US-Japan team hails H2-boron plasma fusion breakthrough
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This is certainly progress, a genuine accomplishment, and a necessary step along the way to their ultimate goal, but it's a bit of obnoxious puffery to call it a breakthrough, and I don't think it resolves any of the fundamental questions about whether this reaction (which is something like 100x harder than the typical DT fusion reaction) will lead to a viable system in our lifetimes.
Instead of being open to the possibility of such ways to exist, the physics community appears to prefer to bend over backwards in their efforts to disparage even the mere idea of alternatives to mainstream approaches. When did they lose their appetite for revolutionary ideas?
The game has been going on for 88 minutes and Flabinisthan is leading 789e10 to 0. It would be historical for Giberrishland to overcome such a lead, and win their first ever tournament.
Thankfully, in a pre-print of an article brief submitted to an open-access server, an anonymous team of Giberrishians strategists claim they are now able to spell the name 'Flabinisthan' correctly, in less than 6 tries (range 5-78.)
They are now considering getting a map of Flabinisthan, and are actively seeking funds to teach someone how to read a map."
https://www.businessinsider.com/cnn-breaking-news-titanic-si...
I'm just kidding, of course, I understand the enthousiasm.
Fusion is the kind of things we need yesterday. It's probably as clickbaity as writing "Breakthrough in finding a cure for pneumonia" back in the 1900s - people really needed that, at the time.
Then, someone discovered Penicilin, half by accident (at least, according to legend), and completely failed to gardner interest (at least, according to wikipedia [1].)
So, I really hope someone is _actually_ having a real breakthrough somewhere, right now, the kind that gets completely ignored until the world is changed forever.
And I wish the clickbaiter an early week-end - they do the less harm when they're _not_ working.
I still believe Commonwealth Fusion Systems with their SPARC/ARC small tokamak design will be the first to achieve a viable commercial reactor.
> This is still proof of concept but they are estimating putting power into the grid in the next 10-15 years
There is literally zero chance of this occurring, unless aliens have landed on Earth and secretly shared their fusion technology with this team.
10-15 years is preposterous. If they had a reliable, sustainable, net-energy-positive, commercialization-ready process today, I think 10-15 years would be an optimistic timeline for the safety and regulatory stuff alone.
Democracy is probably the least-bad system of government but this is where it really falls down. It forces politicians to think in short-sighted, tiny blocks of time. They're just trying to make it through the next ~4 years. And if they don't get re-elected their replacement won't necessarily care about the projects they've inherited.
But an effort like getting fusion to market is something that will take decades. It needs more sustained attention than an ADHD-addled government can produce.
And even then, it's unclear if an Apollo-style national push would get us there much sooner. It could maybe cut through the red tape portions, but much like throwing more engineers at a software problem doesn't necessarily help, it's unclear that throwing even more money at fusion would clear the science and engineering hurdles more quickly.
If you can ensure that your government ministers aren't using the project as a means to funnel taxes away to private corporations that they're associated with then, I speculate, you can probably avoid this sort of thing. Maybe international projects work better in that sense?
(You can find links to the thesis and papers and the latest presentation at https://riderinstitute.org/research/ )
tl;dr: Fusion of heavier nuclei (like pB11 discussed here) are not feasible due to the bremsstrahlung output being higher than the fusion output. Ways around that would be, in theory, non-thermal plasmas, but these are very hard to do because the thermalization time constant is much lower than the fusion time constant. Alternatively one could, at very high efficiency, recycle the bremsstrahlung energy via some apparatus to heat the plasma. It's very unclear if any of these approaches are even remotely feasible.
Now for this particular approach in TFA, described in the open access (as a former scientist who no longer has institutional access I'm very happy about the open access trend!) article https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36655-1 (thanks to user fghorow for providing the link in a sibling comment). Quoting:
> And the physics challenges can be overcome. As demonstrated in ref. 2, by using the recently updated values for the p11B fusion cross-section3 and properly accounting for kinetic effects, it can be shown that a thermal p11B plasma can produce a high Q (where Q = fusion power/input power), and even reach ignition (where the plasma is sustained by the fusion reactions alone).
So they claim the old values that e.g. Rider used for dismissing pB11 fusion as infeasible have recently changed sufficiently to make it feasible.
Further continuing:
> By employing a plasma with a low internal magnetic field and operating in a regime in which the electrons are kept at a lower temperature than the ions, the radiation losses can be further reduced1; and by maintaining a non-equilibrium population of energetic reacting ions, the fusion power further increased4.
This, again, is about non-thermal plasmas. Theoretically possible, but very hard to do in practice.
[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/laser-and-particle-b...
Or perhaps you mean something else which you have not bothered to explain?
Not taking away from the fact this is an interesting achievement in the science of nuclear fusion, of course.
Can you explain to me why this follows? I don't usually associate "hot air exaggeration" with Japanese culture.
I'm sick and tired of them at this point, so I simply refuse to hold my breath on anything coming from Japan until I see it in action.
At the same time they have maintained a high quality of life over decades and a unique culture.
The recent termination of the Mitsubishi Regional Jet is a perfect example (among many others) of what I'm sick and tired about with Japan: Lots of bold claims to start, absolute failure when time comes to execute.
Is there a country more renowned for engineering than Japan? Maybe Germany?
Yes, I'm being 100% objectively serious.
You are in for a very rude awakening in the next few years.
* The forefront of IT engineering (Intel, AMD, Nvidia, IBM, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Micron, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Seagate, Western Digital, Cisco, etc.).
* The forefront of aeronautics and space engineering (Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, General Electric, General Dynamics, Honeywell, SpaceX, etc.).
* The forefront of higher education for engineering (MIT, Caltech, etc.).
* The forefront of new engineering research and development (NASA, DARPA, the National Laboratories, National Science Foundation, etc.).
* Leaders in medical engineering (Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, etc.).
* The most powerful and capable military in the world, made possible by the vast above-mentioned engineering base and more.
You're more than likely reading and posting on HN using technologies engineered, either in whole or in part, by Americans. You're welcome.
As regards infrastructure upkeep, even Japan is suffering from insufficient upkeep of infrastructure to the point of crumbling; they simply aren't as infamous for them as America is.
Just for one high tech example, the most sophisticated chips in the computer you use (whether desktop, laptop or phone) are almost certainly produced in Taiwan, who in turn rely on high tech manufacturing equipment from Europe.
You're welcome, too! Isn't international trade a great thing?
Look at Kioxia, formerly Toshiba Memory. Neglected and laid out to rot under Japanese hands, bought by Americans and immediately became one of the biggest names in NAND flash (and rightfully so as inventors of the damn thing).
Japan can't succeed if success looked at them straight in the eye, and I'm tired of it.
It's not even close.
You can flex all the exceptionalism you want, reality won't change one iota.
There's barely electrical passenger train lines there, let alone high speed rail.
https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/japan-is-worlds-numb...
So even though they fail at some things, Japan is absolutely an engineering powerhouse, and a key part of our current industrialized world.
So for a project requiring a ton of advanced robotics or industrial systems I'd put Japan being involved as a plus, they are the best in the world at that.
TAE tested an alpha particle detector in a Japanese stelarator with Hydrogen plasma with Boron injected in and they successfully detected a small amount of alpha particles, and confirmed they were coming from H-Boron fusion.
All this proves is that their alpha particle detector works, which TAE will need for their later devices. The H-Boron fusion was detectable, but nowhere near enough to get excited about. People make fusors in their garages that make small amounts of fusion everyday, but just with deuterium.
TLDR; their alpha particle detector works. That is all.