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Comment by tehabe | Hacker News Reader

"14 milligram HB11 can produce 300 kWh energy" – I guess it means thermal energy, how much of it can be used for electricity? What do I need for producing this? How small can be such a power plant be or how big must it be to be viable?

Of course this could be all answered in the paper but it is a physics paper not a business or economics paper.

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Their is a wide range of thermal efficiency but something ~30% to 64% is possible. We can also use the heat directly in some applications making it useful number on it's own.

Unfortunately making those pellets is fairly expensive an you only get 8$ or less worth of energy from them. Which is why the economics of this idea is simply terrible and the only value is for validation of H-bomb simulations.

Since most of the energy output of boron fusion is in fast-moving charged particles, you aren't necessarily restricted to a thermal cycle. Focus fusion, for example, gets a pulse of alphas in a tight beam, which they can just aim through a coil for electricity. Tri Alpha also has plans for direct conversion, but I don't know how theirs works.

But presumably if you are burning 10 of these every second the price is going to go down.

> something ~30% to 64% is possible

I would imagine that making those lasers go all the way into the fuel will restrict the operating temperature enough that those 30% will start to look too big.

Can the lasers pass through windows without destroying them?

How expensive? Do you have a source? From the papers I've seen by this group, they claim extremely good economics.

The pellets for NIF were quite expensive but that's a very different technology.

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