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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.
Well, nuclear reactions that we can turn off like laser-initiated fusion are a lot nicer than the alternatives. The inside of your car engine is a raging inferno shot with electric sparks and compressed with inexorable steel cylinders. That doesn't keep you from going on a nice drive with your sweetie.
Bruce Perens.
Oil extraction is done by companies (not by governments except in the country of that government, sometimes) under the terms that the government of the area sets. That government has complete control of the terms and payment for the oil extraction, and frequently (Venezuela, most mideast countries) will seize the equipment once it's been established. Your leftist claptrap - "stealing fossil fuels from 3-rd world countries by western powers" - is almost to stupid to be understandable, once some thought is applied.
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You need a translation not a citation..
'After huge effort to drown nuclear energy in red tape, escalating build costs to many times their real cost - while at the same time
stopping any form on innovation in cleaner/safer/more efficient forms, we have finally achieved the point where its price/performance
does not wipe the floor with everything else'
And for bonus points throw in a little 'while of course ignoring the actual ecological and human damage of competing generation methods
as those are OBVIOUSLY clean, since they dont use evil nasty RADIATION (and where they do, we will ignore it)'
Make a little more sense now?