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Two-Laser Boron Fusion Lights the Way To Radiation-Free Energy
ananyo writes "Fusion unleashes vast amounts of energy that might one day be used to power giant electrical grids. But the laboratory systems that seem most promising produce radiation in the form of fast-moving neutrons, and these present a health hazard that requires heavy shielding and even degrades the walls of the fusion reactor. Physicists have now produced fusion at an accelerated rate in the laboratory without generating harmful neutrons (abstract). A team led by Christine Labaune, research director of the CNRS Laboratory for the Use of Intense Lasers at the Ecole Polytechnique in Palaiseau, France, used a two-laser system to fuse protons and boron-11 nuclei. One laser created a short-lived plasma, or highly ionized gas of boron nuclei, by heating boron atoms; the other laser generated a beam of protons that smashed into the boron nuclei, releasing slow-moving helium particles but no neutrons. Previous laser experiments that generated boron fusion aimed the laser at a boron target to initiate the reaction. In the new experiment, the laser-generated proton beam produces a tenfold increase of boron fusion because protons and boron nuclei are instead collided together directly."
Hooray! Fusion power is now only 20 years in the future! The absence of fast neutrons really is a breakthrough, though: the less radioactive a reactor itself becomes over time, the easier the cleanup at the end of its life.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
produced fusion at an accelerated rate in the laboratory without generating harmful neutrons
... Okay, sooo... less "harmful" neutrons... buuuut still a raging inferno trapped in a magnetic field that we're shooting with lasers. Which, I guess, isn't harmful. This must be a new definition of 'harmful' of which I was previously unaware.
[disclaimer: for those utterly lacking in a sense of humor, the above is not meant to be taken literally. If you reply with a 'that's not what they meant' comment, I will put up the internet bat signal and will send geeks armed with EMPs and death rays to your residence.]
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
This experiment sounds like the first step in the practical small scale direction since Farnesworth's fusor was developed into a commercial neutron source for hospitals and oilwells.
Robert Bussard's fusion project at Energy Matter Conversion Corporation was aimed at investigating Proton-Boron fusion, because it is clean and produces no high-energy neutrons. I was really hoping this was a follow-on to that work. The device Bussard called a Polywell actually shows some serious potential to revolutionize nuclear power globally. It even shows enough promise that the US Navy has been funding some small-scale experiments. It's unfortunate that Bussard died before he could see the potential of the Polywell realized, but it would be nice to see it succeed none the less.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
OK, it it's generating energy, then that would be electromagnatic radiation, a la x-rays and gamma rays.
And as it's starting with no electrons ("fuse protons and boron-11 nuclei"), the "helium particles" will surely be alpha-radiation.
So is there anything that this reaction emits that *isn't* radiation?
Apart from publish-or-perish papers promising potential future miracles that will be used to extract more funding from the national science budget, that is?
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
There was something called "focus fusion" that utilized boron-hygrogen fusion but I'm not sure it did work out well. Regardless, I'm less and less confident if it makes sense. Solar cells and wind turbines are becoming cheaper every year and have passed nuclear energy cost (in $/kWh) some time ago (was it 2010? I don't remember...). Like computers, those devices are becoming cheap commodity and are on their way to take carbon in terms of dollars per kWh. In other worlds, renewables (along with smart grids and energy conservation techniques) are on their way to become new "traditional" energy sources. Bucky Fuller was right after all: nuclear energy (in all its forms) is only marginally better than fossil fuels, renewables take the play to whole new level. We've just missed it for some time because fossil was too cheap (to be frank - partly thanks to stealing fossil fuels from 3-rd world countries by western powers)
Having said that, it does not mean we shouldn't do any research in this area. Basic research is THE basis of achievements of our civilization but please call spades the spades. Don't think it will magically solve our energy problems but there is a chance it will become breakthrough in many ways we don't expect.
I thought collecting interstellar hydrogen atoms with giant magnetic scoops while accelerating to near lightspeed and using them in a fusion ramjet was what Bussard was working on...
When Boron releases a helium nuclei, isnt it fision then?
So we can stop the "We're running out of helium!" posts (yelled in very high,squeaky voices to boot!)
The lack of neutrons in this reactions is nice, but the protons and boron nuclei still need to overcome the Coulombe barrier. Generating practical fusion power still needs a combination of pressure, temperatures and containment times that have not yet been achieved in fusion machines. Accelerator base fusion works (for p-B, or hydrogen, but too many of the particles scatter rather than reacting so you can't reach break even.
This scheme sounds nice for R&D, but not at all clear that it can lead to break-even
where we're going we don't need roads.
I am not a particle physicist, but do wonder if this dual laser Boron fusion method is likely to be a more simpler device than the one Tri-Alpha Energy has been working on for the last half dozen years?
They had better get a lot of research done soon if we are going to have Mr. Fusion in time for Marty on Oct 21, 2015!
I thought collecting interstellar hydrogen atoms with giant magnetic scoops while accelerating to near lightspeed and using them in a fusion ramjet was what Bussard was working on...
The guy was profligate! He had at least two ideas over the span of his career!
[End sarcasm] I wish I didn't believe that was needed.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
No one mentioned the obvious; sounds like another fusion success story. Or am I way off base here?
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
This could be used for the Hydrogen Fusion Ramjet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet) minus the electromagnetic collector since the hydrogen will be readily available.
Have you seen 'Star Trek - Into Darkness' yet? Yeah, it's almost exactly like the reactor in that..
Since I am stupid, I need to ask: if you have no neutrons flying out of the center, what are you going to capture to get that thermal energy to boil water to spin a turbine? Helium nuclei? Isn't that a big problem?
Mostly random stuff.
So is this better than Half-Life 3?
but does it produce more energy than the lasers provide?
um...
How is B(11p) + p --> 3He(4p) + 8.7 MeV considered "fusion" ? You're getting out lighter elements as end product.
Nobody Doesn't Like Molten Boron! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21Ty3O0Vac4
For anyone that wonders: french research agency CNRS has thousands of small research teams, which are each commonly led by a research director. A CNRS research director is like a university professor, except he/she is not in charge of any teaching.
Thank goodness that helium is the byproduct of this fusion process, because a world without balloons was just unthinkable!
Sure p+B11 is aneutronic.. but there's other stuff in there like helium (as a reaction product). so when the protons hit the helium, they'll cause a different fusion reaction. Oh, and what about protons hitting the wall of the chamber. Or, how about the Boron 10 (about 20% of natural Boron). I'm sure they'd do some sort of isotope enrichment, but it's not going to be perfect.
For instance, Wikipedia tells us that there's a alpha + B11 reaction that produces Nitrogen14 + n + 157keV. Since the p+B11 is producing helium nuclei, aka alpha particles, it seems that this reaction will run.
And then, there's the OTHER p+B11 reaction product p+B11 = C11 + n. Oops, some more neutrons
And, of course, you get those protons from Hydrogen.. but there's gonna be some Deuterium mixed in, so you have the d+B11 reactions, not to mention the d+d reaction of classic hot fusion.
Sure, the cross section of those reactions might be small, but it's not zero. And when you're producing significant power, a side reaction with a 0.01% relative cross section is still going to be doing a lot of reactions. And those reactions will probably produce neutrons, or gamma rays, or other stuff.
Face it.. if you're generating gigawatts of anything, you're going to get byproducts. The question is, just how nasty are those byproducts.
Before they toot the "no radiation" horn too hard, how much radiation does an antimatter-matter reaction cause? I would think with pure hydrogen, it'd be none while heavier elements would blast off at least beta radiation.
So a proton plus B11 yields one or more s (aka He), and if it's one, the remaining nucleus would be Be, but that likes to be Be10 (which decays by a to B10). That requires a couple of extra neutrons, so seems unlikely. ISTM then that 3 s is more likely; can't get just 2, 'cause what's left is another. Sounds more like fission than fusion. Since the binding energy curve goes the wrong way at small atomic mass (less binding energy is required per unit mass for larger nuclei than for smaller ones), this seems unlikely to ever be a net energy producer.
This is to provide information on Sunlight phenomenon believed so far to be due to fusion. The research papers published this year (2013) reports that 235-Uranium powers Sunlight. LATEST DISCOVERIES IN SOLAR PHYSICS IN 2013 1. M.A. Padmanabha Rao, Discovery of Sun’s Bharat Radiation emission causing Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) and UV dominant optical radiation, IOSR Journal of Applied Physics (IOSR-JAP), Volume 3, Issue 2 (Mar. – Apr. 2013), PP 56-60, DOI: 10.9790/4861-0325660 http://www.iosrjournals.org/iosr-jap/papers/Vol3-issue2/H0325660.pdf 2. M.A. Padmanabha Rao, Discovery of Self-Sustained 235-U Fission Causing Sunlight by Padmanabha Rao Effect, IOSR Journal of Applied Physics (IOSR-JAP), Volume 4, Issue 2 (Jul. – Aug. 2013), PP 06-24, DOI: 10.9790/4861-0420624 http://www.iosrjournals.org/iosr-jap/papers/Vol4-issue2/B0420624.pdf EXCERPTS OF THE PAPER: Sunlight phenomenon being one of the most complex phenomena in science evaded from previous researchers. Understanding the phenomenon needed advanced knowledge in the fields of nuclear physics, X-ray physics, and atomic spectroscopy. A surprise finding, optical emission detected from Rb XRF source in 1988 led to the discovery of a previously unknown atomic phenomenon causing Bharat radiation emission followed by optical emission from radioisotopes and XRF sources reported in 2010 [10]. The same phenomenon was found causing the Sunlight. However, it took nearly 25 years of research to reach the current level of understanding the Sunlight phenomenon reported here. BREAKTHROUGHS: (1) On the basis of fusion, many solar lines could not be identified previously and what causes these lines remained puzzling. Though 11 solar lines could be identified by other researchers, they became questionable. The significant breakthrough has come when it became possible now to identify as many as 153 lines on the basis of uranium fission taking place on Sun’s core surface. Surprisingly, the fission products released in Chernobyl reactor accident in 1986 also seem to be present in solar flares. (2) Explained what are Sun’s dark spots and their cause. (3) For the first time, it is shown what constitutes Dark Matter and showed existence of Dark Matter in Sun. (4) It is explained with unprecedented detail how Bharat Radiation from fission products (radioisotopes) causes Sunlight by an atomic phenomenon known as Padmanabha Rao Effect.
As usual with physics articles, a non-paywalled version can be found at the arXiv. The intorduction is quite readable.
This is an interesting result, but this is very far away from realistic power generation. They do not mention the efficiency (or I missed it), and I think this isn't at the stage where one even cares much about it.
I can see fascinating possibilities for this if it can heat my soup for lunch time faster than a microwave could.
I would much rather have a distributed energy system furnished by renewables. The older I get, the more done I feel with centralized command-and-control structures like the traditional energy grid. It's forced dependency, and it rankles. Fusion boosters might spin tales about how cheap such energy would be, but they fail to remember that the fatcats at ConEdison like the paychecks they get now, and even want more, and if they find a way to provide energy with fusion at a vastly cheaper rate it does not mean you and I will ever see that rate. They'll just pocket the difference and find a way to charge us even more because it's "clean" energy. Go ahead, just watch and see.
Whether it's coal, gas, oil, or boron is irrelevant. Energy freedom means never having to cut a check to another power company ever again.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
This doesn't light the way to radiation-free energy.
http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11412
"Although there have been a few proposals for fusion reactors employing plasmas far out of thermodynamic equilibrium (such as migma and inertial-electrostatic confinement), there has never been a broad, systematic study of the entire possible range of such devices. This research fills that gap by deriving fundamental power limitations which apply to virtually any possible type of fusion reactor that uses a grossly nonequilibrium plasma. Two main categories of nonequilibrium plasmas are considered: (1) systems in which the electrons and/or fuel ions possess a significantly non-Maxwellian velocity distribution, and (2) systems in which at least two particle species, such as electrons and ions or two different species of fuel ions, are at radically different mean energies. These types of plasmas would be of particular interest for overcoming bremsstrahlung radiation losses from advanced aneutronic fuels (e.g. ^3He-^3He, p-^{11}B, and p- ^6Li) or for reducing the number of D-D side reactions in D-^3He plasmas. Analytical Fokker-Planck calculations are used to determine accurately the minimum recirculating power that must be extracted from undesirable regions of the plasma's phase space and reinjected into the proper regions of the phase space in order to counteract the effects of collisional scattering events and keep the plasma out of equilibrium. In virtually all cases, this minimum recirculating power is substantially larger than the fusion power, so barring the discovery of methods for recirculating the power at exceedingly high efficiencies, reactors employing plasmas not in thermodynamic equilibrium will not be able to produce net power. Consequently, the advanced aneutronic fuels cannot generate net power in any foreseeable reactor operating either in or out of equilibrium."
You're shooting a beam of protons through a gas of fuel, this is about as far away from thermal equilibrium as you can get. Only a small proportion of protons will actually wind up fusing, the power it takes to generate those protons and shoot them into the fuel (or the power to take the ones that miss fuel ions and recirculate them to give them another pass through the fuel) will dwarf the power you get from the fusion reactions. In other words: big fat hairy deal. Fusion is easy. It's the extracting useful amounts of energy from it that's hard, and this process can't do that.
Yes, and in order to use the scooped hydrogen, you have to convert it to boron and helium first. So collecting H (1) and adding to it two Li (3) makes 7, which conveniently equals B (5) + He (2).
Thus, the crystals.
See the nice wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion.
Protons with a kinetic energy of about 500,000 electron volts have a good chance of producing 3 alpha particles with about 17 times as much energy when they hit a boron-11 nucleus. Unfortunately, a .5 MeV proton beam penetrating solid boron loses energy to electrons at about 100 times the rate that it produces energy via the induced fission. Thus you must move the electrons aside before you can start making money.
At last! A power supply for my flying car!
The common "crank" fusion claims are awfully similar to this article. Many "crank" LENR claims like those "Blacklight power" makes involve short pulses of operation pumping light into a metal plasma, with no neutron radiation and some other "cranks" make similar claims including claiming helium as a bi-product. So if this research indicates fusion is possible without neutron radiation, that is a big deal because it means missing neutron radiation may not be proof against fusion. Example: "Rossi's 2011 demonstrations[5] showed neither measurable gamma nor neutron radiation" Reference: rationalwiki org wiki Energy_Catalyzer Also regarding this article "the same laser, that pushes away electrons in the boron plasma, allowing the protons more of a chance to collide with the boron nuclei and initiate fusion.", I've heard the same effect can be made to happen in the lab using x-rays, temporarily making aluminum effectively clear to ultraviolet light. Perhaps an x-ray source or x-ray laser would help in their process of clearing electrons that would normally block the nucleus at lower temperatures. Example: "...report that a short pulse from the FLASH laser ‘knocked out’ a core electron from every aluminium atom in a sample without disrupting the metal’s crystalline structure. This turned the aluminium nearly invisible to extreme ultraviolet radiation..." Reference: 2009 Science Daily "Transparent Aluminum Is ‘New State Of Matter’"