Professor Heinrich Hora, from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), first had the idea to create fusion energy using lasers and boron back in the 1970s, luckily he never gave up working on it. His approach is much different from all the other current fusion projects, which has recently been patented in the U.S., China, and Japan.
Traditional approaches to create nuclear fusion requires very high temperatures that make the process very dangerous. The majority of the time a fuel called Deuterium-Tritium is heated to temperatures that exceed the surface of the sun, almost 15 million degrees Celsius!
Professor Hora and his HB11 Energy hydrogen-boron fusion approach remove the need for these dangerous extremely high temperatures. His technique compresses nuclei together using two powerful lasers that apply precise non-linear forces.
Professor Hora explains his thoughts behind using boron to create the reaction:
Tritium is very rare, expensive, radioactive and difficult to store. Fusion reactions employing Deuterium-Tritium also shed harmful neutrons and create radioactive waste which needs to be disposed of safely. I have long favored the combination of cheap and abundant hydrogen H and boron B-11. The fusion of these elements does not primarily produce neutrons and is the ideal fuel combination.
He also explained that the energy generated using the hydrogen-boron allows for using much smaller and simpler generators because it converts it directly into electricity. In contrast, creating power production using coal, gas, or nuclear requires heating liquids like water to drive turbines.
Professor Hora had to wait for the technology, to test his idea. That occurred in 2018 when new advances in laser technology won the Nobel Prize in Physics.
His approach is described as deceptively simple. It requires a large empty metal sphere where he then puts a modestly sized HB11 fuel pellet in the center with holes on different sides for the lasers. One laser creates a magnetic containment field for the plasma and the other laser triggers an “avalanche” fusion chain reaction.
This removes the need for any kind of heat exchanger or steam turbine generators, the ‘alpha particles’ generated create an electrical flow that could be used and sent almost directly into the existing power grids.This much safer approach could be used without concern, as Professor Hora explains:
The clean and absolutely safe reactor can be placed within densely populated areas, with no possibility of a catastrophic meltdown such as that which has been seen with nuclear fission reactors.
The team has reached much better results than they expected, currently, their simulations are achieving results from the laser-initiated chain reactions at one billion-fold higher reaction rates than they predicted. Managing director of HB11 Energy, Dr. Warren MacKenzie, explains why he thinks they will achieve the goal of “net energy gain” ahead of other groups:
HB11 Energy’s approach could be the only way to achieve very low carbon emissions by 2050. As we aren’t trying to heat fuels to impossibly high temperatures, we are sidestepping all of the scientific challenges that have held fusion energy back for more than half a century. This means our development roadmap will be much faster and cheaper than any other fusion approach.
This is a major accomplishment for Dr. Hora, who is now in his 80’s. The fact that they are receiving even better results than he could have imagined must be the icing on the cake. Some 40 years later, this is only the beginning. Here’s Dr. Hora speaking about his newly patented technology:
After investigating a laser-boron fusion approach for over four decades at UNSW, I am thrilled that this pioneering approach has now received patents in three countries. These granted patents represent the eve of HB11 Energy’s seed-stage fundraising campaign that will establish Australia’s first commercial fusion company, and the world’s only approach focused on the safe hydrogen-boron reaction using lasers.
