Helion hasn't published the triple product results for their latest Trenta reactor, but for the previous Venti they achieved a triple product of ~10^19 keV.s/m^3 at an ion temperature of 2 keV. The Trenta reactor has achieved an ion temperature of 9 keV. For D-T fusion, you need a triple product of about 3x10^21 kev.s/m^3 at 10 keV. For the D-He reaction that helion intends to use, they need to achieve a similar triple product at 50 keV. So it looks like they're still 2-3 orders of magnitude off from where they need to be to achieve ignition. Their neutron production rate is comparable to industrial fusors at ~10^11 n/s, which while useful as neutron sources are nowhere near producing net power. Compare this with tokamaks that have achieved a triple product around 1.5x10^21 keV.s/m^3, or about half of what they need to achieve ignition.
While it's possible that helion has made improvements to ion density and confinement allowing them to achieve a significantly higher triple product and close the gap to power production, I see no reason why a company looking for investment would hide such a result, especially while putting out press releases celebrating other milestones. I doubt they're anywhere near the point where an economical plant could even be considered, though I'd love to be proven wrong.
Something I consider to be a "red flag" in the press releases of any new kind of energy source, power plant, or engine is when they start talking about the potential applications of something fungible like electricity.
E.g.: In the Tech Crunch article linked elsewhere in this discussion there is this quote:
"Helion’s CEO speculates that its first customers may turn out to be data centers"
Do you know what else a 50MW generator could be used for? Anything. Anything that electricity is used for now. Why talk about things we all already know? Why talk about specific applications?
It's like a car company advertising that their new engine could be used to drive to Starbucks to get a coffee.
Once you notice this pattern, you'll see it everywhere in Free Energy / LENR circles...
Eventually a power source can power anything, but choosing good first customers is important. Usually, v1 of the product is expensive and flaky. So you need first customers who are willing to pay extra for the privilege of being early adopters, or for PR value. Data centers seem like a good bet here.
As you get better at mass producing the machines, the cost will come down and you can make money selling power to the grid at much lower prices.
Data centers absolutely do not go for unproven and flaky electricity sources! They go for the most boring, proven, and even downright inefficient sources. They need robustness above all things.
Untested nuclear reactors (fusion or fission) are about as far away as possible from what they want as it is possible to get.
Not to mention that many data centres are bang in the middle of high density urban areas, or at least reasonably close to them, typically in some industrial area on the outskirts of town.
No council in their right mind would approve any kind of nuclear power without years and years of environmental impact studies, justifications, reams of paperwork, etc...
You might argue that it's "safe", but the bureaucrats won't care about your opinion. They'll be worried about perception in an era where people set communication towers on fire because they want to stop 5G "radiation".
Fusion is precisely the kind of technology that is best implemented as base load in a standard power plant type configuration. Far away from big cities and scaled for efficiency.
It makes zero sense to plop something this esoteric down somewhere downtown to occasionally power a data centre during a rare power outage.
This "suggested" use case is 100% intended to appeal to people like you, the "YC News" crowd type. It is absurd on its face. Hilariously improbable. But it sounds cool and it got you talking, so a successful marketing trick, I suppose.
Fusion reactors wouldn't be used just during outages, but for base load, reducing consumption from the grid. They already have this sort of power supply/demand matching to support their solar arrays.
Appealing to cost-insensitive early adopters is an excellent way to start. The Tesla roadster is a well-known example. I don't see the absurdity.
But it is not a risky investment – quite the opposite actually. You can buy panels and inverters with 25yr manufacturer warranties. Maintenance costs are low and predictable (cleaning panels, replacing equipment). Energy output is as predictable as the sun, and in certain regions it is pretty constant.
It is also not "costly" in the sense that the bulk of the cost of installing solar is the labor.
>You might argue that it's "safe", but the bureaucrats won't care about your opinion. They'll be worried about perception in an era where people set communication towers on fire because they want to stop 5G "radiation".
I agree with all the other stuff you said, and I would accept this as a fair characterization of what is in store for nuclear plants historically. I wonder though how much of that experience would transfer in the event that we have real fusion reactions, given climate considerations and a novel technology that won't necessarily become entangled in the same narratives, and (maybe?) comes with a different set of environmental implications than traditional nuclear power plants.
All practical (but not yet viable!) forms of fusion are moderately "dirty" in that they produce sufficient neutron radiation to make the reactor itself dangerously radioactive.
Compared to fission, it's much better overall, but you're still talking about remote manipulation, robots, lead shielding, etc...
There is just no way that a shipping container-sized fusion reactor will be allowed to be "plopped down" anywhere without a metric ton of paperwork and justification.
It wouldn't be safe to go anywhere near it while it is operating! It couldn't possibly have sufficient shielding in that form factor. Even if it had solid lead walls it would still be dangerous.
Fusion would be perfectly fine as base load in dedicated power plants similar to nuclear power plants. There would be thick concrete shielding, containment buildings, etc... Less than you'd need for fission, and also less waste, but there's still nuclear waste that needs to be handled in much the same way.
"Aneutronic" only applies to the primary reaction. There are side reactions, and they occur often enough that all of the nuclear safety issues still have to be handled much the same as with any other kind of fusion.
The reactor walls will still become "hot", you still need shielding, remote manipulation, etc...
It just that it takes longer for the reactor walls to reach the same level of radioactivity.
If after 1 year of operation the nuclear waste is 50% as radioactive as with a different design, that's nice and all, but it's still... nuclear waste.
"They say the combined reaction will produce only 6% of its energy as neutron radiation, compared to 80% for D-T."
Neutrons are a design requirement for typical tritium breeding fusion reactors, but highly undesirable for Helion's D-He3 D-D reactor. I'd expect a 100x neutron flux reduction at activating energies over typical D-T.
“The helium-3 is produced by D-D side reactions and is captured and reused, eliminating supply concerns. Helion has a patent on this process.” —Wikipedia
There is actually He3 in natural helium. They can buy helium, separate out the bit they need, and sell the rest on to people who have no use for the He3.
The relative abundance of He3 is, numerically, really quite small (WP says 0.000137%, or 1 He3 per 730k He4 atoms), but that doesn't matter as much as you might think: they don't need much. Process a ton of helium, get 1.03g of He3. But it also says it is 70 to 242 parts per billion, which is a lot smaller than the other, 1370 ppb figure.
It may be cheaper to get it from used-up tritium, from people who are finished with it because it has decayed too much. In fact the US DOE does sell He3 they have extracted from tired-out stocks held ready to inject into bombs before they are sent out to use. The DOE makes its (fresh) tritium by irradiating lithium, but it starts decaying immediately, with a half-life of ~12 years, and the bombs want it fairly fresh.
These FRC reactors generate their own tritium, which is a problem, because when those fuse you get hot neutrons you don't want, and gamma rays. When you use FRC for propulsion, you can expel the tritium as reaction mass, but that doesn't work so well on the ground. On the other hand, lots of shielding is cheap on (under) the ground. But they don't make enough of it to use, and anyway who wants to bank it for years while it decays?
You would buy a few solar panels for your house at a few thousand dollars a pop, but would you buy a 50MW fusion reactor for your house, at the prices they'd be selling at? If not, there's clearly a continuum between you and the person they'll end up selling to first.
They are rightly taking every opportunity to clarify to investors who their potential market would be.
It has to be someone without vested interests in coal supply contracts and therefore the delayed success of your product, with a huge amount of money to throw at energy security, at a large enough scale for it to be worth a big start up cost. You also need someone to go first, because fusion is scary. This is non obvious. It is an essential part of their pitch, and no amount of cringe from people who know what electricity is is worth omitting it.
If they can make 50 MW reactors at all, then yes, I will be buying the electricity from them. Not the reactor. The electricity.
It goes down wires and is distributed nationally!
I'm also not in the personal market for: Nuclear power, offshore wind, or gas turbines.
Yet, I get electricity from all of those sources.
If they can make one 50 MW power plant, then they can make ten 50 MW power plants. Put a nice little array of them on some cheap industrial land, hook them up to the grid, and start selling 500 MW like any other power plant. Easy. You can also get funding like any other power plant. Just turn up at a bank. Or issue shares. Whatever. If it works there's no need for specialised applications. It just needs to work!
There is no need to "sell" their investors on the concept of electricity generation and usage. We get it. We all get it, in the most literal sense, right now. No need to talk us into it.
They should be selling me on their capability of producing the thing in the first place, not its utility.
That's much harder if they're faking it, which is why they talk about its utility instead.
Again, someone has to buy the reactor. They are in the business of selling reactors, not electricity. They are talking about who is going to buy the reactor. They think big companies who own data centres are going to buy the physical reactors. You are talking about something else entirely.
> Helion’s CEO speculates that its first customers may turn out to be data centers, which have a couple of advantages over other potential customers. Data centers are power-hungry, and often already have power infrastructure in place in order to be able to accept backup generators. In addition, they tend to be a little away from population centers.
They are definitely talking about selling them physical reactors.
It isn't as strange as you might think. Electricity isn't perfectly fungible, so new technologies do get deployed to specific use cases.
For example, solar panels got enthusiastic use in very remote areas even when they theoretically were more expensive than a grid connection. Because there was no grid in remote areas, and no population to support one.
Helion is a non-ignition fusion reactor. They aim to avoid the need for ignition by having efficient energy recapture. The website goes into more detail, and the prototypes have demoed this capability.
The lawson criterion is the point at which the plasma is heated by fusion faster than it is cooled by losses. It is a lower threshold than ignition. Even without ignition, you still need to achieve it to produce net power.
Ironically, their efficient method of energy capture actually makes their job harder than for a thermal system where heat losses due to bremsstrahlung and neutron heating are partially recovered; indeed this is the output for a conventional fusion reactor. For helion, only the energy of the plasma is harvested and thus they must exceed breakeven by enough to not just maintain but to heat the plasma by some economically useful amount.
Google is oversimplifying. The lawson criterion is defined to be the point where heat production by the plasma equals heat loss. For tokamaks (and other magnetic confinement fusion reactors where the confinement time is very long) reaching the lawson criterion is basically all you need to do to achieve ignition - once the plasma is being heated by fusion reactions faster than it is losing heat, it will very rapidly reach the point where it ignites with no further external input.
For short duration fusion (ICF, Magnetized target, Helion, etc) you can exceed the lawson criterion and thus produce gain, but the plasma may still not be long enough lived for the fusion to actually induce more fusion (which is the actual ignition point).
They're not exactly looking for investment, are they? With close connections to investors with deep pockets, in a race to commercialize fusion, it's not exactly surprising that they would keep their cards close to their chest.
An advantage over competitors is my first thought. That being said, it seems sketchy to me too. You always have to take these extraordinary scientific claims with a big grain of salt
IIRC, ITER wont be fully operational until 2035, and will only ever be a research reactor. Even if it can produce net energy (I'm skeptical), it's cost and size are way up there.
Even if Helion is behind the tokamaks, perhaps this play is more about reaching an economically viable reactor design? Not first to fusion, but first to scalable fusion?
Achieving fusion is a necessary step along the road to achieving economically viable fusion. They have a long ways to go before they achieve the easier of the two steps.
>For the D-He reaction that helion intends to use, they need to achieve a similar triple product at 50 keV
The triple product is 16x higher for D-He3.[0] They also need to get D-D reactions going to produce the He3. The triple product for that is 30x the D-T value. (Yeah, you could run the D-D reaction at a loss or at barely-breaking-even I guess).
They're talking about letting the T from the D-D reaction decay to produce more He3. Tritium has a half-life of 12 years, so in steady-state, there is about 20x the annual tritium production sitting in storage. That's a massive amount -- a 1GW D-T reactor would use something like 50kg of T in a year, so that's about 1 tonne of T. (Just getting some rough approximation.) Even if you scale it down to 50 MW, that's still 50kg. It's a major radioactive hazard.
>I see no reason why a company looking for investment would hide such a result
Exactly. Fusion companies tend to trumpet their successes from the rooftop.
So basically it's a low probability win with an extremely big payoff and the added difficulty of a general lack of transparency to the public (but perhaps not to angel or series A/B/C investors), same as any startup investment.
This is the type of investing one (at least me) dreams of doing if you're fortunate enough to get to $B+ in net worth. Sam knows enough people who knows how this tech works to get a read on quality / achievability, and if he gets it right (however challenging/unlikely), it means incredible things. If it doesn't work, whatever -- at least he's shooting at something interesting. And talk about something intellectually interesting to be involved with -- it must be a collection of great minds at this company.
Completely agree with this. This is throwing money at an interesting problem with an incredibly low outcome of success.
Given the amount of public dollars already put into this without success and the amount of money they are going to have too continually pour into this to make it successful it seems like a serious hail mary. Even if they do have the brightest minds working on it. I wish them the greatest success - we need this.
To your point it's an incredibly privileged investing position to be in and to be honest - he can take a lot of the gains he has already had in relatively uninteresting companies that have been successful and hope to something truly remarkable for humanity.
> This is throwing money at an interesting problem with an incredibly low outcome of success.
But an incredibly high return if successful. Nuclear fission (edit... accidentally wrote fusion here), if we can figure it out, is potentially the golden ticket to reducing our carbon footprint. Unlike geothermal energy, it can be done anywhere. Unlike wind or solar, it can be done at any time. It doesn't have the safety issues associated with fusion, nor does it generate waste products nearly as hard to deal with.
Right now, carbon emissions breakdown in the US are broken down by:
Transportation - 29%
Electricity production - 25%
Industry - 23%
Commercial and Residential - 13%
Agriculture - 10%
Land use and forestry - 12%
By moving to fusion, you can all but eliminate fossil fuel usage in the first two (and largest) categories. You can knock a large chunk out of the next two categories, where much of the emissions is due to burning fossil fuels for energy (heating, etc.). You'll still have emissions from agriculture and land use, but you can clamp down on most emissions in a big way.
If you can figure out fusion and get it working on an industrial scale level on par with other forms of electricity production (which is a big if), then you'll have achieved a monumental technological leap and you'll make a lot of money while at it.
Listen I'm all for these kinds of investments. Its very high risk and potentially a high reward. I think likely the reward will be some technology development in the process that helps something else but not in the direction they currently are going. Thats just the way things typically shake out. Especially grandiose plans like this.
They need to prove that the research works to actually produce net electricity - which requires a scientific breakthrough. Next after a research breakthrough - they need to make this a product -- then a commercial product. During that process they need to make this a commercially viable economically viable product that can compete against other forms of energy in the marketplace. They will need to get through serious regulatory requirements. And remember that they need to make this commercially viable to produce electricity at a very low cost - its super competitive at baseload power cost range.
By the time this comes to market the energy landscape will be completely different. It is already moving incredibly quickly.
Like I've said on other post - we need these kinds of moonshots but let's not have them distract against the other important work of deploying already commercially ready technology into the market.
Helion might not work out like they hope but if it does, it'll use aneutronic fuel, producing only 6% of its energy as neutron radiation. That's low enough that they don't need a heat cycle, which gives them a shot at a pretty low cost per kWh. I think they've estimated four cents, which is pretty good for scalable, dispatchable power without batteries.
The UK recently announced a regulatory regime for fusion, with significantly lighter requirements than fission since safety and proliferation issues are much less troublesome. That would be even more the case for aneutronic fusion. Possibly the US would be silly enough to get in the way but many other countries certainly wouldn't, including China.
> - they need to make this a product -- then a commercial product. During that process they need to make this a commercially viable economically viable product that can compete against other forms of energy in the marketplace.
They’re in a really good position here because they actually don’t. Being a no-carbon power source puts them in an almost new market. The government can (should) regulate carbon fuel away, and pour money into this in a non-market way to tip scales. Energy is heavily regulated but also heavily government funded.
Actually not quite - it still needs to be economically attractive in order for it to be a viable product in an energy marketplace that is already deploying @ scale zero carbon generation.
Externalities are actually starting to get baked in (depending on jurisdiction) or are essentially getting mandated in by policy (i.e. no coal in-state via political process). For most of North America coal isn't financially viable unless it gets political beneficial treatment - its been losing to natural gas for awhile now.
To be fair to your comment though air pollution relating to climate warming has been treated as a tragedy of the commons problem for ever.
Even better: much of the "industry" emissions are from producing fuel for the "transportation" category. Oil refineries are the biggest emissions generators in the US manufacturing sector, and some of the largest consumers of electricity in the process, to the point that many refineries have their own power plants on site. If we had fusion power and electric cars, much of those "industry" emissions go away too.
Fusion is what they are doing here. Fission we have already figured out and have been generating power from for decades.
Fusion does not have the runaway reaction safety issues that fission has.
Also, what you're describing is what we've known since we fairly easily harnessed fusion to make a hydrogen bomb.
Controlling the reaction rate so it doesn't explode is metastable with fission, and nearly impossible with fusion. This solution is basically just using tiny explosions.
As others have mentioned, you have your terms backwards. We already have nuclear fission, and its only problem is political FUD[1]. I can't imagine that the fossil fuel industry's FUD machine will spare fusion energy.
[1]: Nuclear is one of the safest kinds of energy we have even including every absurd disaster. We already know how to deal with the waste, and the unit cost of managing nuclear waste is very low (the up-front costs are high, but we're already committed to those costs).
It might be not unreasonably unsafe, compared to e.g. coal (which will be phased out). But as an investment it is even riskier than FRC fusion. The ratepayers of South Carolina were made to invest $30B in a fission project that will, in the end, produce exactly zero watt-hours of energy. But might burn even more money, first.
Yes, large fission projects probably aren’t the way to go these days—I’d rather see investment in Small Nuclear Reactor technology. More importantly though, considering the alternative (failing to mitigate climate change) the risk-adjusted cost of nuclear is minuscule. Moreover, I don’t understand how it is “riskier” than fusion, which still hasn’t been deployed anywhere in any form?
You are not factoring in opportunity cost: that $30B would buy a hell of a lot of solar panels and wind turbines, with perfect reliability. Displacing a megawatt of carbon-generated power now is worth a lot more than displacing that same megawatt in 10 years, because 10 megawatt-years worth of carbon did not, thereby, go into the atmosphere.
> You are not factoring in opportunity cost: that $30B would buy a hell of a lot of solar panels and wind turbines, with perfect reliability.
What do you mean "with perfect reliability"? Do you mean it can buy the panels and turbines and batteries? How much reliable energy capacity does $30B buy?
> Displacing a megawatt of carbon-generated power now is worth a lot more than displacing that same megawatt in 10 years, because 10 megawatt-years worth of carbon did not, thereby, go into the atmosphere.
Yes, there are different return-on-investment curves and the short term obviously favors things which can be deployed quickly. The question is which pays off the best for the relevant timescales. Also, we should invest in both--now isn't the time to pinch pennies nor to put all of our eggs in one basket.
Why d'you think? Helion has been super successful with their demos so far. The timelines are optimistic but I don't see why you'd expect the technology itself to fail with, say, >80% probability.
You misread my comment. 80% was in reference to a probability of failure. I think any chance of success 1:4 or greater can't exactly be called “incredibly low [probability] of success”, and even 1:4 seems unduly pessimistic.
I have been thinking a lot about this. I wish I could invest my paltry funds into climate-focused ventures as part of a crowd of like-minded small-scale investors. So I am investing in things like renewable energy ETFs. But my impression (correct me if I’m wrong) is that I am investing in companies deploying proven technologies, rather than moonshots. I want to invest in moonshots, given the fact that I think we need moonshots in order for human civilization to survive. But a) I would need significant funds to do so, and b) realistically, I wouldn’t be able to evaluate those moonshots for technical and economic feasibility. It is a discouraging realization.
I spend a lot of time thinking about this as well as someone who has worked in climate tech for > decade and am currently looking to deploy capital. It's quite tough.
1. Impossible to get anywhere close to good investing rounds. And deal flow requires serious capital on any meaningful technology (sorry carbon accounting software doesn't move the needle, needed but it isn't a game changer).
2. Investing in companies in the market as an equity holder. It feels like it doens't actually help the company - there's an argument that it helps the industry as there is more money/attention/talent attraction. Seems like a poor investment for myself given the P/E ratios on most of the companies.
3. Investing in actual projects - small returns but meaningful results. You don't get the outsized returns on companies growing quickly.
4. I do believe the success of humanity in the climate tech space is actually not through moon shots but a constant deployment of ready tech (read solar, ESS, wind, etc) and getting our politicians to probably signal the value proposition that climate tech brings. I do think moon shots have a place and we should bet on them.
I am open to ideas on how to help and new models if anyone has any!
>sorry carbon accounting software doesn't move the needle
I think the place where software could be really useful is with demand response and grid management. There's tons of work in that space already.
Seems to me that long-duration storage and electrochemical production of fuels/chemicals/materials are the places where new technology is really needed, thinking ahead to when we get to 100% decarbonization of the grid and beyond that to when we try to decarbonize everything else. If the exponential growth and learning rates of solar keep up, in 15-20 years it will meet our entire projected primary energy demand and cost 5x less than the going rate for electricity right now. (Those are big 'if's, though!)
Alan Kay[0]: "The key to the Parc approach was to be able to do many experiments in the future without having to optimize." What technology are we going to need 15-20 years from now, when solar energy is 5x cheaper, that doesn't exist yet? My thinking is that electrochemistry is the big missing puzzle piece. If we totally dropped fossil fuels, we'd need to pump something like the entire present-day electric grid's worth of power into making chemicals/fuels.
Some companies with new technologies in this space that I like:
-Form Energy: low-cost iron-air batteries
-Prometheus: solar fuels from CO2
-Boston Metal: zero-carbon steelmaking
-Twelve (formerly Opus 12): other chemicals from CO2
I'm in a similar position (haven't worked in climate tech, but have been diving in recently), and am interested in connecting with others who are trying to find the most useful way to deploy capital in service of a better climate outcome. If you're up for connecting, my email is in my profile.
Thanks for this very thoughtful reply! I thought 2) in particular was a very good point, and one I hadn’t really considered. I would definitely be interested in hearing more about specific opportunities in 3) if anyone has any. At this point, I’m not terribly interested in monetary returns when it comes to climate stuff, so I almost think of these activities as donations. That also means that my funds available are quite limited in the comparison to usual capital for this stuff (on the order of a few thousand).
This stuff is all "personal responsibility", and the fossil fuel industry invests a lot in making us think that recycling, etc will save us. It's really about making sure the fossil fuel industry can continue to pollute without having to pay the social costs.
The bottling industry similarly ran campaigns in the 70s to convince people that litter pollution was a personal responsibility problem, so that it wouldn't have to pay to clean up its mess.
Similarly, rather than making safer cigarettes, the cigarette industry ran commercials and hired "experts" to testify that the cause of household fires was flammable furniture (not cigarettes). As a consequence, several generations grew up around toxic flame retardants.
Ultimately personal responsibility cannot carry the day. Not only is it politically impossible to convince everyone to give up their luxuries and frivolities, but even if we could, these things account for a small share of our pollution. We need to transition our economy to clean energy. Carbon tax (or "pricing" if you chafe at the word "tax") is necessary (but probably not sufficient).
Yes, this will probably "harm the economy" in the same way that limiting one's credit card debt "harms their personal finances".
Sorry but not even close. Think about the fact that 80% of the world population lives on so little compared to America/Europe. If 100% of the planet follows your lifestyle advice, we would still be in trouble. It’s sad but the only "positive" thing right now about climate change is that most of the world is too poor to leave a big imprint.
We actually don’t need to lower the cost of permanent CO2 sequestration by very dramatic anounts before it’s feasible to finance a CO2 neutral Western lifestyle via taxes. The big challenge is scaling it up, and also having a society that’s productive enough to finance this.
For us, I think the sweet spot is a little riskier than renewable energy ETF's but a lot less risky than a fusion moonshot.
If electricity gets just a little cheaper (and it's fairly obvious that it will), then Power-to-Gas technology becomes viable, and could displace fossil fuels quite rapidly.
I'm looking into it. Email in profile if you're interested.
If you're more of a technical person, starting an analyst firm that provides insight for existing venture capital firms might be a solid play. Lots of people would like to save the planet and get rich doing it, they just need someone to tell them how.
No comment on this technology but only commenting on the thought process that Sam or any of these “intellectual billionaires” are right about complex scientific problems because they know enough people who know how this tech works is not valid. The people who circle billionaires have a huge conflict of interest to convince them to fork over billions, and they know people like Sam are smart enough that you can’t lie to them. So they do (subconsciously often) what George Costanza said which is believe in the lie themselves. So yeah don’t trust experts If they’re looking at you for a cheque (even if they themselves won’t directly get the check).
It seems like this would be a great place for a prediction market. Anonymously aggregate the information of people who know enough that they are prepared to lay money on the line. Replace the conflicts of interest with a direct interest in profiting from being right.
Completely agree. More abundant clean power, combined with the eventual takeover of Graphene in the battery sector (dramatically increases power density, recharge time and reduces weight) and I believe we will have a path to significantly decrease global emissions.
When we get to the point of putting Graphene batteries in planes than can fully recharge in the time it takes to unload and reload passengers/luggage it’s going to be pretty incredible.
Aircraft will probably adopt LH2, instead, carried in tanks slung under the wings, like the engines. Or maybe with very thick wings. The LH2 will be made on the spot at the airport from power drawn from high-tension power lines to wind & solar farms.
Once the hydrogen-powered aircraft start flying, kerosene-powered craft will find it impossible to compete.
This! I'm not positive on nuclear fission reactors because I don't think they are robust against the climate challenges we face. Too much bad waste that requires functioning societies to maintain. However, fusion doesn't seem to have these problems. I'm hopeful something comes out of it and the world moves fast.
Main thing I wanted to say is that we all love to shit on how Silicon Valley has basically gotten rich off investing in websites and SaaS products over the past ~15 years, areas which the Internet has provided a natural monopoly to the winner but haven't really been the type of "societal innovation" we've been craving. This, however, is obviously different, and if it works (a huge if), would be on par with the transistor in terms of societal effects. Kudos to Sam for swinging big.
I mostly didn't follow the talk about confinement, but I am slightly concerned about neutron activation. He3 fusion is more "neutron-light" than it is completely aneutronic. Operating at reasonable power levels, the reactor is going to be fairly radioactive after a few years. Widespread adoption of fusion is going to require the general public to be more relaxed about low level radioactive waste than they historically have been.
The quotes about total system efficiency is also odd. "95% efficient"? They're not planning on capturing heat energy, so neutron heating is totally wasted, and they're talking about using entirely resistive 12 tesla magnets, which will also throw off a lot of heat.
A fusion reactor vacuum vessel will be bigger than the core of a fission reactor of equivalent power, certainly. But I wonder if a better metric is containment vessel size: there's a lot of very radioactive, very contaminated equipment inside a PWR containment vessel that isn't the core itself.
>orders of magnitude more
Really? Wikipedia says "a typical large 1000 MWe nuclear reactor produces 25–30 tons of spent fuel per year". I don't see a commercial fusion reactor being quite that bad, unless reactor lifetime ends up being very short.
Helion's promotional images keep showing the reactor vessel in a shipping container, which is narrowly true, but doesn't show the support equipment on the other side of a five meter thick concrete radiation shield. No vacuum pump near a running fusion reactor will survive long.
There are all sorts of fascinating engineering problems for a commercial reactor. Photos of the Wendelstein 7-X show it covered with ports for sensors, which you couldn't do with a power reactor, because anything you attach directly to the vacuum vessel will be destroyed. It'll probably end up terribly ugly, the usual intestinal tangle of any industrial plant, a big spiky sausage with pressure sensors at the ends of long tubes to reduce their neutron flux. If you have to mount any sensor directly to the vessel then you use ten or twenty fold redundancy, since replacement is impossible.
After five years of operation, if you go to replace a sensor on the vessel and the threaded fitting crumbles away when you apply the wrench, what do you do? Weld on another one? What's the weld heat-affected zone look like inside the steel after it's spent five years soaked in hot hydrogen, helium, and is richly marbled with transmutation products, dozens of odd elements you don't ordinarily choose to alloy steel with?
Those particle energies come from D-T fusion. Helion is doing a hybrid of D-D fusion, which produces lower-energy neutrons comparable to fission, and D-He3 fusion which does not produce neutrons. They say the combined reaction will produce only 6% of its energy as neutron radiation, compared to 80% for D-T. There will be some D-T side reactions, but not much.
Reactor size depends on the design. For tokamaks, output scales well with reactor volume. But it also scales with the fourth power of magnetic field strength. Two well-funded startups are building tokamaks with newer superconductors that support stronger magnetic fields, allowing them to get the same output as ITER from much smaller reactors.
Other designs have different scaling laws so aren't necessarily any particular size. Helion for example is pretty compact.
> Main thing I wanted to say is that we all love to shit on how Silicon Valley has basically gotten rich off investing in websites and SaaS products over the past ~15 years
500 years ago, these people would've chased Jewish financiers out of strongly catholic areas, or shit on Dutch merchants getting rich in the spice trade.
When it comes to human nature, things don't really change.
Positive View - "In 2021, the firm announced that its 7th prototype, Trenta had reached 100 million degrees C after a 16-month test cycle with more than 10,000 pulses. Magnetic compression fields exceeded 10 Tesla, ion temperatures surpassed 8 keV, and electron temperatures exceeded 1 keV.[16][17] Helion's seventh-generation prototype, "Polaris" is under development and is expected to be completed in 2023.[18] It will increase the pulse rate from one pulse every 10 minutes to one pulse per second for short periods.[19] The Polaris facility will economically produce helium-3 on a commercial scale."
Criticism - "Retired Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory researcher Dr. Daniel Jassby mentioned Helion Energy in a letter included in the American Physical Society newsletter Physics & Society (April, 2019) as being among fusion start-ups allegedly practicing "voodoo fusion" rather than legitimate science. He noted that the company is one of several that has continually claimed "power in 5 to 10 years, but almost all have apparently never produced a single D-D fusion reaction".[24] However, the Helion team published peer-reviewed research into its colliding FRC system demonstrating D-D neutron production as early as 2011,[11] and further detailed D-D fusion experiments producing neutrons in an October 2018 report at the United States Department of Energy's ARPA-E's annual ALPHA program meeting.[25] According to the independent JASON review team,[26] VENTI, a sub-scale prototype Helion had developed partially for the ALPHA program, achieved initial results of 8·1022 ions/m3, 4·10-5 seconds confinement time and a temperature of 2 keV for a triple product of 6.4·1018keV·s/m3 in 2018."
I went looking for more information about their technology, and found the top thread on this reddit post from a few days ago interesting. It's a debate between two people involved in the field about whether or not Helion's approach appears to be viable:
fizzix_is_fun does a really good job laying out flaws in the reasoning that Elmar puts forward. The remarkable thing is that it's not just Elmar -- the Helion website seems to be the source of some them.
I wish there was a good summary article of all the mainstream and alternative fusion approaches out there, like ITER, (SP-)ARC, General Fusion, Wendelstein 7X, etc.
It's interesting that they do direct electricity capture instead of the usual heat -> steam -> turbine approach. They also seem to be loaded with patents around this. I totally see why this investment might make sense and hope it works out.
Direct conversion geometry was worked out a long time ago. The patents aren't very useful because the plasma temperatures that make aneutronic fusion attainable are far out of reach. If you can't demonstrate D+T then you have no hope for D+D or p+B11.
Everything is still either magnetic- or inertial confinement-based, right?
And within those there are the variety of designs.
I hate to say it, but a tiny part of me doesn't discount the possibility of energy majors subtley killing small-scale fusion approaches and pushing internation-scale huge projects (i.e. ones unlikely to be delivered quickly).
> Everything is still either magnetic- or inertial confinement-based, right?
Pretty much, but there are some that are kinda-sorta both (General Fusion's approach is "magneto-inertial"), and also a lot of variety within each bucket. Like, Zap Energy's approach is magnetic, but involves no external magnets, whereas developing the fancy magnets is a key operational challenge for CFS.
There's some interesting arguments in favor of the combination of magnetic and interial approaches. This is broadly known as 'magneto-inertial fusion', and there's a continuum of ideas between 'mostly inertial' and 'mostly magnetic'. I'd put Helion's approach far toward the magnetic side.
I mean, that's just a failure in the EOL decommissioning mechanism of large instances, in terms of making them bigger, there becomes a point where it becomes difficult (or even impossible) to add more fuel [1], but they don't violently explode until the decommissioning phase.
I read Arthur Turrell's "The Star Builders": https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Star-Builders/Art... a few months ago, and it gives a decent overview of many of the players and approaches, with the caveat that I don't think it talks about FRC reactors at all (what this and TAE are) at all from what I remember, probably because I think many people in the "mainstream" academic/government fusion community seem to not think it's a particularly serious contender.
The general sense that I get (as a purely amateur observer but one who reads a fair bit about the various efforts) is that pretty much everyone thinks ITER will reach a decently high Q, but that it will take forever and be incredibly expensive, and that beyond that, of the people that think any of the startups have a chance (which seems to be a minority among fusion people but a decently big one), there's the most consensus around the potential of the high-field tokamak startups (so that's CFS/(SP)ARC and Tokamak Energy), because the physics is basically the same as with ITER, except facilitated by the much higher-strength fields allowed for by high-temperature-superconductor magnets; there are engineering challenges there still, but it seems like if the physics underlying ITER are sound and the magnets work (which has at this point been demonstrated as a stand-alone thing), the math all adds up. Stellarators (Wendelstein etc.) seem like the next-highest consensus: people seem to think the physics is sound, but it's less far along. Beyond that, other things seem to fall into one of: "the physics basis seems fine but the economics seem questionable" (probably most inertial approaches), "this has been considered at length and many believe this is physically impossible, but it'd be amazing if they're wrong" (TAE, arguably General Fusion, possibly also Helion), or "it'd be incredible if it works and physics doesn't forbid it but it's wildly novel and nobody really knows yet if it has legs" (things like Zap Energy's shear-stabilized Z-pinch plan).
The overarching tldr is that it seems like the approaches that the most people think will work also have some of the most significant operational challenges if they do (breeding tritium, dealing with high neutron flux, etc.), which is why anybody is bothering with the quirkier approaches: if they work, they will probably ultimately work better than the tokamaks do, but they might not work.
Using the plasma's pressure on the containing magnetic field to induce a current (rather than heating water in order to use steam to run a turbine, as is currently what we do with fission) is pretty damn clever, and might lead to smaller reactors and lower costs - I really hope this works out.
I'm curious though, what happens to the plasma before the next pulse - in the animations it neatly dissipates, but I doubt it's that simple.
The big issue with other fusion reactor designs is how to make sure this incredibly hot plasma doesn't touch and melt any part of the reactor. Current designs try to "levitate" and contain the plasma with a magnetic field, but it's really, really difficult to successfully contain something as energetic and chaotic as plasma. I'm guessing part of the point of the pulses here is to answer the problem of "we can't contain it for long" with "we don't have to".
The field-reversed-configuration (FRC) creates a somewhat-stable moving donut of plasma that doesn't need to be "contained" per-se. The configuration of the plasma induces a magnetic field, tightening the donut as it moves.
TAE is exploring static FRC which has instabilities over longer timescales. Helion uses a pulsed approach which means they don't need to worry about these long-term stabilities and can simply optimize for peak power in non-equilibrium systems.
Over the years, many fusion designs have been shut down due to losses at equilibrium. It seems that Helion avoids these factors altogether by having a non-equilibrium system.
Didn't this same company make the same "three years" claim in 2014? "Helion CEO David Kirtley says that his company can do it in three years."[1]
Happy to see investment in this space, but also tempering my expectations that having a commercial fusion reactor in three years is anything approaching realistic.
A comment[0] on Reddit by someone close to the Helion CEO claims the media left out some important context. Helion said they could do it in three years with funding and they didn't get the funding they needed.
She is talking about Tokamak, particularly, which really is a dead end. But a minuscule fraction of the spend is giving plasma fluid dynamics physicists work experience, so it is not all totally wasted. Maybe some more of it is going to superconducting magnets, which ought to be useful for something someday.
You and me both, fusion is this thing that I wish I could drop everything and work on, because it would be world-changing, but at this point we see a new fusion reactor design/startup every other month and nothing viable so far.
In this environment it's hard not to see all of this as snake oil.
There are more plausible and less plausible concepts/companies out there.
Helion in particular was founded by respectable scientists who have a background in plasma physics, and they've developed their idea pretty quietly for the last 10 years, only de-stealthing this summer (presumably after reaching a key milestone). What they're trying to do is difficult, but I wouldn't say it's snake oil.
Somewhat tangential topic, but ... It's interesting to me how most of the companies with real transformative potential have very little need for (dedicated) software engineers.
I think half of that is that most other engineering professions now come with some non negligible coding skill and the other half is simply that "software can solve anything" is a plain and simple lie.
I can't help but feel a little left out of innovation with "just" software skills. Am I too sorry for myself or is that a shared feeling?
Software doesn't solve anything by itself -- You have to apply it to something. I guess some developers are just pure code monkeys that implement routines as specified, but there are plenty of software engineers who use their knowledge of the field their working in to create software to help solve the problems in a good way. I suppose the main difference between the two groups is the level of experience and interest in the field.
I think it depends on your definition of "transformative." Have FAANG not transformed the way we live our lives? If you restrict "transformative" to mean physical technology instead of information technology, then yeah, it makes sense that software is somewhat peripheral in that effort. There are areas where software is helping (ex: AlphaFold). Outside of AI, though, having domain expertise is necessary in addition to having programming skills, so it's more effective to teach domain experts to program than vice versa.
They are doing basic research, why would they need software engineers? They will need SWeng when they scale up no doubt, but they are doing basic research right now. Most of the coding will be done by the scientists there. Most nuclear scientists have a pretty good grasp on numerical programming, even if it usually isn't the most robust code in the world.
I understand that this is HN and being critical of big energy bets is kind of the community's second nature. But I'm missing the angle about how fantastic it is that so many private millions are sunk into unlikely energy bets. Energy is a big problem and for long time we looked primarily to governments to fund the hard research.
I think this is among the best things someone like Altman can do with his money and I think it's awesome - even if Helion turns out to be Theranos-level nonsense in hindsight. He seems perfectly willing to lose his entire investment, likely an enormous sum of money. I think it's impressive and I hope it becomes some sort of hype among the ultra-wealthy.
Reading their websites it seems they have magically solved every single major problem that the worldwide fusion research community (which probably received hundreds of billions of dollars in funding over the years) has struggled with for decades. Sounds really good but also quite hard to believe, to be honest. But hey I don't always want to be the pessimist, so I'm hoping it's actually true what they claim.
There's dozens (hundreds?) of different types of conceptual fusion designs. Are you talking about fusion in general or just with FRCs?
In general, there's so many ideas that "don't seem like they wouldn't work" without evidence one way or the other. It wouldn't surprise me that the path with FRCs is more fruitful than tokamaks/stellarators/lasers. FRCs are rooted in the inertial-electrostatic-confinement realm of fusion research which actually does produce neutrons even on the smallest of scales.
The idea seems very nice of course, but most fusion ideas seem nice on paper. The problem is just dealing with the imperfections of a real-world setup. I'm not an expert in fusion and just briefly worked in the field as a physics student, but from what I've learned people still struggle with even producing suitable materials that can withstand the occasional plasma plume (which I think is probably inevitable to happen in Helion's design too) that can deposit 200 MW/m² of energy into the walls of the fusion vessel.
So as I said I really hope this works and makes the founders rich while also producing cheap & clean energy, but I remain at least a bit skeptical.
Any reason why you say hundreds of billions? My impression is lower but fusion research funding has been going on longer than I've been alive.
I take this with a big grain of salt too but 2.2 billion lined up is an awful lot of funding. To your point, if they are legit, I'm sure they are building off of prior fusion research and progress.
Large groups of people are really only useful when a problem can easily be broken into smaller, self-contained parts. Or when the work requires little "moving in lock-step." This may be one of those fields where "more people" just means "more politics."
Okay, a little further digging into their claims and successes reveals what I think Sam's point of "they built a generator that produces electricity" means.
As some one else mentions, part of Helion's novelty is that they don't use heat to produce the electricity (through steam and traditional generators). They use the Faraday effect on the (pulsed) magnets.
This is (I think) unique to their approach. Therefore, if they actually have "built a generator that produces electricity", it may prove that part of their concept.
Then all they need to do is get the fusion part working for longer than 1ms.
The reactor is supposed to be pulsed, so 1ms might be fine.
Skipping the heat cycle is possible if they achieve their goal of using aneutronic fuel. With D-T fusion (the easiest) the output energy is 80% neutrons, so you're stuck with heat. With aneutronic, you mostly get fast-moving charged particles.
I didn't know Sam was that loaded. Where did he get all that money from? I know he made some money back in the day, but I didn't think it was that high. Or he raised a fund or something?
I don't see a quote as to how much he personally put in. $500M went in so far in total; the rest is milestone-based.
I recently saw an 8-figure round in which the lead put in $25K. But they did the legwork to arrange the round and get everyone else in, so they were the lead. Sam's the board chair, an early investor, and super connected, so he's certainly able to lead a round whether or not he puts in the majority of the cash.
The only thing I have to say is that I'm glad my younger self was stopped by the accredited investor requirements some 10 years ago and didn't invest in a fusion startup that never worked out.
Investing in these startups if you don't at a minimum have an undergrad degree in physics is high risk gamble.
Can anyone tell me if this is a
net + like the lay person would understand it or something like the net + qplasma thing often misleadingly used when talking about tokamaks?
It does and I really hope that is the case. Was just wondering if there was someone informed enough reading that could confirm this is indeed the case.
I liked the website’s explanation but have a question.
So with a regular gas generator you go to the gas station and buy some 93 unleaded gas, then pour it into your generator. You might then pull something or use an electric start to turn on the generator and then you have electricity.
With this power plant the site says it requires helium. Where does this helium come from? Presumably energy is needed to get the helium just like energy is needed to pump natural gas and frack for oil.
Will the total output in electricity be greater than the inputs for this?
Extra: what happens if there’s too much expansion or things are too hot? Could this explode or implode? If so would it be a huge deal?
Helion's scheme would require a specific isotope of helium, of which there's not much of in current stockpiles. Assuming that you had some He-3, remember that since this is a reaction between nucleons, the typical energy scales are a million times higher than typical chemical energy scales. Therefore the amount of fuel (in kg) is a million times smaller. And so, there's a significantly larger margin for extracting and purifying the helium fuel from whatever source.
> Will the total output in electricity be greater than the inputs for this?
Yup, that's the goal!
> Extra: what happens if there’s too much expansion or things are too hot?
Fusion reactions are difficult enough that if it were physically possible to make them run 'hotter' or release energy faster, frankly we would already be doing so.
> Could this explode or implode? If so would it be a huge deal?
The radiation risks from fusion are orders of magnitude smaller than from nuclear fission power. We still need to think about them and make sure that plants are safe, but it should be significantly easier to manage.
> The radiation risks from fusion are orders of magnitude smaller than from nuclear fission power. We still need to think about them and make sure that plants are safe, but it should be significantly easier to manage.
Strictly speaking, it depends on the fuel cycle. They're targeting a fuel cycle (D+He3) with minimal neutron flux.
A commercial D+T fusion reactor would generate much larger neutron flux than a fission reactor. But it still wouldn't generate all the long-lived fission byproducts that are so problematic with (non-breeder) fission reactors (assuming proper sheilding).
The isotope of helium they want to use doesn’t exist on earth in significant quantities. They want to make their own by running another fusion reaction between two deuterium nucleii. Deuterium is plentiful but this reaction will take energy and “activate” (make radioactive) some components of their feeder reactor.
The website answers this question [1]. "Helion produces helium-3 by fusing deuterium in its plasma accelerator utilizing a patented high-efficiency closed-fuel cycle."
Wikipedia provides a bit more detail [2]: "The helium-3 is produced by D-D side reactions and is captured and reused, eliminating supply concerns. Helion has a patent on this process."
It continues to annoy me that fusion companies make claims like "enabling a future with unlimited clean electricity.". Current, broadly used technologies such as wind and solar already deliver unlimited clean energy. What fusion promises is clean energy that is delivered more consistently - at night, or with no wind. But there are multiple paths to consistency, and improving energy storage technologies and improving the grid seem easier to do than inventing an entirely new and extremely expensive new class of energy production.
Maybe worth pointing out that fusion has been a long-term project of Sam's. Back when PG asked him to lead YC, the other thing he was considering was working on fusion. He's been following the sector for a long time.
Looks like Helion has a long-term target of 1¢/kwh.
Conveniently, BCHydro just emailed me my bill this morning. They charge $0.2077/day. Then $0.0939/kWh for the first 688kWh and then $0.1408/kWh after that.
It looks like Helion is targeting to be somewhere between 10x to 15x cheaper than hydro-electricity.
Yep. Hydro is reliably something like 4¢/kWh wholesale so Helion is aiming to be 75% cheaper. Of course the real benefit is that hydro is pretty bad environmentally and limited geographically whereas fusion in theory should be infinitely scalable.
I'm curious what they've figured out that generations of scientists have missed. More power (ha) to them, but I'd be surprised if the solution to this infamously hard problem is just 3 years away. It's like civilization leaving a few trillion dollar bills on the ground.
So we've been working on fusion for a long time, now it looks like we're getting close, but if we were actually close then we would have gotten there already so we must not be close? Is this a new version of Zeno's paradox?
It's not that. Just that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the evidence we have is pretty slight. Doesn't mean it's impossible, does mean we are justified to be skeptical until they publish more detail results.
I don't think they haven't figured out anything super fundamental. There's a bunch of fusion companies all with aggressive time schedules that are aiming to generate electricity within the next 5 years or so.
What you've missed is that most scientists have been expecting electricity will be generated from fusion soon for the past 10 years or so, almost definitely before ITER comes online. The development of High-temperature superconducting tape basically guarantees it.
> I'm curious what they've figured out that generations of scientists have missed.
The scientists didn't miss this - on Helion's website they state that idea here was thought about in the 1950s, although they lacked the computational power to test their theories.
All the public money is going toward a dead end, Tokamak.
Helion gets to draw on that work for magnets and plasma containment, but doesn't have to solve that system's problems. So, it is legitimately possible they could have something.
You might wonder why the international research community has ignored this approach. It is a good question. All I can think of is that the people paying the bills for that want lots of physicists to have experience with hot-neutron processes, so they have a population to draw on for weapons work.
Of course they won't say so. What they say is that they are chasing the system that needs the lowest temperature.
For a long time fusion was funding constrained: there were many more ideas than could be tested and examined under government budgets. In the US nearly all funding went to one concept, the tokamak. While the tokamak has achieved the best performance thus far, there's now sufficient interest in fusion that less-well-developed ideas are being tried, in order to not put all the eggs in one basket.
So, what is the expected efficiency of this system?
Like, are we actually getting net power output?
edit : The idea to capture the EM energy directly, without using the heat from the system is ingenious. Gives me a huge boost of hope, however limited my exposure / knowledge about fusion reactor design is.
MIT's SPARC has been many times in HN, can anyone knowledgeable tell how does Helion's approach differ from SPARC? Which is supposed to be completed 2025.
SPARC is very important, but it's a physics demonstration facility, not a reactor. Its not going to generate any electricity. CFS (SPARC's parent company) will use SPARC to demonstrate that their magnet technology and plasma physics can be scaled to a reactor -- I think they're aiming for 2030 or 2035 to 'put electrons on the grid' with their 'ARC' reactor. SPARC stands for 'smallest possible ARC'.
Compared to CFS's approach, Helion's approach is different in two or three key ways.
First, it's a different fusion reaction, which has important engineering consequences. The reaction that Helion wants to use generates fewer damaging neutrons, which makes the rest of the reactor easier to engineer and eliminates several tricky subsystems.
Second, it's a different geometry, which does not require huge powerful steady-state superconducting magnets. However, it does require very fast magnets.
It's a pulsed machine (they would fire several shots per second; each shot lasts on the order a milliseconds if I recall). So it requires more pulsed power systems and the components may need a different kind of high-repetition lifecycle testing.
Third, they want to use a 'direct energy conversion' scheme, which means eliminating the need for gas turbines (i.e. steam turbines) coupled to generators. This is important since the heat exchangers and turbines make up very roughly half the cost of a traditional power plant, so this would allow the electricity price to be lower by about a factor of two!
Shorter version of my response to a different comment: CFS's approach builds on more mature theoretical foundations; it's basically ITER but with new magnets using technology that has arisen since ITER was conceived. It has a decently high probability of working, but will have practical/operational challenges that some more moonshot-y approaches would avoid (neutron damage to the reactor housing, having to breed tritium, complicated cooling systems, making electricity by boiling water). That's at one end of a spectrum, and as you move away from that, you get to things that involve more unknowns in terms of theory, but, were they to succeed, would avoid many of these challenges. Helion's proposed technology is towards the other, more moonshot-y end of that spectrum, using a less-well-established reactor design that's higher-risk/uncertainty, but should it work, would avoid tritium, wouldn't involve high neutron flux, and wouldn't require steam turbines.
Unlike other fusion reactors, Helion doesn’t produce neutrons which could be used to make Plutonium. D + T fusion, on the other hand, makes more neutrons than fission does making it an alternative path to proliferation.
Kirtley: An NSF, NASA, and DOD fellow, Dr. David Kirtley has 13 years of experience in nuclear engineering, fusion, and aerospace
Pihl: TitleEngineer / Scientist II
Dates EmployedApr 2012 – Jul 2014
Employment Duration2 yrs 4 mos
The Plasma Dynamics Laboratory at the University of Washington
Votroubek: University of Washington
Degree NamePhDField Of StudyPlasma Physics (Aeronautics & Astronautics)
So not just VC pitching specialists (sorry about the bad cutting pasting)
A wonderfully understated announcement for how important this could be.
One thing I didn’t really think about with fusion, until reading the comments here: when the energy is basically free, you don’t have to try too hard to capture the output to make something of it. Is that actually the case with harvesting fusion energy?
Is the waste heat an issue? Where does the pink stuff go after it’s been squished into the middle of the ribbed magnetic bonbon thing? Apologies if I’m blinding you with science technobabble.
> when the energy is basically free, you don’t have to try too hard to capture the output to make something of it. Is that actually the case with harvesting fusion energy?
We still haven't got more usable energy (electricity and/or heat) out of a fusion reactor than it takes to run the thing, so capturing as much of the energy as possible is still absolutely important.
However, in the long-term (e.g. 100 years from now) you're right that working fusion power plants would make energy "basically free". The main reasons would be (a) the abundance of fuel (assuming the source would be heavy water) and (b) the fact that nuclear reactions are so much more energetic than the chemical reactions we're used to (so even a few percent improvement may be a large amount of extra energy).
It's not plausible that even fusion power plants would make energy 'basically free'.
1) Fusion plants still require site infrastructure, power conversion technology, waste heat removal, and (though not for this particular concept) steam generators (or other fluid cycle generators). These have significant capital costs but finite lifetimes. You're right that the variable cost of energy is pretty low, probably comparable to current fission plants, but that's still more expensive than the variable cost of electricity from solar and wind.
2) The price of electrical transmission and distribution starts to become important (I forget what the typical cost of that today is, but it's a few cents/kWh.) This doesn't matter if you can put a small power plant at your local industrial park though.
3) There's a big difference between $0.05/kWh, $0.02/kWh, $0.01/kWh, and $0.005/kWh, and then a huge difference to 'true zero'. This is because there's probably lots of industrial processes that we might like to do if electricity and heat were cheaper than it is today, each becoming reasonable at a certain price. There could be a large market at each price floor 'step'.
4) Yeah, the fuel is abundant, which is good, but fuel costs are not significant drivers of the cost of fission.
While not free, I'd like to think that fusion will help make a world with energy much cheaper than the world without fusion.
Am I correct in thinking that, from looking at Helion's website, their design resembles the Lockheed Martin "bottle" design that popped up a few years ago?
It's pretty different. This is pulsed; LM's was going to be steady state. LM's design had magnets internal to the plasma which has significant difficulties.
The proposed fuels are different.
As far as I can tell LM's fusion project has stopped.
>they and their team have built a generator that produces electricity. Helion has a clear path to net electricity by 2024,
Explanation required. Does the first sentence have any bearing on fusion, and how does it relate the the second?
I mean, I have a generator that produces electricity (it doesn't use fusion). What is the point of having one that uses fusion, but doesn't have net output?
By analogy, imagine an aeroplane in a wind tunnel. It's not the real aeroplane - it's a scale model. It has no engine and it's not moving, the wind is moving over it. On one level the experiment hasn't achieved anything - that model can never do anything useful in the real world.
But we are making measurements on aerodynamic performance - on another level we have learned that if you can make an aircraft that shape and give it an engine that moves it at the same speed as the airflow, then the aeroplane will generate enough lift to keep it in the air. That's a really important result that gets us significantly closer to a useful aeroplane. If separately someone has demonstrated an engine with suitable weight and power characteristics to match, then we can say "now we just need to build the aircraft and it should fly".
Helion involves a unique method of extracting energy from the fusion process (direct extraction from the magnetic field). That's new and therefore uncertain. Producing a reactor that performs something fusion-like and generates electricity in that way is a great result even if the fusion process isn't generating as much power as it should and is fundamentally driven by electricity. Like the plane above, if they have separately demonstrated a fusion process that is powerful enough, "all" they need to do now is put the two things together.
I guess I'll forever be apologizing for that post, but (as I mentioned in another, after digging into their technology) there was no mention of the novelty of their approach to generation in Sam's announcement. So "they have built a generator that produces electricity" has little meaning outside of the context of most commonly-known methods of generating electricity from fusion, i.e., heat.
I think if I were a billionaire investing in fusion technologies, I think I'd be sure to mention my investment's special sauce when I drop a few sticks on it.
It was a reasonable question based on the linked article. Fusion announcements (like new battery chemistries) are almost worthless on their own - you have to read more about the company, what stage they're at, what the tech actually is etc.
Have you watched The Imitation Game? This is exactly the same question that the antagonist had about Turing's computer. "The human computers can do 10 things a day and your machine does 0 things a day". Well, yeah, until you get it working it's useless. But once it works it does all the things.
Getting a fusion reactor to work is trivial; at least one 12 year old has done it [1]. Getting net energy out of the reactor is much more difficult. The point of the funding is to figure out how to increase the gain factor. Once that's figured out, the rest (manufacturing and deploying reactors) is comparatively trivial.
My understanding is that fusion power theoretically has net positive output, but practically no one has achieved this yet. If they are able to achieve such it would be a scientific and commercial breakthrough.
We know that it does, all you have to do is look up at that big ball of fusion in the sky. However, can we humans harness it? We don't know for sure but it sure looks like it. In our lifetimes? who knows, I certainly hope all these new ideas spark some fusion though.
My understanding is that most of the fusion net balance problems are proportional to scale.
Machinery to initiate fusion must be at least this big, consume at least this much power, and cannot be scaled down arbitrarily.
However, if one were to scale it up in size, the same doesn't hold. Output power scales faster than increased input requirements.
Consequently, most current fusion work is (a) find a design that theoretically has those scaling characteristics, (b) build a prototype to investigate / prove any unknowns (net negative power, but not ITER/NIF expensive), & (c) if able to prove (b) then scale up into a net positive example.
Investing in a prototype and believing it will turn into a successful product, when that prototype can't even demonstrate the fundamental technology itself, just seems like wishful thinking. And I see no evidence to suggest they have a path to viability other than "trust me bro."
I see a bunch of patents and hand-waving that seems intentionally complicated. I spent much of my career helping companies raise money based on demos (I'm talking billions of dollars) and this just seems like more bullshit to me. And all of those demos I worked on were smoke and mirrors, despite building quasi-functional prototypes you could interact with.
I'd love to be wrong but they aren't make an effort to convince me otherwise, they just want to raise a shitload of money.
It's called Research. It's much riskier than traditional investments and you need to know the technology deeply and have high trust in the team in order to effectively make such risky investments. But the payoffs of net-positive fusion energy are nearly incalculable. Step change in humanity type of thing.
> I spent much of my career helping companies raise money based on demos
And I've made a bunch of money sitting on my ass watching a few stocks go to the moon. Knowing how to invest in webshit or getting lucky picking stocks can make you rich much easier than R&D can make you rich. Sam isn't investing because this is the best risk-adjusted return for his portfolio. He's investing because, if it does pay out, it also very literally changes the course of humanity in the process.
> And all of those demos I worked on were smoke and mirrors, despite building quasi-functional prototypes you could interact with.
The investment isn't being made on the basis of an existing reactor. There are tons of existing fusion reactors. The investment is being made on the basis of the team's plan to get to net positive energy.
* I'd love to be wrong but they aren't make an effort to convince me otherwise*
Luckily there are other folks in this world who are willing to make risky investments in important ideas.
(BTW, no one's getting rich on fusion research until fusion works... every year the fusion community leaks a bunch of folks to finance and tech because even entry level positions pay 3x and offer more stability.)
> Knowing how to invest in webshit or getting lucky picking stocks can make you rich much easier than R&D can make you rich.
It seems like you missed my point, because I make all my money investing nowadays too after failing forever trying to turn R&D into viable products. It's easy to raise money on bullshit and almost impossible to actually make it work. In fact, it likely is actually impossible, we just don't know yet.
> Sam isn't investing because this is the best risk-adjusted return for his portfolio. He's investing because, if it does pay out, it also very literally changes the course of humanity in the process.
I've met Sam and I don't think he cares about making the world a better place. I think he just likes money and attention.
You seem awfully idealistic. I'm terribly cynical. We're not going to agree and that's fine.
First you point out that this seems like bullshit and a waste of money.
Then you point out that Sam doesn't care about making the world a better place and just likes money.
You're contradicting yourself, and on top of that, publicly insulting a core figure in this community. I've never met Sam, I don't care about him or if he wants to make the world a better place or not, but your comments are completely uncalled for.
You're a cynic, cool, that's fine. Comment on why you think the technology is bogus and don't publicly insult others.
My point is I think it's a shitty investment. You're welcome to celebrate it and I'm welcome to criticize it. I don't take back what I said about Sam and think he deserves more criticism, not less.
What you said is not criticism, it's just an insult. It adds nothing to the conversation and lowers the level of discourse.
I'm not celebrating anything. I'm a skeptic at heart and don't believe in any hype until I see meaningful progress. I just don't see the need to shit all over something because my gut tells me it's hype.
> Sam isn't investing because this is the best risk-adjusted return for his portfolio. He's investing because, if it does pay out, it also very literally changes the course of humanity in the process.
I thought I'd reply with my personal experience why I disagree. And again, I stand by what I said about Sam. I really think he deserves much more criticism than he gets. If criticizing someone's character is an insult then I think we need more insults. I don't want a nicer world, I want a world with less bullshit.
The problem with your comment is that anyone could have made it. I could make the same comment about you because for whatever reason I don't like you. It may be true or not. Anonymous attacks on the internet do nothing but lower the level of discourse.
Now if you posted about a specific negative experience you had with the individual and actually put something on the line, that would be different. But as it is, there is no reason to believe you. For all I know, you just dislike him because he didn't invest in your company.
I don't care about your opinion the same way you don't care about mine. Making a vague comment about disliking someone is a lot less damning than being specific about why I don't like him, and unfortunately I can't really get into that without doxxing myself and frankly it isn't worth the hassle anyway. If you want to write me off as worthless then go for it. It seems you already have, that's fine.
Maybe. I don't really care. My point wasn't about him per se.
I'm willing to concede you're right about Sam. Sure. Investing in fusion is a terrible way to make money. If rich folks' egos get more money thrown at the right problems, so be it.
Some day some billionaire is going to save the Earth from a giant asteroid impact and there will be a bunch of people saying "meh, he only did it as an ego trip."
I'm happy to thank people when they give me a reason to thank them. Having personally met Sam I feel confident in my assessment he does not merit your gratitude. If the founders of Helion pull it off and actually usher in a new era of plentiful cheap energy I will be ecstatic to congratulate them on their success.
If someone does a good thing, I don't much care why they did it.
And if this works out, between (a) Sam funded the project that cracked cheap fusion and saved the planet, and (b) HN's OnlineGladiator met him and disliked him, I think the balance will tilt toward feeling some gratitude towards Sam.
I hardly think my opinion is going to sway the majority's view of a public figure. If the world wants to love him I'm not going to change that. But it still doesn't change my opinion about him since it's not based on what I read about him online but based on actually interacting with him in person. Also if Helion turns out to be successful I'll have no problem admitting I was wrong. I hope they succeed, or rather I hope someone succeeds in creating cheap and plentiful energy.
What does it matter what I think, anyway? Think for yourself and come to your own conclusions. I don't care if you disagree.
Edit: I'm not trying to be (too) pedantic. But the brief investment announcement went to the trouble of saying "they built a generator that produces electricity" and (effectively) "but no net electricity".
Isn't thathat generator a nothing-generator then? Why even mention it?
• Better techology (that still needs to be R&Ded) makes it more efficient and net positive in the future.
• Prototype v1 is a required step towards v2(-v3...vn?) that actually accomplishes the goal. An example of this is SpaceX's Starhopper -> Starship.
• Some economy of scale makes it work at some point. Example, put a single box in a big ship from Shanghai to LA, cost of shipping = millions of $; vs. put a million boxes in the same ship, cost of shipping = a few $.
Neither: their proposed design doesn't generate electricity from heat, so what they're talking about here is proving out the alternative mechanism of electricity generation that they propose to use. That's a valuable to demonstrate because it's novel, and necessary to eventually being net-positive, so showing that's possible shows that their eventual plan could work.
Yes, I figured that out long after my original post.
It's just that Sam's post didn't mention any (semi-)novel method for generating electricity from fusion, so the actual words - "they and their team have built a generator that produces electricity" - appear as either hype or non-information outside that context.
Their "generator" in this case appears to be the reactor which generates helium-3 fuel by fusing deuterium fuel. Their eventual endgame is a first stage D->3He (dont know the exact process) fusion generator followed by the second stage D+3He->He+p (or 3He+3He->He+p+p) fusion reactor. They claim that even the precursor process of fusing Deuterium into He3 is net-electricity-positive overall, which is a claim that kind of works on a napkin as long as there is a physicist nearby engaging in some wild hand waving. It will be quite amazing if true.
They’re using D-H3, which is aneutronic. There are also side-reactions which do produce neutrons, but perhaps it’s not enough to result in degradation.
Extracting tritium between pulses seems to be the key approach to reducing degradation. One of the company's patents [1] explains:
"The D-3He fusion reaction produces no neutrons as well (D+3He→4He (3.6 MeV)+H (14.7 MeV). However the D-D side reaction, while not as frequent, can generate 14.1 MeV neutrons through one of its fusion product reactions (D+T→4He+n+14.1 MeV). There is also the D-D reaction itself that produces a lower energy neutron (2.45 MeV) which is below the threshold for activation of most nuclear materials and is thus far less detrimental...Example systems and methods described herein may employ a 3He fuel cycle which may reduce or suppress a dangerous D-T side reaction by extracting the tritium ions as they are created. The extracted tritium is unstable and may beta decay in a relatively short period of 11 years to 3He, a primary fuel for the D-3He reaction. Accordingly, example systems, reactors and methods described herein may enjoy a self-sustaining fuel cycle where the required 3He to operate the reactor may be generated by the decay of tritium ions extracted from the reactor itself..."
The FAQ on the website [2] acknowledges their process "does create some 'activated materials' over the operating life of a power plant. Helion’s plants have been specifically designed to only use materials that would result in low activation, similar to what might be created by medical devices or other particle accelerators.
Our expectation is that a Helion plant could be fully decommissioned within a week without any lasting environmental impact."
does anyone in fusion field know what type of reactor Helion is trying to make? I did a brief stint in fusion research but the architecture they are trying to make work is unfamiliar to me.
The fuel is deuterium, plus He3 which they make from deuterium fusion. Deuterium is absurdly abundant in the oceans and will last until the sun goes out.
Most of the energy is released as fast-moving charged particles, which will drive direct electricity production, so efficiency might be pretty good, but I haven't seen numbers.
is it fair to say "finally are forced to eat crow"?
weren't the doubters right all along?
And yes I understand that it is more exciting to support the new technology, but it would be foolish to dress that up as a proof that the other people were wrong - if it indeed in the past 30 years the clean fusion was right around the corner.
people who say the 30 years thing say it generally implying that the failure has been due to humans underestimating the difficulty. when in reality, this is not a justified position, given the lack of funding for fusion. now that we have the tailwinds of improved tech and more investment and unified desire to address climate change, the "30 years away" assumption seems likely to capitulate if anyone is continuing to make it today, as the OP did.
> people who say the 30 years thing say it generally implying that the failure has been due to humans underestimating the difficulty. when in reality, this is not a justified position
It was very much a justified position. Humans did underestimate the difficulty. Specifically, codes for predicting behaviors of plasmas routinely gave overly optimistic estimates for what would be required to produce net power, leading to numerous experiments that produced orders of magnitude worse results than predicted. Basically every time a more powerful fusion experiment was built, new instabilities that we were previously unaware of (and thus the simulation codes couldn't possibly account for) were discovered. Fusion funding was initially abundant but dried up after repeated failure.
It’s unjustified because that is one of two variables: difficulty, and funding. Once funding dried up it became a determining variable. As we now see, progress has resumed as funding has returned. The “it’s always 30 years away” trope is backstopped by the assumption of low or declining funding.
Nope, one variable, funding was completely irrelevant. All the funding in the world can't give scientists precognition. Progress was always being made, if you look at a plot of reactor performance by year, it's a straight line from the 50s to today. The reason that fusion was 30 years away and always would be is because the knowledge gained revealed our ignorance - we were discovering new issues as fast as we were solving the already discovered ones. That's the problem with cutting edge research - there is no way of knowing ahead of time what trouble you'll run into.
Again, the progress didn't stop because funding dried up, funding dried up when it became clear the progress didn't matter. Fusion was appealing at first because it seemed easy, and easy things can typically be done economically. As soon as it became clear that fusion was much harder than initially believed, the hope of building power plants that are economically competitive with more mature alternatives was dashed. New startups can make all the claims they want about how their technology will succeed where others failed, but the fact is until they've actually succeeded, it is impossible for them to say they won't run into unforeseeable problems between now and then. Anyone claiming otherwise is lying.
