<story><title>Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?</title><url>https://newatlas.com/energy/hb11-hydrogen-boron-fusion-clean-energy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>willis936</author><text>27 comments and not one hit of the word “inertial”!  The line about not being thermonuclear and the description of the device in question (a sphere with lasers) points towards an inertial confinement fusion (ICF) device.  Most of the fusion research eggs are in the thermonuclear basket, specifically magnetic confinement fusion.  It is good to research a diverse set of approaches, but there are more engineering challenges to ICF reactors than there are to MCF reactors.  Pulses on the order of 1-2 Hz requires a mechanical system that can cycle out the exhaust and replace the pellet in that time.  Going to reactor scales also requires high load thermal cycles.  MCF ain’t easy, and brings it’s own engineering challenges.  The ones I always hear are things like wall materials and fuel recycling, but these are largely solved or in the process of being solved.  The engineering challenge I see as the most difficult for MCF are related to steady state operation.  Tokamaks have no way of being steady state.  Stellarators do, but now the next problem is wall conditioning.  Wall materials outgas in hot plasma.  A lot.  Like more than the fuel puffed in.  The way this is handled in science machines is with glow discharges of various species: plasma just below the temperature to cause wall sputtering, coating the wall with carbon and boron for their absorptive properties, etc.  No one’s run a steady state hot plasma before, so no one knows if these will be a non issue in reactors.  Keeping the plasma clean may be a challenge to keep the plasma from terminating.  Aside from that MCF is ready for prime time.  It needs a big reactor for scaling laws to make it energy profitable (and potentially money profitable).  We just need some very expensive test reactors to smooth out these issues.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pxhb</author><text>One reason you might not find ‘inertial’ is because the only thing they have in common is a laser.&lt;p&gt;For ICF, a long-pulse laser is used like a hammer to heat and compress the material to fusion conditions.&lt;p&gt;This scheme, as far as I can tell, uses the large EM fields of a short-pulse laser to accelerate a ‘beam’ of ions into cold material to induce fusion.</text></comment>
<story><title>Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?</title><url>https://newatlas.com/energy/hb11-hydrogen-boron-fusion-clean-energy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>willis936</author><text>27 comments and not one hit of the word “inertial”!  The line about not being thermonuclear and the description of the device in question (a sphere with lasers) points towards an inertial confinement fusion (ICF) device.  Most of the fusion research eggs are in the thermonuclear basket, specifically magnetic confinement fusion.  It is good to research a diverse set of approaches, but there are more engineering challenges to ICF reactors than there are to MCF reactors.  Pulses on the order of 1-2 Hz requires a mechanical system that can cycle out the exhaust and replace the pellet in that time.  Going to reactor scales also requires high load thermal cycles.  MCF ain’t easy, and brings it’s own engineering challenges.  The ones I always hear are things like wall materials and fuel recycling, but these are largely solved or in the process of being solved.  The engineering challenge I see as the most difficult for MCF are related to steady state operation.  Tokamaks have no way of being steady state.  Stellarators do, but now the next problem is wall conditioning.  Wall materials outgas in hot plasma.  A lot.  Like more than the fuel puffed in.  The way this is handled in science machines is with glow discharges of various species: plasma just below the temperature to cause wall sputtering, coating the wall with carbon and boron for their absorptive properties, etc.  No one’s run a steady state hot plasma before, so no one knows if these will be a non issue in reactors.  Keeping the plasma clean may be a challenge to keep the plasma from terminating.  Aside from that MCF is ready for prime time.  It needs a big reactor for scaling laws to make it energy profitable (and potentially money profitable).  We just need some very expensive test reactors to smooth out these issues.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>anonsivalley652</author><text>It seems easy to conflate any or all approaches as fringe when no one&amp;#x27;s done it yet, and especially if there are political and program-$ecurity concerns overriding doing what&amp;#x27;s best, but some approaches scream magical thinking with unexplained reasoning more than others (like one or more cold fusion proposals in the early 1980&amp;#x27;s). OTOH, it seems like ICF and tokamak are the officially-sanctioned dogma and all other approaches are discounted automatically.&lt;p&gt;Q0: Without bias from my opinion, how fringe or potentially legitimate does IEC seem?&lt;p&gt;Q1: Props to the article&amp;#x27;s team that they invented some awesome lasers. Is there enough experimental data yet on their novel approach to backup their claims to justify funding a prototype? Would such a team be able to test this on a shoestring budget without spending millions?</text></comment>