"We are overcoming all the scientific challenges that have held back the energy of nuclear fusion for over half a century." The director of HB11 Energy, Australian company presenting its hydrogen-boron technology for nuclear fusion. It is already working a billion times better than expected.
HB11 Energy is a company born inUniversity of New South Wales. Today it has announced a series of patents in Japan, China and the United States to protect its unique hydrogen-boron approach to generating nuclear fusion energy.
Nuclear fusion is the long awaited clean and safe theoretical solution to humanity's energy needs. This is how the Sun itself produces the huge amounts of energy that have fueled life on our planet so far.
Where nuclear fission (the cleavage of atoms to release energy) has proven incredibly powerful but insanely destructive when things go wrong, fusion promises a generation of green energy reliable, safe, low cost and without the possibility of a radioactive collapse.
The state of nuclear fusion
Many multibillion-dollar controlled fusion projects are slowly advancing, from the insanely complex Wendelstein 7-X of the Max 35 Institute to the project ITER Tokamak from 35 countries.
Most nuclear fusion reactor solutions under study rely on a deuterium-tritium thermonuclear fusion approach that requires the creation of incredibly hot temperatures, much warmer than the Sun's surface, up to 15 million degrees Celsius. This is where HB11's technology revolutionizes things.
The results of decades of research by the professor Eminent Heinrich Hora, HB11's approach to fusion is incredible. Eliminate rare, radioactive and harsh fuels like tritium, as well as those incredibly high temperatures. Instead, it uses abundant hydrogen and boron B-11, employing the precise application of some very special lasers to trigger the fusion reaction.
The HB11 approach based on boron-hydrogen
Extraordinarily simple: the design is a largely empty metal sphere, where in the center there is a small HB11 fuel pellet, with openings on two sides for the two lasers.
One laser establishes the magnetic containment field for the plasma and the second laser triggers the "snowball" fusion chain reaction. The alpha particles generated by the reaction create an electrical flow that can be channeled almost directly into an existing power grid without the need for a heat exchanger or steam turbine.
The general manager of HB11, dr. Warren mckenzie, clarifies: "Many fusion experiments are using lasers to heat things up to insane temperatures. We are not insane. We are using the laser to massively accelerate the hydrogen through the boron sample. We could say that we use hydrogen as a an arrow to hit a boron atom, and if we hit one, we can start a fusion reaction. That's the essence. "
"The hydrogen / boron fusion creates a couple of helium atoms. They are 'naked' atoms, they have no electrons, so they have a positive charge. We just have to collect that charge. Basically, the lack of electrons is a product of the reaction and directly creates the flow."
HB11 claims that its generators would be compact, clean and safe enough to be built in urban environments. There is no nuclear waste involved, no superheated steam and no possibility of a Chernobyl-style accident.
It is an absolutely new path
Eminent Heinrich Hora
"It has been shown that it is possible to create fusion conditions without the need for temperatures of hundreds of millions of degrees. It is a unique achievement. I have been working for over 40 years on how to achieve it. Now we can drastically change that. Hydrogen-boron fusion as source of energy is a new hope for energy and climate ".
Hydrogen-boron fusion can really change everything
If cheap, clean and safe fusion energy were truly achieved, it would be a tremendous leap for humanity and a large part of the answer for our future energy needs. And if it were achieved without insanely hot temperatures involved, people would be even better off.
