21 ms·

Helion

514 points by sixhobbits 5y ago

gallerdude 5y ago
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.
- DennisP 5y ago
  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?
  - lambdatronics 5y ago
    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.
- dqpb 5y ago
  All solutions to all problems were at some point just 3 years away.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- CodeGlitch 5y ago
  > 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.
- tinco 5y ago
  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.
- hobscoop 5y ago
  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.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  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.
pkaler 5y ago
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.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
  I think you’re comparing the retail price of energy to the cost of generation. Usually there’s a big difference.
  - mikeyouse 5y ago
    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.
lainga 5y ago
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?
- hobscoop 5y 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.
mateo1 5y ago
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.
- lambdatronics 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing, that's an interesting story! I'm curious which company that was.
creeble 5y ago
>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?
- qeternity 5y ago
  > but doesn't have net output? Well, this is what the investment is for.
  - creeble 5y ago
    Then what is the meaning of "have built a generator that produces electricity" other than meaningless hype? Edit: fix quote
    - qeternity 5y ago
      Because building a reactor that actually works is part of the process. The next step is making it efficient. It's like any other business: you invest to establish it, and then you make it profitable.
      - OnlineGladiator 5y ago
        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.
marcus 5y ago
I haven’t checked their technology yet but if their iteration speed is an order of magnitude faster than the competition my money is on them
- demonexarl 5y ago
  How you know?
andrewcamel 5y ago
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.
- boringg 5y ago
  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.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    s/outcome/probability/
  - chadash 5y ago
    > 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.
Ciantic 5y ago
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.
- dosshell 5y ago
  SPARC is a tokamak with state of the art magnets. Helion uses Field-reversed configuration [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-reversed_configuration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-reversed_configuration
- hobscoop 5y ago
  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!
- apendleton 5y ago
  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.
rwmj 5y ago
Vague explanation of how their technology works here: https://www.helionenergy.com/our-technology/ https://www.helionenergy.com/our-technology/ 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.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  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).
  - OneTimePetes 5y ago
    How else? Soundwaves or Lightpressure confinement? Diamond Anvil hammered?
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      Most of the fusion energy we are consuming uses gravity for containment.
      - ethbr0 5y ago
        It's a proven method, but I have concerns about its scalability.
        jacquesm 5y ago
        It scales just fine in the 'up' direction.
        omnicognate 5y ago
        Up to a point. Such reactors hit a size threshold above which they violently explode, leaving a dense, radioactive core that cannot be disposed of.
devoutsalsa 5y ago
Given that nuclear fusion is 30 years away in perpetuity, after their Z-Round of funding in 2047, what comes next? AA-round?
- StreamBright 5y ago
  And we have a lot of fission based technologies to investigate, develop and improve to have sort of similar outcome.
  - boringg 5y ago
    Very different process though.
- gfodor 5y ago
  What comes next is they crack it in the next 24-36 months and people like you finally are forced to eat some crow.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - glofish 5y ago
    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.
    - gfodor 5y ago
      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. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/U.S._historical_fusion_budget_vs._1976_ERDA_plan.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/U.S._his...
stevespang 5y ago
:) Another one get's taken for his money . . . .
ConcernedCoder 5y ago
I would love to know how they deal with structural degradation via neutron bombardment.
- nynx 5y ago
  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.
  - twic 5y ago
    Atomic Rockets says 5% of the energy comes out as neutrons for D-3He fusion, as opposed to 79% for D-T fusion: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/fusionfuel.php#id--Fusion_Reactions http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/fusionfuel.php#... No source given, but this is usually well-researched.
  - csense 5y ago
    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." [1] https://patents.justia.com/patent/20170011811 https://patents.justia.com/patent/20170011811 [2] https://www.helionenergy.com/faq/ https://www.helionenergy.com/faq/
deleted 5y ago
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endisneigh 5y ago
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? Cool tech!
- hobscoop 5y ago
  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.
  - smaddox 5y ago
    > 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).
creeble 5y ago
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.
- DennisP 5y ago
  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.
- chillacy 5y ago
  Their current prototype fuses 1ms every 10m, their next is aiming for 1ms every 1s: https://www.helionenergy.com/faq/ https://www.helionenergy.com/faq/
dang 5y ago
Related: https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/05/helion-series-e/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/05/helion-series-e/
deleted 5y ago
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m12k 5y ago
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".
- jkelleyrtp 5y ago
  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.
chirau 5y ago
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?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- robbedpeter 5y ago
  Might be his altcoin paid off in a ridiculous way?
- tofuahdude 5y ago
  President of Y Combinator goes a long way.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  Sam, through YC, is an investor in basically some of the biggest unicorns in history. IIRC YC's investment is 7%, correct? I'm not sure how much they participate in subsequent rounds, but Stripe alone is now valued at about $95 billion. I'd be shocked if Sam weren't that loaded.
- guynamedloren 5y ago
  He did announce "Apollo, funding for moonshots" last year. I want to say it's a self-funded fund, but I may be misremembering. https://twitter.com/sama/status/1273315232367042560?lang=en https://twitter.com/sama/status/1273315232367042560?lang=en
- uranium 5y ago
  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.
- 5y ago
jahnu 5y ago
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? Sabine Hossenfelders explains here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  Altman writes: > Helion has a clear path to net electricity by 2024 ...which strongly implies producing more electricity than put in, not just heat.
  - jahnu 5y ago
    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.
    - BurningFrog 5y ago
      The Helion tech is summarily explained here: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/05/sam-altman-puts-375-million-into-fusion-start-up-helion-energy.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/05/sam-altman-puts-375-million-...
ThePhysicist 5y ago
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.
- jkelleyrtp 5y ago
  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.
  - ThePhysicist 5y ago
    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.
- cmollis 5y ago
  exactly. sounds really good.. but two guys in Seattle vs like the rest of the world's particle physicists? hmm..
  - seph-reed 5y ago
    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."
varjag 5y ago
It's one of those posts where I feel unqualified to judge if am facing brilliance or a mount Everest sized pile of hubris.
- belval 5y ago
  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.
  - hobscoop 5y ago
    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.
- deft 5y ago
  His other recent investment is the glowing orb worldcoin. I think its safe to say the second, and in the off chance it works, put it down as luck.
xhrpost 5y ago
Kind of felt like I would die before the Energy Age gets here. This gives me hope that it may come sooner than expected.
gpm 5y ago
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: https://old.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/qkvzjs/fusion_energy_at_cop26/ https://old.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/qkvzjs/fusion_energ...
- lambdatronics 5y ago
  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.
beervirus 5y ago
> Helion has a clear path to net electricity by 2024 That seems impossibly ambitious.
fmakunbound 5y ago
I've got maybe $4500 for investing. How do I get in on this?
- dharmaturtle 5y ago
  You need to be an accredited investor, aka have a net worth of 1 million dollars or an annual income of 200k+ https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/092815/how-become-accredited-investor.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/092815/how-b...
  - boringg 5y ago
    You don't get access to the deal though.
kumarvvr 5y ago
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.
- sbierwagen 5y ago
  >Like, are we actually getting net power output? Yes, that's the idea. If you don't need power generation, several vendors offer commercial deuterium-tritium fusion reactors for sale today, as neutron sources. Here's one: https://www.thermofisher.com/order/catalog/product/151762A?SID=srch-srp-151762A https://www.thermofisher.com/order/catalog/product/151762A?S...
- chillacy 5y ago
  The FAQ says they're net negative, recovering 95% of the input. They don't really define what that encompasses though. https://www.helionenergy.com/faq/ https://www.helionenergy.com/faq/
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
I have no idea whether this would work. I read the really great debate linked by another commenter, https://old.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/qkvzjs/fusion_energy_at_cop26/ https://old.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/qkvzjs/fusion_energ..., and while it was 98% Greek to me, was good to see some of the ideas and challenges. 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.
- eldavido 5y ago
  > 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.
  - finnh 5y ago
    The Dutch East India Company deserves to be shat on, for eternity. Also I think you mean "Catholic", not "catholic".
    - anfelor 5y ago
      > Also I think you mean "Catholic", not "catholic". Wow, I sometimes like to think that I speak English at a native level and then I learn about something like this.. Catholic: relating to the Catholic church catholic: including many different things She is a novelist who is catholic in her interests. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/catholic https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/catholic
- deltree7 5y ago
mjfl 5y ago
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.
- apendleton 5y ago
  It's a field-reversed configuration design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-reversed_configuration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-reversed_configuration
nharada 5y ago
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. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/14/y-combinator-and-mithril-invest-in-helion-a-nuclear-fusion-startup/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/14/y-combinator-and-mithril-i...
- trhway 5y ago
  still looks like a speedup of 10x - the 30 years into 3 years.
- AareyBaba 5y ago
  This video by Sabine Hossenfelder has tempered my expectations. How close is nuclear fusion power? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    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.
- nabakin 5y ago
  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. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/qna3dr/-/hjh36wx https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/qna3dr/-/hjh36wx
glofish 5y ago
> In Trenta, we ran fusion pulses once every ten minutes. Polaris will pulse once a second (1 Hz). It feels really far out from practicality. They have demoed a system that ran once every ten minutes, and they hope to build a system once per second. I frankly don't think it is possible to heat things up to 100 million celsius and have that process work reliably. It is just too extreme.
iheartblocks 5y ago
Does anyone know what the efficiency is, and what the consumables are?
- DennisP 5y ago
  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.
aresant 5y ago
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." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion_Energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion_Energy
blueyes 5y ago
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.
gorgoiler 5y ago
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.
- chriswarbo 5y ago
  > 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).
  - hobscoop 5y ago
    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.
fataliss 5y ago
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?
- lambdatronics 5y ago
  Btw, check this out: https://usfusionenergy.org/opportunities https://usfusionenergy.org/opportunities
- unbalancedevh 5y ago
  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.
- DantesKite 5y ago
  Software engineering is an amplifier in almost every domain. There's a nuclear technology company that open-sourced a tool for measuring fuel efficiency. https://github.com/terrapower/armi https://github.com/terrapower/armi But it's by no means the most important tool. There's a lot of hard, physical engineering problems that can be solved. I think of software engineering like motor oil. You can apply it across a wide variety of contexts, but it's by no means the engine.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  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.
jjk166 5y ago
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.
- bloudermilk 5y ago
  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.
  - jjk166 5y ago
    This is literally an article about them closing a round of investment. What exactly would they gain from keeping this particular card close to their chest?
    - bloudermilk 5y ago
      The real question to ask is, what would they gain from revealing it?
    - nabakin 5y ago
Shadonototra 5y ago
https://www.helionenergy.com/who-we-are/ https://www.helionenergy.com/who-we-are/ Where are your scientists? researchers? engineers? Oh i see ycombinator..
- tim333 5y ago
  Early story on YC investment https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/14/y-combinator-and-mithril-invest-in-helion-a-nuclear-fusion-startup/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/14/y-combinator-and-mithril-i...
  - Shadonototra 5y ago
    It doesn't answser my question, where are the people working on the tech, in the "who we are" section of their website? Are scientists second class citizens? investors and "people who pitch projects to 'vulture' capitalists" are gods?
    - tim333 5y ago
      Of the 3 shown: 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)
      - Shadonototra 5y ago
        Thanks, this gives more perspective This kind of information should be on that page Including the rest of the team
inasio 5y ago
Hellions are the denizens of hell in the awesome Sandman Slim series, not sure if that makes it a good or a bad choice for a company name...
brofallon 5y ago
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.
- digislave 5y ago
  Wind and solar don't provide unlimited free energy.
PaulHoule 5y ago
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.
jgalt212 5y ago
2 massive whoppers in the just the first few sentences. > Helion is by far the most promising approach to fusion I’ve seen. > Helion has a clear path to net electricity by 2024
skrebbel 5y ago
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.

514 points by sixhobbits 5y ago

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.

DennisP 5y ago
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?
- lambdatronics 5y ago
  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.
dqpb 5y ago
All solutions to all problems were at some point just 3 years away.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
CodeGlitch 5y ago
> 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.
tinco 5y ago
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.
hobscoop 5y ago
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.
ncmncm 5y ago
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.

pkaler 5y ago

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.

fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
I think you’re comparing the retail price of energy to the cost of generation. Usually there’s a big difference.
- mikeyouse 5y ago
  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.

lainga 5y ago

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?

hobscoop 5y 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.

mateo1 5y ago

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.

lambdatronics 5y ago
Thanks for sharing, that's an interesting story! I'm curious which company that was.

creeble 5y ago

>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?

qeternity 5y ago
> but doesn't have net output? Well, this is what the investment is for.
- creeble 5y ago
  Then what is the meaning of "have built a generator that produces electricity" other than meaningless hype? Edit: fix quote
  - qeternity 5y ago
    Because building a reactor that actually works is part of the process. The next step is making it efficient. It's like any other business: you invest to establish it, and then you make it profitable.
    - OnlineGladiator 5y ago
      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.

marcus 5y ago

I haven’t checked their technology yet but if their iteration speed is an order of magnitude faster than the competition my money is on them

demonexarl 5y ago
How you know?

andrewcamel 5y ago

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.

boringg 5y ago
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.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  s/outcome/probability/
- chadash 5y ago
  > 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.

Ciantic 5y ago

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.

dosshell 5y ago
SPARC is a tokamak with state of the art magnets. Helion uses Field-reversed configuration [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-reversed_configuration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-reversed_configuration
hobscoop 5y ago
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!
apendleton 5y ago
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.

rwmj 5y ago

Vague explanation of how their technology works here: https://www.helionenergy.com/our-technology/ https://www.helionenergy.com/our-technology/ 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.

ethbr0 5y ago
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).
- OneTimePetes 5y ago
  How else? Soundwaves or Lightpressure confinement? Diamond Anvil hammered?
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Most of the fusion energy we are consuming uses gravity for containment.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      It's a proven method, but I have concerns about its scalability.
      - jacquesm 5y ago
        It scales just fine in the 'up' direction.
        omnicognate 5y ago
        Up to a point. Such reactors hit a size threshold above which they violently explode, leaving a dense, radioactive core that cannot be disposed of.

devoutsalsa 5y ago

Given that nuclear fusion is 30 years away in perpetuity, after their Z-Round of funding in 2047, what comes next? AA-round?

StreamBright 5y ago
And we have a lot of fission based technologies to investigate, develop and improve to have sort of similar outcome.
- boringg 5y ago
  Very different process though.
gfodor 5y ago
What comes next is they crack it in the next 24-36 months and people like you finally are forced to eat some crow.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- glofish 5y ago
  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.
  - gfodor 5y ago
    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. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/U.S._historical_fusion_budget_vs._1976_ERDA_plan.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/U.S._his...

stevespang 5y ago

:) Another one get's taken for his money . . . .

ConcernedCoder 5y ago

I would love to know how they deal with structural degradation via neutron bombardment.

nynx 5y ago
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.
- twic 5y ago
  Atomic Rockets says 5% of the energy comes out as neutrons for D-3He fusion, as opposed to 79% for D-T fusion: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/fusionfuel.php#id--Fusion_Reactions http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/fusionfuel.php#... No source given, but this is usually well-researched.
- csense 5y ago
  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." [1] https://patents.justia.com/patent/20170011811 https://patents.justia.com/patent/20170011811 [2] https://www.helionenergy.com/faq/ https://www.helionenergy.com/faq/

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

endisneigh 5y ago

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? Cool tech!

hobscoop 5y ago
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.
- smaddox 5y ago
  > 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).

creeble 5y ago

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.

DennisP 5y ago
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.
chillacy 5y ago
Their current prototype fuses 1ms every 10m, their next is aiming for 1ms every 1s: https://www.helionenergy.com/faq/ https://www.helionenergy.com/faq/

dang 5y ago

Related: https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/05/helion-series-e/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/05/helion-series-e/

deleted 5y ago

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m12k 5y ago

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".

jkelleyrtp 5y ago
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.

chirau 5y ago

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?

deleted 5y ago
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robbedpeter 5y ago
Might be his altcoin paid off in a ridiculous way?
tofuahdude 5y ago
President of Y Combinator goes a long way.
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
Sam, through YC, is an investor in basically some of the biggest unicorns in history. IIRC YC's investment is 7%, correct? I'm not sure how much they participate in subsequent rounds, but Stripe alone is now valued at about $95 billion. I'd be shocked if Sam weren't that loaded.
guynamedloren 5y ago
He did announce "Apollo, funding for moonshots" last year. I want to say it's a self-funded fund, but I may be misremembering. https://twitter.com/sama/status/1273315232367042560?lang=en https://twitter.com/sama/status/1273315232367042560?lang=en
uranium 5y ago
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.
5y ago

jahnu 5y ago

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? Sabine Hossenfelders explains here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY

BurningFrog 5y ago
Altman writes: > Helion has a clear path to net electricity by 2024 ...which strongly implies producing more electricity than put in, not just heat.
- jahnu 5y ago
  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.
  - BurningFrog 5y ago
    The Helion tech is summarily explained here: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/05/sam-altman-puts-375-million-into-fusion-start-up-helion-energy.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/05/sam-altman-puts-375-million-...

ThePhysicist 5y ago

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.

jkelleyrtp 5y ago
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.
- ThePhysicist 5y ago
  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.
cmollis 5y ago
exactly. sounds really good.. but two guys in Seattle vs like the rest of the world's particle physicists? hmm..
- seph-reed 5y ago
  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."

varjag 5y ago

It's one of those posts where I feel unqualified to judge if am facing brilliance or a mount Everest sized pile of hubris.

belval 5y ago
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.
- hobscoop 5y ago
  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.
deft 5y ago
His other recent investment is the glowing orb worldcoin. I think its safe to say the second, and in the off chance it works, put it down as luck.

xhrpost 5y ago

Kind of felt like I would die before the Energy Age gets here. This gives me hope that it may come sooner than expected.

gpm 5y ago

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: https://old.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/qkvzjs/fusion_energy_at_cop26/ https://old.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/qkvzjs/fusion_energ...

lambdatronics 5y ago
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.

beervirus 5y ago

> Helion has a clear path to net electricity by 2024 That seems impossibly ambitious.

fmakunbound 5y ago

I've got maybe $4500 for investing. How do I get in on this?

dharmaturtle 5y ago
You need to be an accredited investor, aka have a net worth of 1 million dollars or an annual income of 200k+ https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/092815/how-become-accredited-investor.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/092815/how-b...
- boringg 5y ago
  You don't get access to the deal though.

kumarvvr 5y ago

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.

sbierwagen 5y ago
>Like, are we actually getting net power output? Yes, that's the idea. If you don't need power generation, several vendors offer commercial deuterium-tritium fusion reactors for sale today, as neutron sources. Here's one: https://www.thermofisher.com/order/catalog/product/151762A?SID=srch-srp-151762A https://www.thermofisher.com/order/catalog/product/151762A?S...
chillacy 5y ago
The FAQ says they're net negative, recovering 95% of the input. They don't really define what that encompasses though. https://www.helionenergy.com/faq/ https://www.helionenergy.com/faq/

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

I have no idea whether this would work. I read the really great debate linked by another commenter, https://old.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/qkvzjs/fusion_energy_at_cop26/ https://old.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/qkvzjs/fusion_energ..., and while it was 98% Greek to me, was good to see some of the ideas and challenges. 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.

eldavido 5y ago
> 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.
- finnh 5y ago
  The Dutch East India Company deserves to be shat on, for eternity. Also I think you mean "Catholic", not "catholic".
  - anfelor 5y ago
    > Also I think you mean "Catholic", not "catholic". Wow, I sometimes like to think that I speak English at a native level and then I learn about something like this.. Catholic: relating to the Catholic church catholic: including many different things She is a novelist who is catholic in her interests. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/catholic https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/catholic
deltree7 5y ago

mjfl 5y ago

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.

apendleton 5y ago
It's a field-reversed configuration design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-reversed_configuration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-reversed_configuration

nharada 5y ago

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. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/14/y-combinator-and-mithril-invest-in-helion-a-nuclear-fusion-startup/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/14/y-combinator-and-mithril-i...

trhway 5y ago
still looks like a speedup of 10x - the 30 years into 3 years.
AareyBaba 5y ago
This video by Sabine Hossenfelder has tempered my expectations. How close is nuclear fusion power? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY
- ncmncm 5y ago
  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.
nabakin 5y ago
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. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/qna3dr/-/hjh36wx https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/qna3dr/-/hjh36wx

glofish 5y ago

> In Trenta, we ran fusion pulses once every ten minutes. Polaris will pulse once a second (1 Hz). It feels really far out from practicality. They have demoed a system that ran once every ten minutes, and they hope to build a system once per second. I frankly don't think it is possible to heat things up to 100 million celsius and have that process work reliably. It is just too extreme.

iheartblocks 5y ago

Does anyone know what the efficiency is, and what the consumables are?

DennisP 5y ago
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.

aresant 5y ago

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." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion_Energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion_Energy

blueyes 5y ago

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.

gorgoiler 5y ago

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.

chriswarbo 5y ago
> 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).
- hobscoop 5y ago
  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.

fataliss 5y ago

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?

lambdatronics 5y ago
Btw, check this out: https://usfusionenergy.org/opportunities https://usfusionenergy.org/opportunities
unbalancedevh 5y ago
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.
DantesKite 5y ago
Software engineering is an amplifier in almost every domain. There's a nuclear technology company that open-sourced a tool for measuring fuel efficiency. https://github.com/terrapower/armi https://github.com/terrapower/armi But it's by no means the most important tool. There's a lot of hard, physical engineering problems that can be solved. I think of software engineering like motor oil. You can apply it across a wide variety of contexts, but it's by no means the engine.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
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.

jjk166 5y ago

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.

bloudermilk 5y ago
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.
- jjk166 5y ago
  This is literally an article about them closing a round of investment. What exactly would they gain from keeping this particular card close to their chest?
  - bloudermilk 5y ago
    The real question to ask is, what would they gain from revealing it?
  - nabakin 5y ago

Shadonototra 5y ago

https://www.helionenergy.com/who-we-are/ https://www.helionenergy.com/who-we-are/ Where are your scientists? researchers? engineers? Oh i see ycombinator..

tim333 5y ago
Early story on YC investment https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/14/y-combinator-and-mithril-invest-in-helion-a-nuclear-fusion-startup/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/14/y-combinator-and-mithril-i...
- Shadonototra 5y ago
  It doesn't answser my question, where are the people working on the tech, in the "who we are" section of their website? Are scientists second class citizens? investors and "people who pitch projects to 'vulture' capitalists" are gods?
  - tim333 5y ago
    Of the 3 shown: 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)
    - Shadonototra 5y ago
      Thanks, this gives more perspective This kind of information should be on that page Including the rest of the team

inasio 5y ago

Hellions are the denizens of hell in the awesome Sandman Slim series, not sure if that makes it a good or a bad choice for a company name...

brofallon 5y ago

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.

digislave 5y ago
Wind and solar don't provide unlimited free energy.

PaulHoule 5y ago

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.

jgalt212 5y ago

2 massive whoppers in the just the first few sentences. > Helion is by far the most promising approach to fusion I’ve seen. > Helion has a clear path to net electricity by 2024

skrebbel 5y ago

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.