This is not a "breakthrough", it's an announcement that they turned their machine on for the first time and took the first measurements, and measured a signal (i.e. reaction rate) so small that they have to go through some lengths in the paper to convince the reader it actually represents the reaction in question.
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.
Yeah, the fundamental physics constraints of this approach are pretty wild. The cross section peak for the candidate Proton-Boron interaction is at about 10 times higher energy (i.e. temperature) and the peak itself is roughly a fifth of the Deuterium-Tritium cross section. Oh and each individual interaction produces less than half the energy. So 100x more difficult is actually not far off in that sense. That means you don't just need a lot more energy to sustain the reaction, you'll also get a lot less energy from it. This is a very long and steep road to net energy production and there are good reasons why noone has bothered with it so far. The only upside is that you produce more charged particles, which are easier to control and extract energy from and they also cause less radiation damage. But if anyone ever makes a reaction like this work, by bet is still on Helium-3. But we won't be able to make use of that until we have scalable mining industry on the moon's surface.
Helium-3 can be made on earth by fusing deuterium nuclei. Which is a lot easier than fusing Helium-3 nuclei, so if you can do the latter the former is probably a lot easier than going to the moon.
If it was easy to create Helium-3 via fusion we wouldn't need it in the first place. The whole idea is that He-3 fusion might be easier to harness because it produces fewer neutrons. And if we can't create it as byproduct in a net energy gain scenario this approach is only useful for spaceship fuel at best.
I guess, hypothetically, you could have giant D-D power plants producing He3 as a byproduct, which can then be used in smaller more portable applications like (space)ships.
The whole point of H-B11 fusion research is finding ways around the naive interaction dynamics in order to take advantage of superior aspects.
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?
"Major breakthrough in the World Cup final between Flabinisthan and Giberrishland.
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."
"Sure, the situation seems dire. But as I said, once we have someone able to read a map, it's only going to be a matter of time until we win the game. All you have to do is fund our startup ! No need to make hard decisions, like "learning how to play". That's for ideologists !"
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.
Very skeptical. Ever since the ball lightning-is-fusion craze of the 90s, lots of people were claiming to have done small scale p-B11 fusion. Being able to produce a few helium nuclei isn't the same thing as achieving a Q>2 or Q>10. I mean, NIF "achieved" fusion, but we all know it's not able to extract net power.
I still believe Commonwealth Fusion Systems with their SPARC/ARC small tokamak design will be the first to achieve a viable commercial reactor.
What is cool about Fusing Hydrogen to Boron is there is relatively low amounts of radioactive particles, the only emission is Helium nucleuses and those have a charge that can make electricity directly without a heat cycle. Other fusion types make neutrons which then can make materials they hit become radioactive or at least weaken them. This is still proof of concept but they are estimating putting power into the grid in the next 10-15 years, which is a big jump from the constant 30-40 year timeframe fusion has been stuck in up to recently.
Depends on the field in question but generally, any timeframe greater than 2-3 years generally means "we have absolutely no idea because there are multiple major things to solve and a nonzero number of unknown unknowns."
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.
As a comparison: In the UK we've being building a single trainline, 230km of track, the project is 10 years old has tripled in cost to £90B and new estimates are that it will take 10 more years.
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?
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.
Todd Rider's 1995 PhD thesis poured cold water on all these exciting aneutronic fusion approaches. He maintains to this day a good presentation covering various approaches and what is feasible and what isn't. Current version at https://secureservercdn.net/198.71.233.129/f5o.aea.myftpuplo...
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.
I read some interesting work about picosecond laser driven pB11 fusion [0]. There doesn't seem to be a huge amount of research into picosecond lasers, but it strikes me as the logical step past NIF's work. What are your thoughts on this?
Yes, I've read about Heinrich Hora's approach to fusion. I'm not enough of an expert on this to say whether it's bogus or not. Guess the proof is in the pudding if they build a machine to demonstrate that these theoretical models actually work.
Insane article with its focus on “clean” fusion as if we already have dirty fusion.
> “Inventing fusion reactors that produce net energy is one thing, delivering it as a reliable, grid-ready source of electricity is another.”
If it’s such not a big deal - can you send me plans for a net energy producing reactor, while you work on commercialization?
While I don't agree 100% with everything in the article either, you are kind of twisting their words here. They didn't say producing net energy weren't a big thing. They only stated that reliable, grid-ready electricity was even more difficult than net energy production in the first place.
I'm not sure why this seems to be hyped up in media reports and I'm skeptical this is a big deal. They used NIFS's stellarator to observe proton boron fusion in a magnetic plasma. The way they accomplished this is by bombarding the plasma with massively energetic particles. The energy produced through fusion is almost undetectable. I'm not sure what relevance this has to their proposed FRC reactor and the paper doesn't make that clear either. They do talk about a wealth of data that could inform their research but since the scale here is so astronomically different from a hypothetical reactor that produces energy it is hard to see how the knowledge gained from what is essentially a single experiment has any relevance to their eventual goal of producing net energy gain. Most of the work to make fusion energy work is engineering and engineering is very sensitive to scale.
* 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.
I am sure none would claim that the US has not produced great things, but in an economy of world wide trade, even the US is very much dependent on foreign products.
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?
The point I am making is that America knows how to execute and succeed with engineering, unlike Japan.
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.
Kioxia isn't good example. Toshiba was failed on some industry like nuclear, but Toshiba NAND manufacturing was one of the best division. They invented NAND Flash and has been a top player. Toshiba should avoid bankrupt so they needed to sell superior division.
I would agree with you when it comes to innovative engineering. But when it comes to making really reliable and high quality parts of not-so-innovative designs, then I think Germany has a traditional edge. This is visible when you look at the staple German suppliers for all sorts of machine parts and their reputation compared to the competition.
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.
That is tangent to whether Japan can bring projects to fruition.
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.
Seems like cherry (or is that lemon?) picking. The United States has failed projects too, as do all advanced economies. There’s no way Japan got where it is today if they can’t execute.
The private sector in Japan is not especially productive and definitely has trends of choosing unworkable gadget ideas that nobody outside the country would ever care about. A fusion reactor that doesn't work is a sort of big Galapagos phone.
Japan is the 4th largest exporter in the world. At that level big gambles are responsible bets. Japan already has an established industrial and economic base. They can afford to experiment. At their scale failures come for free and still have positive value.
I really don’t understand the downvotes, but the full version of that famous quote is “do things that don’t scale right away.” Not “do things that don’t scale and will never scale.”
There are a number of different approaches that are currently being worked on. I'm curious to know how they rank in terms of likelihood of getting power onto the grid. First Light Fusion of Britain is pursuing a novel approach, as is TAE. The MIT folks are pursuing a compact tokamak I believe. Any thoughts on what approaches have a fighting chance of eventual success?
Fusion is usually measured by the detection of neutrons at the proper energy level for the fusion reaction you are looking for. H-Boron fusion does not release neutrons (or at least enough to measure) but alpha particles instead.
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.
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.