Completely clean + efficient fusion!In recently completed test experiments, the researchers were able to achieve temperatures that reached up to two billion degrees in some shots of the plasma focus device, well surpassing previous records of 520 million degrees achieved by the commonly used tokamak device. The much larger and more expensive tokamak has been cornerstone of the US fusion program for 25 years.
In addition, the “density-confinement time product,” which is the plasma density multiplied by the duration of the plasma event, exceeded that produced in a Tokamak by a factor of eight. The larger the density and confinement time, the more fusion fuel is burned, and the greater the total energy output. The deuterium fuel used in the recent test and the hydrogen-boron fuel for planned tests, which is expected to produce a superior outcome, are both commonly available.
These results are significant because temperatures above 1 billion degrees are needed to burn hydrogen-boron fuel. When hydrogen and boron fuse in a plasma focus they release energy in the form of a beam of charged particles—nuclei of helium atoms. This beam can be converted directly to electricity through a kind of high-tech transformer. This would be much cheaper than producing steam to drive turbines as occurs in fossil fuel and nuclear-electric generator plants.
Another advantage of the hydrogen boron reaction is that it produces no high-energy neutrons (in fact produces almost no neutrons at all), and so does not create radioactive products in the reactor structure or elsewhere. In contrast, deuterium-tritium, the fuel planned to be used in the tokamak and other fusion reactor concepts, releases its energy in the form of high energy neutrons, creating radioactivity in the reactors and necessitating the same steam cycle that is in use today.
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http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/article/49/This post was edited by AEtheric on Sep 9 2009 12:01am