The Future begins with pB11 Fusion Fuel
By Georg Korn, Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer at Marvel Fusion
Commercial fusion is no longer the stuff of hypothetical equations or scientific speculation. The future has arrived. Combined with the right ignition technology, commercial fusion is the key to unlocking a novel, clean energy source, which could eclipse all earlier power production methods, launching a new age of technological innovation. I am convinced that my children will reap the rewards of commercial fusion — like billions of others worldwide — and it will later be seen as one of the “sparks” alighting the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Scientists have been experimenting with fusion since the 1930s. It is now, however, that we are closer than ever to turning fusion-based electricity production into reality. Exciting, recent technological advancements have brought the use of the aneutronic proton (p) and boron-11 (B11) fusion fuel — an intrinsically safe fuel — closer to commercialization.
In the ongoing race for the first fusion power plant, most of the concepts to date have one thing in common though: they are based on the fusion of Deuterium (D) and Tritium (T) as the underlying energy-releasing reaction. D and T are fused together, with the help of heating a plasma and keeping it for longer times in a magnetic field, to form helium (alpha particles) and neutrons. The DT fusion reaction has the lowest prerequisites and is the best researched so far. The Coulomb barrier — as the repulsion of two positively charged atomic nuclei is called — is much lower here than in the case of pB11, and it can be broken through rather straightforwardly as long as high enough temperatures are achieved and maintained.
Nonetheless, one major drawback prevails: The DT reaction releases substantial amounts of radioactivity and therefore remains hazardous as well as costly since handling radioactive materials makes large investments necessary for transport and security. This is the case in DT fusion, where the radioactive isotope tritium is involved as a fuel and where high-energy neutrons are generated in the fusion process causing further radioactivity.
I passionately believe that Marvel Fusion’s promise lies in the creation of a new, clean energy solution based on a safe and unproblematic fuel. You might be surprised to learn that with pB11 there is indeed such a fuel already in existence. The potential of this revolutionary fuel and its ideal properties have driven me in my daily work. Enabling the green, low radioactive power source is among the deep convictions underlying the founding of Marvel Fusion.
Its dedicated focus on the pB11 fuel combination is what distinguishes Marvel Fusion from most other fusion companies or research projects. Why? The advantages of pB11 are simply unbeatable. Boron and proton can be handled without any problems and are sanitary. During the laser- initiated fusion of pB11, alpha particles (charged Helium nuclei) are produced which allow highly efficient power generation in magnetic and electrostatic converters and produce no problematic radioactivity.
Furthermore, boron occurs naturally on Earth, in such large quantities, that the fuel supply is de facto unlimited. Due to its intrinsic higher safety, the absence of highly radioactive products, and the ample supply, pB11 is by far superior to the radioactive fuel DT.
Why then have other fusion companies not embraced this fuel option? The reason is that the fusion of pB11 is much more complicated than the more conventional DT fusion. Scientists have been trying to figure out how to ignite pB11 for decades. But there’s one thing that cannot be changed: the thermal nuclear fusion of pB11 requires extremely high temperature in the plasma (over 5 billion degrees Celsius).
At Marvel Fusion, we are meeting this challenge with a radical new idea: Instead of relying on very high temperatures, i.e., the thermonuclear route, we functionalize quantum and other effects at the atomic level. We give the propellant a special structure that creates a high enough density within the fuel material and at the same time ensures that the laser is more effectively absorbed. The particular structure combined with high-intensity short-pulsed laser irradiation generates the necessary relative kinetic energy between the fusion partners and increases the probability of fusion using an alternative high field mediated route.
As a scientist, I can confirm that scientific research is fraught with setbacks and hassles, regardless if one hypothesis is correct or incorrect, but it does go together with innovation. I am convinced that following the aneutronic reaction path will lead us to a new carbon-free energy solution. I believe, furthermore, that pB11, as a source of fusion fuel, can be optimized for efficiency and scale to meet the world’s enormous energy demands. While intellectual challenges in the commercialization of our fuel are exciting– nobody has ever done what we are doing — I remain focused on our goal as the future is now, and pB11 will fuel this future.
Dr. Georg Korn is the Chief Science and Technology Officer at Marvel Fusion. During his long career in science Georg has carried out research on a wide range of topics in laser and laser physics and technology including lasers for ICF fusion, laser-plasma interaction, laser-driven short-pulse x-ray generation, ultrafast and high-power lasers for ultra-intense laser matter and laser-vacuum interaction and lasers for material processing and vision correction.
Throughout his research, Georg has worked with multiple Nobel Prize physicists, including Dr. Nicolay Basov for laser fusion topics, and Prof. Gérard Mourou, the inventor of Chirped-pulse amplification (CPA), a fundamental technology to lead to highly-intense, ultrashort pulse laser systems. Since 2007 he has been the deputy coordinator of ELI (Extreme Light Infrastructure), a European high-power laser-facility project, and later became the chief scientist (2011) and the science and technology manager (2014) of the ELI Beamlines in Prague, Czech Republic. Georg Korn is a Fellow of the OSA and visiting professor at Osaka University.
He earned a Ph.D. in physics from the Institute for Optics and Spectroscopy, Academy of Sciences, Berlin. After a postdoc at the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, he worked at institutions such as the Max-Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy (Berlin), the Center for Ultrafast Optical Sciences University of Michigan, the University of California, San Diego, the Laboratoir d´Optique Appliquee (Palaiseau, France), the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics (Garching, Germany) as well as in the medical laser industry.
