Submission + - Chinese Private Company Achieves Hydrogen-Boron Fusion (interestingengineering.com)
hackingbear writes: ENN Group, a clean energy firm in China, has just achieved hydrogen-boron fusion reactions in the EXL-50U spherical tokamak at a rate exceeding 100 million per second, the first hydrogen-boron fusion reaction achieved by a commercial fusion company on its own device. Typical deuterium-tritium (D-T) fusion, pursued by Most fusion projects including the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), relies on scarce and expensive tritium and also releases energetic neutrons that can damage the reactor materials and induce radioactivity in surrounding components. Hydrogen-boron fusion, by contrast, relies on comparatively abundant fuels and primarily produces charged alpha particles whose energy could potentially be converted directly into electricity, without using heat to make steam and power a turbine. However, hydrogen-boron fusion is considerably harder to achieve as it requires vastly higher temperatures and strict confinement conditions. So, instead of trying to raise the temperature of the entire plasma, the team combined high-energy neutral beam injection with radio frequency waves. ENN has started building Helong-2, its 3rd-generation fusion device, and is targeting 2030 for the project's first electricity from hydrogen-boron fusion.
