HB11 Energy was the first to master laser nuclear fusion

The Institute of Laser Engineering at Osaka University hosted a demonstration of a prototype nuclear fusion machine from the Australian company HB11 Energy. Its founders have developed their own technology, which is fundamentally different from the tokamak, in that it does not create extremely high temperatures. Therefore, the reactor design itself is several times simpler and cheaper, and its performance has been confirmed in principle by scientists from different countries.

The principle of thermonuclear fusion is to create conditions in which the nuclei of atoms collide and fuse to form a new element and release energy. Inside stars and in the tokamak, this is achieved by creating huge temperatures, when the particles start moving so fast that they are bound to collide with each other. But HB11 Energy has come up with a different way – they use a high-powered laser to literally “push” the hydrogen atom into the boron atom to overcome the repulsive forces.

The HB11 Energy looks like a sphere with a boron target inside and two laser holes. The first affects the hydrogen atoms, while the second, together with a capacitive coil, generates a magnetic field to hold the plasma in place. During the reaction, simple alpha particles without electrons are produced. This means that they have a positive charge, which is what the HB11 Energy engineers plan to “collect”. However, they do not specify how exactly.

In the course of experiments, the installation did produce a certain amount of alpha particles, and dozens of times more than the calculated number. However, the efficiency turned out to be only at the level of 0.0005, so the creation of a full-fledged clean energy generator is out of the question at this stage. This does not prevent the creators of HB11 Energy from advertising their brainchild and collecting investments to build a new plant with lasers of already petawatt power.