😱 UK Startup [ENG8] using water as nuclear fuel claims [5 for 1] net energy gain milestone

[Hamartia Antidote]

Startup using water as nuclear fuel claims net energy gain milestone

Achieving energy gain in fusion has been extremely difficult but Gibraltar based company is claiming runaway success with its new approach.

interestingengineering.com

ENG8 says it can generate five times as much power as it puts into its fusion energy process.

ENG8, a fusion energy company based in Gibraltar, has claimed to have consistently obtained a five-time energy gain from its experiments. The company's claims were validated at the Culham Innovation Centre in Oxfordshire, one of the leading fusion centers under the UK Atomic Energy Authority, the company press release said.

Nuclear fusion offers a non-polluting and less risky method to meet the world's energy demands. While the process has been ongoing on the Sun for billions of years, humanity is still trying to perfect how it can replicated on Earth.

Research in the area has focused on using magnets and lasers to create plasma where nuclei of smaller atoms can be fused to create energy. However, energy gain has not been achieved through these approaches so far. This means that the energy spent to create fusion energy is much higher than the energy generated. Therefore, a claim that energy output is five times more than that put in is a major milestone that energy companies around the globe would be interested in.

How does ENG8 generate fusion energy?​

ENG8's approach to generating fusion energy is also different from its peers. Instead of trying to fuse hydrogen atoms, the company uses water molecules as a primary fuel in its setup called the EnergiCell. The company still needs to create high-energy plasma, which it does using heat. Here, the atoms of the water molecule are ionized and recombined under high-temperature conditions to release electromagnetic energy.

On its website, ENG8 says it has worked out a catalyst that helps reduce the temperature required to initiate and maintain fusion and used a readily available proton source to generate ions instead of producing specialist hydrogen isotopes.

The catalytic fusion process generates energy in various forms, such as light, heat, electrons, and other charged particles. This is trapped through the expansion of a coolant through a heat engine and directly converting electromagnetic energy into electricity.

Validation of the energy gain​

The letter Q symbolizes the fusion energy gain factor and is the ratio of the energy put into the energy generated. When Q=1, breakeven is reached, but when Q exceeds this number, it is called infinite.

ENG8 claims that it has declared a Q factor value of 2.4 thermal or five electrical, which Underwriters Laboratories, a US-based independent certification agency, has validated. For the validation, ENG8 ran three tests, each exceeding more than 10 minutes, the press release claims, and for each of these runs, the Q value electrical was five.

"The results are quite brilliant, the stability of the fusion reaction was incredible, and this development can make the biggest difference to climate change of any other technology on earth," said Valeria Tyutina, CEO at ENG8."It changes everything – faster than you think."

The company has not reached this point overnight. It has been working on validating the EnergiCell since 2020, when it completed its first independent validation with a Q of 1.8. The recent assurances pave the way for EnergiCell to be deployed as early as next year, the company claims.