I have previously spoken to this California company about its impressive progress and ambitious plans in the field of fusion power generation. TAE has invested more than US$1.2 billion, resulting in a fifth-generation fusion device called Norman, designed to maintain plasma at 30 million °C (54 million °F), ahead of schedule. We’re making progress, but it’s already passed 75 million °C (135 million °F).
Check out our 2022 TAE Interview Stories to learn why the company uses boron hydrogen, how the process differs from tritium-based designs, the design, benefits, evolution of TAE’s prototype capped cylinder fusion reactor, and more. And to know exactly why 100 million degree temperatures don’t cut the mustard in a hydrogen-boron reactor, TAE targets a plasma confinement of over 1 billion degrees by the early 2030s.
Today, TAE is celebrating the publication of a peer-reviewed paper in a reputable journal. Nature Communications, recording the world’s first measurement of hydrogen-boron fusion in a magnetically confined plasma. There’s a reason for that. The authors note that HB fusion has already been measured in laser-produced plasmas and in particle accelerators with beam-targeted fusion. But these environments can’t tell TAE much about how HB fusion and its products behave and grow in magnetically confined plasmas like those used in nuclear reactors. .
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The experiment is part of a partnership with Japan’s National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS), which owns the world’s largest superconducting plasma confinement device and the world’s second largest stellar device, the Large Helical Device (LHD). Done.
Although not specifically designed to pursue hydrogen-boron fusion, the project took advantage of the fact that the LHD already has systems to inject boron or boron nitride into the plasma. In general, boron is injected to condition the containment walls, remove impurities, reduce turbulence and improve plasma confinement, and increase the electron density of the plasma, but the team found that boron also accumulates in the middle. I noticed that you are doing of plasmas with sufficient densities that measurable amounts of HB fusion can be expected when high-energy protons are launched into the plasma.
So TAE put together a system based on PIPS (Passivated Implanted Planar Silicon) detectors to detect alpha particles (or helium nuclei) resulting from HB fusion in the LHD chamber. Sure enough, with both the boron implant and the high-energy proton beam turned on, the PIPS machine detected more than 150 times more alpha particle pulses.
TAE Technologies
Michl Binderbauer, CEO of TAE Technologies, said: And we will bring to the world a revolutionary new form of carbon-free energy that relies on this non-radioactive and abundant fuel. “
This kind of research will continue, and we hope to find, among other things, ways to increase fusion gains. and TAE expects to be able to harvest more energy than it needs to run. By the early 2030s, the company expects the ‘Da Vinci’ machine to be operational, grid-connected and powered by the world’s first HB fusion power plant prototype.
To learn more about TAE and its plans, watch the video below.
History of TAE Innovation, Development of Environmentally Sustainable Fusion Energy
The article is open access in the journal Nature Communications.
Source: TAE
