Laser Boron Fusion Reactor With Picosecond Petawatt Block Ignition

Abstract

Fusion of hydrogen with the boron Isotope 11, HB11 at local thermal equilibrium LTE, is 10 5 times more difficult than fusion of deuterium and tritium, DT. If -in contrastextreme non-equilibrium plasma conditions are used with picoseconds laser pulses of more than 10PW power, the difficulties for fusion of HB11 change to the level of DT. This is based on a non-thermal transfer of laser energy into macroscopic plasma motion by nonlinear (ponderomotive) forces as theoretically predicted and experimentally confirmed as "ultrahigh acceleration". Including elastic nuclear collisions of the alpha particles from HB11 reactions results in an avalanche process such that the energy gains from HB11 fusion is nine orders of magnitudes above the classical values. In contrast to preceding laser fusion with spherical compression of the fuel, the side-on direct drive fusion of cylindrical uncompressed solid boron fuel trapped by magnetic fields above kilotesla, permits a reactor design with only one single laser beam for ignition within a spherical reactor. It appears to be potentially possible with present day technology to build a reactor for environmentally fully clean, low-cost and lasting power generation.

Road map to clean energy using laser beam ignition of boron-hydrogen fusion

“…The cylindrical target with the HB11 fuel is co-axially located in a coil where during a ns a 4.5 kilotesla magnetic field is produced by a kJ-ns pulse of laser 1 (Fujioka et al 2013;Santos et al, 2015;Tikhonchuk et al, 2017) for trapping the fuel plasmas. A ps-30 kJ laser pulse 2 initiates the non-thermal ignition of the fusion in the fuel (Hora, 1988;Hora et al, 2015Hora et al, , 2017c.…”

“…This could be understood by using PIC computations with plasma densities below critical. The very difficult calculations at critical density were mastered only by JW Wang and his team recently (Xu et al, 2016Li et al, 2017;Hora et al, 2017c). As a test whether the PW-ps laser pulses have a sufficient contrast ratio may be that the light reflected from the irradiated target has to show a blue Doppler shift of spectral lines.…”

Green energy generation via optical laser pressure initiated nonthermal nuclear fusion

“…32 A concept reactor was developed including a spherical container where the energetic particles fly toward a positively charged electrode that is kept at a voltage of 1.4 MV, directly converting their nuclear energy into an electric current. 33 The reactor design for the picosecond excitation pulses needed a cylindrical fuel container with magnetic trapping in a field of a few kiloTesla (kT). Such extreme magnetic fields were demonstrated in laser driven capacitor-coil geometries by Fujioka.…”

Maximizing specific energy by breeding deuterium

“…Unless this problem can be addressed (e.g. maintaining cold electrons [19], removing electrons [20], non-equilibrium plasmas [21,22]), it does not appear possible to produce net electricity using nearly all other fusion reactions. At the present time, even the D-T fusion reaction proves very challenging, with current fusion devices still somewhat short of net energy production [23].…”

“…The table boundaries were chosen such that it includes all fusion reaction with nE i τ E f c < 10 26 keV s m −3 . This number was chosen as the cutoff for potentially feasible reactions because it is more than a factor of 10 above p-B-11, the hardest reaction that some present-day researchers are pursuing [19,21,22]. Isotopes with no data were omitted.…”