10 billion reactions sounds like a large number doesn't it? But if they told you how much energy this would release, and how expensive it is going to be to fabricate fuel pellets to this precision it isn't going to sound all that sexy. If they had bountiful energy past break even today THEN maybe in 10 years a commercial plant could be possible. Lockheed promised similar commercial results in a similar time frame. People who were familiar in the matter knew it was never going to happen.
The hb11 project is 3 orders of magnitude short of break-even. Despite that, it is overwhelmingly more promising than Tokamak schemes like ITER or SPARC, which we can be certain will never produce one solitary erg of commercially competitive energy.
Certain people are profiting from construction contracts, and bunches of physicists are employed. They will be the only people who benefit.
Since bunches of plasma fluid dynamics experts are being traind up, there should be some spinoff value, anyway, e.g. for solar physics.
>"Hydrogen-boron fusion is one example. In principle, the fusion reaction between nuclei of hydrogen and boron could provide a highly efficient, radioactivity-free form of nuclear energy with practically unlimited fuel reserves.
The reaction produces no dangerous penetrating radiation and no radioactive waste, but only stable alpha particles, whose electrical charge even permits a direct conversion of fusion energy into electricity."
[...]
"In the meantime, the situation has changed radically, thanks to the development of laser systems which can generate ultra-short pulses in the range of a few femtoseconds (one femtosecond equals a millionth of a billionth of a second), and the discovery of a method for amplifying such pulses by factors of a trillion or more.
The method is called chirped pulse amplification [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirped_pulse_amplification ], for which its discoverers, Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland, were awarded with a Nobel Prize in 2018. With the help of CPA, it’s possible to concentrate sufficient energy into an ultra-short pulse so that it reaches powers in the range of petawatts (a million billion watts). That is more than 100 times the power of all the world’s electric power stations combined – albeit only for a tiny instant of time."
(PDS: Side Note: There must be an electrical analogue to this idea...
That is, instead of using a laser to concentrate an incredible amount of light energy in the tiniest of points but for briefest instants of time -- do the same thing -- but with electricity (or any source of radiation at any other wavelength) -- instead of light...
Reason: There may be future applications for this in materials engineering / lithography / nanotechnology / other fields...)
Boron + proton goes to three alpha particles, am I missing something but isn't this fission? Although fission splits into two parts, this is splitting into three.
It seems that the ever 20+ years into the future for fusion just got cut down to 10, with this and all the other commercial projects about to hit break even energy.
