Breakthrough Billion Degree Confinement – LPP Press Release Jan 4 2011

[Tulse]

Thanks very much for the clarification, Dr. Lerner.

[QuantumDot]

So what is next for FoFu?

As i understand it there are a few things that you are currently working on and have a number of things planned.

ex Ramp up the current to 45ma.
play with the timing of the current with the pinch.
switch the electrodes.

I imagine that its too early to switch to boron yet even thou you have reached a high enough temperature to test fusion with boron.

just out of curiosity how many shots are you firing a week now.

[Breakable]

So the sweet spot for pB11 is around 160 keV or do you need higher temperatures to get decent output?

[Ivy Matt]

Ivy Matt wrote: So, presumably the information on the p-B11 fusion reaction was obtained by bombarding a boron-11 target with accelerated protons, and this was done back in the early ’70s.

Half right, half wrong. I was off by forty years.

Documentation of p-B11 fusion. See especially page 240.

Documentation of 8.7 MeV. See especially page 290.

Lerner wrote: It actually is easy and fun to look up the answers to these questions on the web—reaction rates and all are easy to find. I hope people on this forum will do that.

Well, I’ll vouch for the fun part, at least. Historical research is right up my alley. I spent much of Friday night and Saturday morning searching and reading about George H. Miley and UIUC; Francis K. McGowan and the Nuclear Data Tables; Oak Ridge National Laboratories’ experiments during the 1950s; and finally Cockcroft and Walton, Rutherford and Oliphant, Kirchner, Dees and Gilbert, and others “splitting the atom” in the 1930s. I hadn’t realized that phrase originally referred to nuclei with atomic weights less than iron.

Heres more historical background for those interested:

CERN Courier article on Cockcroft.

Cockcroft’s Nobel Lecture.

Walton’s Nobel Lecture.

[vansig]

Breakable wrote: So the sweet spot for pB11 is around 160 keV or do you need higher temperatures to get decent output?

Wikipedia quotes Eric’s paper at http://arxiv.org/abs/0710.3149 as saying, 600 keV is optimal. AFAIK, at lower temperatures, combustion will be incomplete; at higher temperatures, too many side-reactions occur.

[Dan619]

I am just a layman here, so apology if I ask this the wrong way or wrong place. I am curious as to if this does not work for Boron fuel, will this work for DD or DT? I do understand about the neutrons, that they make things radioactive. But would there be fewer neutrons than from a fission reactor? I have read about a “neutron pump” that makes radioactive waste more radioactive, but the waste is only radioactive for a century instead of thousands of years.

[Tulse]

Radioactivity is a major problem — true, it is less of one than for a fission reactor, but it is still an issue.

In addition, when the energy comes from neutrons, one has to extract usable energy from them. Typically, in order to do this, one has them heat some medium that then heats water that then generates steam that then turns a turbine that then turns a generator — the same relatively inefficient approach to generating electricity that all power plants have used for 130 years. The real elegance of aneutronic fusion is that one can extract electricity directly from the charged particles produced, without needing the standard steam generation cycle. As a result, you get a plant that is (at least in principle) much more efficient, more compact, and requires less capital to build and with lower operating costs. (By contrast, DD or DT fusion plants would for the most part look and cost very similar to a coal- or gas-fired plant, as they need generally the same equipment for doing the actual generation of power.)

[dennisp]

Another layman question: does this result prove that x-ray cooling isn’t a problem?

[Aeronaut]

dennisp wrote: Another layman question: does this result prove that x-ray cooling isn’t a problem?

We’re attempting to prove that high magnetic fields can keep the X-ray cooling low enough to exceed energy breakeven using pB-11 fuel. Iow, that X-ray cooling is an ongoing challenge which can be managed, not eliminated.

[dennisp]

Yeah I got that, I was wondering if the high temperatures in this result had already proven it. Sounds like not quite yet.

[DerekShannon]

Not yet, especially since the X-rays get worse with the square of atomic number, so mo’ boron mo’ brem, but see the slide in Eric’s Google talk where results have already more closely matched predictions with the magnetic field effect factored in.

[Author]

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