, @01:08PM (1 child)
The way controlled fusion is perpetually twenty years in the future has become a running joke. But progress is progress - people throw away computers today that governments would have slaughtered millions to obtain thirty years ago. We may yet reach Fusion.
I think renewables make the most sense to use, when it's feasible. They're easier to set up in a decentralized way, which makes targeted infrastructure physical attacks, targeted infrastructure cyber attacks, or the effects of a single flood or earthquake on the power grid less severe. But solar and wind just don't scale like nuclear, you need many tens of billions of dollars in panels and batteries (or pumped energy storage, or compressed air energy storage like lightsail.com or similar) to offset one traditional nuclear power plant.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday December 17 2017, @03:26PM
A joke of the saddest sort, since if you measure it in terms of progress per dollar, it has been proceeding roughly in line with initial projections when the "20 years away" claim was first made. Unfortunately, funding has been declining steadily since then so that at any moment it pretty much always remains 20 years away at the then-current funding levels.
If you were feeling especially cynical you might even suspect that the purse strings were being controlled by someone(s) with a vested interest in making fusion into a running joke.
On the bright side, the slowly vanishing funding for tokamak fusion has inspired many other groups to make impressive progress on various shoestring-budget alternative fusion technologies that could be deployed in a much more distributed fashion - though even that tends to suffer from ever-diminishing budgets. For example there's my personal favorite: the late Dr. Bussard's Polywell fusion team, now EMC2, sounds like it had reached the point where they are ready to build a full-scale (10m diameter) net-positive reactor. And, judging from the trickle of publicly available information from their last progress reports while funded by the NAVY, the prototypes have likely already successfully demonstrated aneutronic p-B fusion in addition to the much easier D-T fusion.
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Saturday December 16 2017, @05:46PM (10 children)
Your life on Earth is nearly over:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_fusion_weapon [wikipedia.org]
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/cst/bh_2013_denton.pdf [af.mil]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @06:37PM (4 children)
Wake up,
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Saturday December 16 2017, @06:42PM
You don't sound woke yet. Get #woke.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @07:04PM (1 child)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wauzrPn0cfg [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 17 2017, @01:01PM
https://youtu.be/L1YN9QMKpBo?t=64 [youtu.be]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday December 18 2017, @09:15PM
Don't wake the sheeple. https://www.xkcd.com/1013/ [xkcd.com]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday December 18 2017, @06:20PM (4 children)
Seems like a non-issue to me. The fallout is what makes nuclear weapons so dangerous - get rid of the fallout, and they're just really big bombs. Potentially a bit more compact than conventional explosives, or much higher yield, but generally speaking dollar-for-dollar conventional explosives are a lot more effective - in almost every situation a bunch of small bombs does a lot more damage than one big bomb with the same total wield.
Bunker-busting is the only potential exception I can think of offhand, and frankly they're mainly relevant to going after political and military "nerve centers". And anything that makes the warmongers and generals more vulnerable is liable to decrease their desire to go to war. After all, war has long been a way for the powerful to spend other people's lives to increase their own wealth and power.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday December 18 2017, @06:29PM (3 children)
There is a proliferation risk for nuclear weapons that require no fissile material.
Obviously, your average terrorist organization would find it difficult to create a pure fusion weapon, should it ever be realized. But it would be harder to detect (no Geiger giveaway) and wouldn't require the fissile material or the difficult (and disruptable, as Stuxnet showed) process of enriching it.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday December 18 2017, @09:48PM (2 children)
Again, so what? There's already rampant proliferation of conventional explosives, and a fallout-free nuclear weapon is just a really expensive bomb.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday December 18 2017, @10:17PM (1 child)
Load a nuclear bomb onto a truck and detonate it in the middle of a city. You'll do far more damage than any amount of conventional explosives you could load into that truck.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday December 18 2017, @11:00PM
Sure. But for the same price you could load a whole fleet of trucks with conventional explosives and detonate them all around the city, doing far more total damage.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Snospar on Saturday December 16 2017, @08:59PM (2 children)
I'm confused. I thought the rule was that we are always "50 years away" from clean fusion energy, but in the article they state they're probably "10 years" away from a working reactor with "off the shelf" parts.
I can only assume they've traveled back from 40 years in the future to make this announcement - would Boron-Hydrogen fusion make that time travel possible?
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday December 16 2017, @09:10PM
Well, I'll just link it since nobody else was prepared to:
https://xkcd.com/678/ [xkcd.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by ese002 on Sunday December 17 2017, @04:42AM
I think they mean 10 years away after a commercially viable deuterium-tritium reactor. So, 60 years away in perpetuity.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 17 2017, @01:18AM (1 child)
"Now where did I leave my petawatt lasers?"
This is why we can't have nice things. Some rat jew or their friend will be plotting about how to make weapons out of harmless technology.
Luckily, some of us decide we will not help make more weapons and bring our own demise closer. This is why so much new technology will never be found. If the jews were to find out about it, they would use it against us and murder us all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 17 2017, @01:34AM
You make it sound like you are actually involved in research and not just trolling.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday December 17 2017, @08:57PM
The good news: doesn't leave behind a radioactive reactor
The bad news: doesn't leave behind a reactor