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Jul 21, 2023

Carbon challenge: US Department of Energy backs Sydney fusion start

The US Department of Energy has backed plans by the Australian start-up HB11 Energy to build nuclear power plants that could one day supply the world with near-limitless, radiation-free nuclear

The US Department of Energy has backed plans by the Australian start-up HB11 Energy to build nuclear power plants that could one day supply the world with near-limitless, radiation-free nuclear energy.

The Sydney-based start-up, which last year raised $7.5 million in a capital raise that it initially hoped would yield $20 million, has been named as one of dozen companies that will receive DoE funding and access to resources as part of a public-private partnership scheme launched last year by the Biden administration to accelerate the development of nuclear fusion technology.

HB11 managing director Warren McKenzie (left) with co-founder Heinrich Hora, who invented the technology. Louie Douvis

Nuclear fusion, the same process that heats the sun, involves forcing two atoms to fuse into a single larger atom, releasing enormous amounts of energy in the process.

HB11’s process, known as “inertial confinement fusion”, involves blasting a hydrogen atom with huge pulse lasers that smash them into boron atoms with so much energy the two fuse into helium atoms. Energy released by the fusion reaction is then converted into electricity.

Unlike most inertial confinement fusion systems, HB11’s process fuses elements that are so abundant they could power the planet for thousands of years, and it doesn’t emit any dangerous neutron radiation, the company claims.

The start-up has already demonstrated its process can release nuclear energy, but currently the power produced is 10,000 times less than the power consumed by the laser to trigger the nuclear reaction in the first place, HB11 Energy co-founder and managing director Warren McKenzie told The Australian Financial Review.

The US grant was only “in the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars”, but would also give HB11 access to an enormous, petawatt-class laser at the University of Rochester in New York, as well as access to nuclear modelling systems and expertise, so the start-up could investigate the unexpected results it got in its past experiments, which released more nuclear energy than expected, Dr McKenzie said.

The grant also puts HB11 in the running to participate in a public-private partnership with the US department, which has said it wants to build a pilot nuclear fusion plant next decade, with a view to having fusion-generated energy distributed on the US power grid by 2050.

“We’re in Gate 14 of the Melbourne Cup. The finishing line is a very big cheque to build a fusion reactor,” Dr McKenzie said.

Inertial confinement fusion is less popular than magnetic confinement fusion, which uses huge, magnetic chambers to suspend atoms heated to tens of million of degrees, at which temperature the atoms form plasma and overcome their natural repulsion to each other, allowing them to fuse into bigger atoms.

But it was an inertial confinement fusion system at a National Ignition Facility lab in California that late last year was the first fusion reactor in history to generate more energy from the reaction (3.15 megajoules) than was consumed by the massive laser triggering the reaction (2.05 megajoules).

Unlike HB11’s hydrogen/boron reaction, the NIF experiment fused two forms of hydrogen (deuterium and tritium) together. But it did validate the concept of inertial confinement fusion, Dr McKenzie said.

“Laser fusion has been all the rage since then,” he said.

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