Fusion Based Electricity Is Now A Reality

"A lot of energy"??? That seems rather imprecise. So they are not reaching unity power and they want to spend 2 billion of someone else's money. I get that. More work is needed. But how is this different from other fusion projects?

Two billion is absurd to prove that it works. I wonder if it does work.

NIF blasts frozen hydrogen pellets with megajoules of UV light. People make EUV for lithography by hitting tin droplets with a blast of IR. Both use much longer modulated pulses to preheat and shape and then blast the target bits. (We do the timing for both.)

Nice pic of the NIF target chamber, but they can't take credit for that.

New Frontiers in Funding.

"Now a reality?"

If it worked people would be throwing money at them.

If they are asking then they don't have anything but an ad campaign, and that ending showing a picture of some kid with their nose under water is not ideal IMHO. What is the message here?

John :-#(#

As a means of converting energy to less energy it works great!

"What failed at the multi-billion National Ignition Facility is now on the agenda of a Bavarian startup: Marvel Fusion “… will provide a novel approach that is suited for commercializing baseload fusion electrical power. The Marvel Fusion path to commercial fusion energy is based on short pulse, high energy and electrically efficient lasers” "

Having a Nobel Laureate physicist backup is pretty good marketing.

Marvel fusion wants to erect a first test site in the Bavarian community of Penzberg. Construction of the buildings is scheduled to start in May 2021, it should be running in 2023 as local newspapers report. They plan to invest 200 to 300 million euros, which is about the sum that was invested in each of the ELI sites. 150 people should work there in the beginning, they say. A real power station producing a real energy output would cost about two billion Euro and construction could be operational in 2030. The whole endeavor is backed by private funding. Gérard Mourou is member of the Advisory Board, one of the founders of the whole ELI project, Georg Korn, is hired as Chief Technology Officer.

The technology, Marvel is not alone: https://hb11.energy/

It works a billion times better than expected!

I've posted about an Australian version of this idea here earlier - it's neutron free fusion, which has lots of advantages.

It does depend on a rather specialised ultrashort pulse laser. which makes the US laser fusion arrangements look a bit unsubtle.

https://hb11.energy/our-story/ I heard a lecture on it from Heinrich Hora a couple of years ago . He seemed pretty confident that he would be able to eventually get it to work, if he could suck in enough venture capital.

People are throwing money at them. We're talking Germany, not U.S.

Recipe for failure: US government overfunding and university or government administration of project.

If a boron-hydrogen pellet can be ignited with a laser shot, and the released energy ignites the rest of the pellet, it's a nuclear bomb.

Let's hope it doesn't work.

More innovations from Germany!

Right- I found them. The idea is being enabled by new developments in ultra short duration high intensity laser technology. It's now quite workable.

Two billion give or take exchange rate is about what the US military spends in a day. About 1/300th what it'll cost to upgrade the US nuclear arsenal over ten years. About 1/10th what it would cost to house every homeless person in America for life.

PReTTy sooN yoUre talKing reaL moNEy

That was the claim back when I first posted about the idea, more than a year ago. Demonstrating that it is actually workable is the time-consuming and expensive bit, and it doesn't seem to have happened yet. It's still venture capitalists looking for more money.

Appears purely theoretical. Requires 10 PW picosecond pulses to initiate the reaction, a 1 meter sphere charged to +1.4 megavolts with the reaction unit at center, lots of study and effort to solve major problems. Sounds like a pie-in-sky money sink for naive investors.

Quote:

What is HB11 Energy’s Concept?

The laser boron fusion concept reactor is detailed in the ‘Roadmap’ paper [7]. It includes sections on ‘Problems to be solved’ and ‘Need for very high contrast ratio PW-PS laser pulses.’ Below is a summary of this concept.

The HB11 reactor concept is illustrated in Fig. 1. (A) This shows a sphere of at least one metre in radius, intended to capture energy from the generation of helium nuclei produced by the HB11 reaction – 2.9 MeV alpha particles representing up to 300 kWh energy per shot of 15mg HB11 fuel. The sphere has to be made of steel or similar material of at least a few millimeters in thickness to absorb the shock produced by the fusion reaction, which will correspond to about that of 50 grams of chemical explosive.

Fig. 1. (A, left) Schematic of an electric power generator including sphere and hydrogen-boron fusion reactor unit at the centre (B). (B, right) The reaction unit includes capacitor coils (yellow) around the HB11 fuel pellet (purple).

The reaction unit is shown in Fig. 1 (B). The HB11 fuel sits inside a capacitor coil in the reaction unit. A kilotesla magnetic field is produced by a nanosecond pulse in Laser 1 by means described by Fujioka et al. [10] and Santos et al. [19].

Simultaneously, a kilojoule picosecond pulse in Laser 2 creates the conditions for the ultrahigh acceleration of plasma blocks required for non-thermal ignition of HB11. These conditions were predicted numerically by Prof. Hora in 1977 to achieve the HB11 reaction (literature summarised in [9]). Several more recent results have not only observed the HB11 reaction experimentally but also an avalanche reaction realising gains much higher than predicted for spherical compression (summarised by H. Hora, G. Korn, S. Eliezer, G. Miley, Mourou, et al. in 2015) [6].

DIRECT CONVERSION INTO ELECTRICITY

The reactor is intended to achieve the direct conversion of nuclear energy into electricity without its conversion into heat. To achieve this, the reactor sphere will be charged at a potential of less than but close to 1.4 megavolts allowing it to slow the charged alpha particles before they contact the sphere. The alpha-particles will be neutralised on contact with the sphere allowing their charge to be captured as the source of electricity.

While there will undoubtedly be challenges with the conversion of this charge into AC electricity suitable for a power grid, the concept removes the requirement of heat exchange and steam turbine infrastructure allowing for much smaller and cost-effective generators to be produced.

What still needs to be done?

In achieving this experimental proof-of-concept, some of the key streams of research that will need to be explored include:

Further understanding block ignition from radiation pressure laser drivers. As there are only very few results experimentally demonstrating radiation pressure, bulk acceleration and the generation of plasma blocks, it is far from well understood. With the dawn of 10 PW laser interactions approaching, we expect a surge in activity within the laser plasma community towards high energy high efficiency radiation pressure acceleration and we are poised to steer this towards realizing HB11 reactions. The long-term aim of this stream of experiments will be to use the currently available (and soon to be online) laser systems to confirm plane geometry picosecond block ignition using hydrogen boron fuel and optimize the laser conditions in order to achieve the largest gains in a fusion reaction.

Understanding the laser requirements – Laser development over the next decade such as those driven by advances for the European ELI project, and others, should enable this capability to be developed. Lasers with performance of ~10 PW and rep-rates of less than 1 shot per minute are examples of the ongoing rapid development of the field.

Understanding the kilotesla magnetic field – the physics of laser generation of the ultrahigh magnetic fields in the coils is also an active field of research (e.g. Fujioka et al. [10]). Additional and ongoing research on the field properties, the time dependence, and further improvements are of technology is also required to evaluate and optimize this concept.

Reactor sphere – a better understanding of the operations / physics of the reactor sphere will provide a critical step in understanding future scientific and engineering design parameters for building a reactor. For instance, placement of the reaction unit at the centre of the reaction sphere is a challenge and is similar to the need of all inertially confined approaches.

Fuel – A better understanding of the ideal fuel and the construction and characteristics of the target will be required in order to achieve the most efficient interaction and the highest gain fusion reaction.

Computation modelling – all experimental efforts will be supported by the efforts of a computational modelling team.

https://hb11.energy/how-it-works/

NIF didn't fail. It has other uses than power generation; that's almost a cover story. NIF did exceed break-even from optical input to thermal output.

NIF is still firing shots, and upgrades are planned.

If you're ever in the neighborhood, check out the visitor center.

Photovoltaics have been used to convert fusion energy to electrical energy for 50+ years.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work very well at night.

boB :)

Which they seem to think that they can get. There's quite a lot of experimental background that suggests that their scheme can be made to work, but there's a lot of development work (which may not work out) between the concept and a commercial source of power. "Purely theoretical" is a put-down, rather than a meaningful comment.

If anything it suggests that there are so many ways for fusion without achieving a high pressure, high temperature equilibrium, that one of them is bound to succeed.

The direct conversion to high voltage electricity was already used in practice, if I remember correctly using a plutonium wire in a cylinder. That was in behalf of a spacecraft. It is certainly attractive over molten salts that contain beryllium

Groetjes Albert

Example for a Petawatt Laser: