Boron availability

[DaveMart]

Hi! Just joined and had a question – I had understood from reading the links here:
http://pesn.com/2006/03/08/9600242_Spheromak_Plasma_Toroid/
that boron is a relatively limited resource – with most supplies in Turkey.
Obviously supply depends on price and the richness of the ore which can be mined, with low-grade ones having greater quantities but at considerable costs.
Can someone give me an idea how this affects the issue of focus fusion?
Regards,
DaveMart

[Glenn Millam]

This is a good question. As to the availability of boron, the US has pretty good supplies from rastorite and tincal in the southwestern United States. What I wonder is the cost per MW/hr of pB11 fuel, namely, decaborane. My quick search on the subject brought up a price of US $500 per gram. If a 5 MW reactor uses 24 pounds of fuel a year, the cost on that fuel is$5,443,108.60. 1 MW production over a year costs $1,088,621.70. 1 MW/hr therefore is $124. Another quick search on the cost of coal per MW/hr derived a number of $11. Is this right? If it is, it makes focus fusion sound really expensive.

I got my price for decaborane from some medical website. This may be excessively inflated, as anyone who ever had a $7 tylenol in a hospital will know. It also may not be the correct form of decaborane, too, using B10 or something.

Here are the links.

http://www.medicalisotopes.com/Product_Details.asp?find=3967

http://www.nucleartourist.com/basics/costs.htm

[DaveMart]

I don’t think it is as bad as that!
According to the guys at the Plasma toroid research project, the use of boron in a nuclear reactor at current prices leads to a fuel cost of around 1/20th of fossil fuel:
‘The low cost of operating a PB11 spheromak as an electric generator (currently estimated as a 20:1 saving) is based on fossil-fuel prices as of this year. If oil prices continue to rise as predicted, the savings differential may become even greater. This would more rapidly make up for the rather steep capital outlay involved to install a home heating system priced at USD $12,000. (Ref. 14) However, using a relatively rare element as part of a fuel-input system could cause the price of boron to rise, and calculations of cost saving which are based on its current low price may have to be revised somewhat in the future.’
http://pesn.com/2006/03/08/9600242_Spheromak_Plasma_Toroid/
Unfortunately though they do not source this comment.
Here are a couple I dug up:
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/boron/boronmcs05.pdf
http://www.indexmundi.com/en/commodities/minerals/boron/boron_table%204.html
http://www.imf2005.itu.edu.tr/field.php
http://www.consrv.ca.gov/cgs/minerals/min_prod/non_fuel_2002.pdf
It looks like a price per ton of a few hudred dollars.
Commonly mined ores seem to be in fairly limited supply, mainly in Turkey, but with substantial resources in California and Russia.
What I don’t know though is the prevalence of lower grade ores not presently mined, which it might be necessary to exploit if boron was utilised for a lot of energy generation, how the likely rates of depletion under those circumstances would square up to current resources and so on.
Nor am I qualified to try to put some numbers on those questions.
Some approximate figures frot hsi might be needed though, to convice potential investors that boron resources are likely to last beyond next Tuesday! 😉
My own wild guess would be that at a price of 10 times current, available exploitable resources might be 100 times greater than current, leading to a fuel cost about half that of current fossil fuel resources, and allowing focus fusion to still capilalise on no generating equipment being needed and so on.
Hopefully this might give a resource base which would be OK for a few hundred years at, say, American rates of power consumption for a world of 10billion.
As boron is a rare element some numbers would be handy though, rather than just surmising.
Regards,
DaveMart

[Lerner]

A 5 MW reactor takes about 5 kg of fuel per year. For an experiment, we purchased decaborane for $5 per gram or $5,000/kg. At that price fuel costs would be $25,000/yr or 0.05 cents/kWh. Electricity now costs about 5 cents/kWh.

Actually, these prices are based on the fact that decaborane is sold in very small quantities. It would be much cheaper with mass production. In the 1950

[DaveMart]

A 5 MW reactor takes about 5 kg of fuel per year. For an experiment, we purchased decaborane for $5 per gram or $5,000/kg. At that price fuel costs would be $25,000/yr or 0.05 cents/kWh. Electricity now costs about 5 cents/kWh.

Actually, these prices are based on the fact that decaborane is sold in very small quantities. It would be much cheaper with mass production. In the 1950

[Glenn Millam]

A 5 MW reactor takes about 5 kg of fuel per year. For an experiment, we purchased decaborane for $5 per gram or $5,000/kg. At that price fuel costs would be $25,000/yr or 0.05 cents/kWh. Electricity now costs about 5 cents/kWh.

Actually, these prices are based on the fact that decaborane is sold in very small quantities. It would be much cheaper with mass production. In the 1950

[Transmute]

I don’t see any evidence that boron is rare. From what I can find global consumption of boron is over 1.8 Million tons a year! Although most of that weight is in oxygen (borates), so only a faction of that weight is elemental boron. And considering how its used it seem like one of the more common elements, at least its seems much more common the uranium or thorium. I’ll affirm that Lerner’s estimates are probably within the right range and that boron fusion even at 100%+ of the worlds electricity production would not even put a significant dent in boron consumption. Making decaborane would be entirely dependent on boron, hydrogen and energy, so decaborane

[Jolly Roger]

Transmute wrote: Although making isotopically pure B10 and H1 might add alot more cost.

Transmute:

You mean “B11”, and yes, separating the desirable B11 from the undesirable B10 seems to be a problem, as a significant fraction of Boron (~20%) is B10. However, as they are chemically separable and the (fission) nuclear industry uses B10 and dumps the B11 onto the electronics industry, B11 should be readily available in the near future.

Deuterium is only 0.015% of Hydrogen, so it should not be a significant problem, but if it is, pure Protium should be available from the Canadian nuclear industry, which uses a lot of Deuterium and dumps the Protium.

Even after the fission nuclear industry is phased out and replaced with Focus Fusion, the separation technology and infrastructure will remain.

[Torulf]

Boron is the 6th common ion in the sea. 1m3 sea water contains 27.68g H3BO3.
If the energy is used for desalination it can be possible to in same time extract the boron.

[Torulf]

A possible problem is not shortage of boron but shortage of beryllium.
Beryllium is rare, expensive and toxic. Maybe it

[Transmute]

The beryllium can be recycled, its not destroyed by fusion only sputtered off the electrodes to build up on the end of the decelerator.

[annodomini2]

Torulf wrote: Boron is the 6th common ion in the sea. 1m3 sea water contains 27.68g H3BO3.
If the energy is used for desalination it can be possible to in same time extract the boron.

Could the hydrogen be extracted intact to provide rocket fuel?

[Torulf]

Hydrogen can be easy be electrolysed from water. It has not to be involved in this poses. The cheap electricity may make the hydrogen cheap to.

[Brian H]

annodomini2 wrote:

Boron is the 6th common ion in the sea. 1m3 sea water contains 27.68g H3BO3.
If the energy is used for desalination it can be possible to in same time extract the boron.

Could the hydrogen be extracted intact to provide rocket fuel?

You totally misunderstand the process. Hydrogen is consumed, not produced. The element produced is He3. It could be used for dirigibles, or party balloons.

[Transmute]

You know there is predictions that helium researves will run dry in a few decades (when oil and gas reserves are gone there will be no helium side products being produced). How much helium could a Boron fusion economy produce and how much helium does the world use?

[Author]

Posts