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Helion Needs You
- colesantiago 4y agoDisclaimer (if it isn't obvious already): Sam Altman is an investor in Helion Energy. (Lead investor for Helion's E round raise).
- yomkippur 4y agoi just dont trust this guy after that weird eyeball sphere thing connected to a crypto ponzi scheme
- sdfhdhjdw3 4y agoBingo, I made the exact same comment. That was quite an effective way to take your credibility and shove it down the drain. They're all scumbags.
- simonebrunozzi 4y agoThis isn't Reddit. I don't want to defend anyone, but at the same time, if I see accusations, I'd like to see substance and reference points, not just "they're scumbags", end of conversation. Please, provide some details on why you think they're like that.
- hef19898 4y agoA short search for this eyeball scanning cryoto scheme of Sam's on HN will answer that question. At least why OP thinks it.
- PebblesRox 4y agoHere's a post from 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30931614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30931614
- yomkippur 4y agoWhy do you feel the need to apologize for a well documented display of shady behavior? It just puzzles me when people jump into defend what is clearly unsavory and amoral behavior. Just because its legally grey area doesn't mean its moral.
- skinnymuch 4y agoEspecially because they could have done a basic search for what the person was talking about. Not everything needs to be cited if it’s an easy search away. Agree with not just this comment but your comments as a new throwaway (I assume?) account in general. Though I don’t care about the CCP enough to be as anti CCP as you. Tho Ofc I am anti CCP
- sdfhdhjdw3 4y agoThey were offering shitcoins in exchange to people scanning their eyeballs. That's a double-whammy of dodgy behavior. No, I don't need to provide details. If you don't see it, you're a lost cause.
- davidatbu 4y agoAre you aware that the eyeball scans are only used in a zero-knowledge proof? So they collect no biometric data actually?
- sdfhdhjdw3 4y agoNot everything is a question of "does it collect data", actually. They're collecting _some_ value from individuals, whether you understand it or not. Your comment reminds me of Facebook's disingenuous "we we're not _selling_ the data", which just a way of distracting from the real issue. This isn't about data, it's about yet another incremental stripping down of individual's control over their intrinsics.
- davidatbu 4y agoYou seem to agree that they don't collect biometric data, so I'm not sure exactly what "intrinsics" is being "stripped down" from individuals, in this case. Could you clarify?
- sdfhdhjdw3 4y agoI don't agree to anything, because I don't know enough about it. They SAY they don't collect data, they SAY it's a zero knowledge proof. Who knows about that. What I know is that they're extracting some value from people who (like me) likely don't understand the implications. This isn't complicated.
- davidatbu 4y agoBecause you so confidently asserted that they were "all scumbags" who have no "credibility", I'd expected much more certain evidence about the nefariousness of Worldcoin. I, like you, believe it is very important to remind folks that they should clearly understand the value prop of an exchange before they participate in it. But I don't think that calling "scumbags" the folks behind any proposed value exchange (like Worldcoin) that you yourself (self-admittedly) don't fully understand the implications of, is a way to achieve that.
- drexlspivey 4y agoor after what he did with "OpenAI"
- remarkEon 4y agoAs with all of these threads, someone needs to tell me why I shouldn't be optimistic about this. I'm not a physicist, and only partially grok all the technical challenges with making something like this work. I'm skeptical, but that's because so many others with so much money have been working on Fusion, so why is Helion different?
- csense 4y agoThe company's FAQ page addresses this: https://www.helionenergy.com/faq/ https://www.helionenergy.com/faq/
- remarkEon 4y agoRight I get that, I guess I'm looking for an unbiased party to evaluate what they're saying here.
- hef19898 4y agoAll easy, Helion will just do it better than everyone else. They can even produce Helium-3 themselves! Which kind of raises the question why they are not aiming to sell said Helium-3... I call BS on basically all of it. Except their cookie banner, that has an "opt-out" button right next to accept.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoIf you want to feel optimistic, solar pv tech that's been improving over decades should be hitting the same price point around the time they intend to actually produce net energy for the first time. Other pv tech in the pipeline that may or may not work aims to make it cheaper still. So if this works great, if not it's not the only shot we have. Also the most important price point is "less than fossil fuels" which renewables have reached already in most of the world. That's when you start displacing large amounts of carbon. But more new cheap, clean energy sources are always welcome news.
- jeffreyrogers 4y ago
- ilaksh 4y agoI have always wanted to believe that fusion will be a real energy source someday. Maybe this is finally it. Not the first time someone said that though.
- wahnfrieden 4y agopeople like sam are betting the world on it
- lkbm 4y agoThis made me wonder just how much he's actually putting in vs. what he has / is investing in general. Reports say that he personally invested $375MM into Helion[0] and various sources say his total net worth is...$200-$200MM[1][2]. But yc definitely also has solar startups, and Sam Altman appears to believe in those as well[3], as one would expect. Conclusion: It's unclear how "all-in" he is (but it's a pretty big bet), and online "net worth" estimators are even more terrible than I'd assumed. [0] 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-... [1] https://finty.com/us/net-worth/sam-altman/ https://finty.com/us/net-worth/sam-altman/ [2] https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/ceos/sam-altman-net-worth/ https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/ceos/s... [3] https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/25/y-combinator-backed-bright-aims-to-bring-solar-power-to-mexico/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/25/y-combinator-backed-bright...
- wahnfrieden 4y agoI’m not talking about dollars put in, I meant that they are banking on surviving climate change via accelerated techno optimism
- DennisP 4y agoTechno-optimism is destructive when it gives people an excuse for inaction. If you're actually putting a lot of effort or resources into a possible solution, that's the opposite of inaction. Plenty of people are tackling the political side of things, with a notable lack of success. I'm glad there are people working hard on the technological breakthroughs that could make the task a lot easier.
- thepasswordis 4y agoIt’s times like this that I’m really sad that I didn’t pursue an engineering degree :(. I have made plenty of money, and live a very comfortable life, but I would really love to be able to work on projects like this. I guess one option is to invest in companies like this.
- sidcool 4y agoI don't want to come across as banal, but is engineering something you would like to pursue now?
- thepasswordis 4y agoIt’s a tough spot because: 1) I picked up low voltage electrical engineering along the way, just never did a degree. As in: PCB design, tons of robotics and very small run (<100) bespoke devices. 2) I’m oldish (mid 30s) and have a family and am semi retired. So it would be burdensome to do a college degree, especially with the additional liberal arts requirements. My point is: if I had the degree, I would “come out of retirement” and apply for jobs like this one, but I don’t, and it would take several years to get it even at an accelerated pace. So I guess regret is meant literally. I wish I had just done the degree in my 20s, because I actually don’t want to do it now, and even if I do just decide to do it online or something, it will be more annoying at this point in my life than it would have been when I was 20.
- defterGoose 4y agoI'd urge you to reexamine now. When your kids are grown up and out of the house and you're a little older you might think "it would have been so easy to go back and get my degree then and look where I could have been now." Remember that although rare, there are people getting PhDs in their 60s and 70s.
- qqqwerty 4y agoThere was a post on here about a guy who got his degree in less than a year. He used an online school that allows for self paced courses. Also, you might not really need a degree depending on your body of work. I imagine most startups these days will happily ignore that requirement if the candidate has demonstrable experience in the field. On the flip side, a company like this probably has low pay, long hours, and it will be a decade or more before you see your work come to fruition (if at all). So if you are financially secure enough already, the work might not be for you. Probably best to pick up some hobby projects that scratch the itch.
- mutant 4y agoOh, is that all? A complete solution to energy? Have it next week boss
- sidcool 4y agoAt what stage are we in actualising fusion energy as a feasible source? Is it: 1. Theory is in place. Need to work out some some physics. 2. Physics is solid. Engineering needs work.
- SkyMarshal 4y agoHelion addresses that in their FAQ (https://www.helionenergy.com/faq/ https://www.helionenergy.com/faq/). TLDR, they have produced six working prototypes, the most recent which has been continuously running for 16 months. These haven’t produced net electricity yet, apparently due more to scale than to any unsolved scientific or engineering problems. Prototype 7, “Polaris”, is aimed to scale up the design to produce net electricity by 2024. This new hiring spree is to figure out how to mass produce it.
- hef19898 4y agoWow, so start-up claims to have a fusion reactor demonstrator running for 16 months, while all the large projects are struggling with their firat prototypes. And we just believe said start-ups claims?
- DennisP 4y agoAchieving fusion is not that hard, lots of projects have working fusion. You can even do it yourself with a homebrew project costing about $1000. What's hard is getting more power out than you put in, which GP mentioned Helion has not done yet.
- SkyMarshal 4y agoYou don't have to believe it. Literally nothing in your life will change whether you choose to believe this bit of information or not. Either Helion will solve nuclear fusion, or turn out to be another failed startup, but in this instance, your personal beliefs will have no impact on which one happens. So you may as well suspend both belief and disbelief and just wait and see what the reality turns out to be.
- engineer_22 4y ago-> As the plasma expands, it pushes back on the magnetic field. By Faraday's law, the change in field induces current, which is directly recaptured as electricity. This clean fusion electricity is used to power homes and communities, efficiently and affordably. Charging without wires! /s Where does the thermal power go?
- thatcherc 4y agoThermal power goes into the expansion of the plasma I'd figure, just like the hot gases in an internal combustion engine cylinder. Only here the work is done against a magnetic field instead of a piston.
- engineer_22 4y agoI wish I understood this better. Isn't it the opposite, it requires work to contain the plasma? The hotter it gets the more work it takes to contain?
- DennisP 4y agoHelion uses a series of pulses, just like an ICE.
- zamalek 4y ago> Only here the work is done against a magnetic field instead of a piston. I understand the theory behind this, but when it is used in an analogy like this it really blows my mind.
- thinkcontext 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion
- engineer_22 4y agohttps://sci-hub.se/https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0029-5515/13/4/006 https://sci-hub.se/https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.108... Here's a paper that explains it better than the wikipedia
- Symmetry 4y agoOf the current fusion startups I'm generally most optimistic about Helion because they have a plausible solution for generating energy that produces electricity rather than just heat. Having to couple large amount of turbine with potentially neutron-activated liquids is a big driver of costs in nuclear plants and this neatly seems to sidestep the problem by turning the momentum of charged particles into electricity directly with no heat engine involved.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago> this neatly seems to sidestep the problem by turning the momentum of charged particles into electricity directly with no heat engine involved How??
- obblekk 4y agoAneutronic fusion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion) - some fusion reactions simply don't result in many neutrons being created, rather all protons and electrons being created. When a neutron is created, it has a lot of energy (heat) and it has 0 charge. This means it cannot be contained by electric/magnetic fields, and it cannot create an electric potential in metal directly. It must run into something else, transfer it's heat energy, and that something else must then transfer energy into electricity (usually this means heat up some water and run a turbine). That's hard, lossy, and messy. And it's how all major fusion projects have always worked (including ITER). If instead, someone got an aneutronic fusion reaction to work (no theoretical issues, just engineering problems), they could produce pure protons and electrons, trap them with an electric field, and use the high speed motion of the charged particles to induce a current/voltage in a nearby metal. This would solve the following problems: 1. Easy to contain high temperature outputs 2. Easy to protect the inner wall of a reactor (minimal interaction due to electric repulsion) 3. Easy to generate useful (electric) energy from heat energy This would definitely be a gamechanger. It's like going from "use the sun to boil this water and turn the turbine" to "use the sun to induce a photoelectric effect." Categorical difference.
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- pnut 4y agoUnlimited access to a natural resource can juice development short term, but look at where that has gotten us with both fossil fuels and Moore's Law - bloated, absurdly resource hungry software, and environmental destruction. Of course, we also got new technology and increased average standard of living, but so much waste. Probably "free energy" is necessary to achieve a utopian, post scarcity society, but with all our prior experience with gluts of resource mostly being hoarded and used for profit-seeking, my enthusiasm for the nature of any fusion revolution is more measured than wide eyed.
- chadash 4y ago10-15 days’ vacation is pretty bare minimum if you are trying to get top talent. Maybe think about adding 5 days onto those buckets to get higher quality candidates.
- hef19898 4y agoLiving where the legal minimum is 24 days in addition to bank holidays and where 28 days the practical minimum with the consus being 30 days, I'll call that exploitation.
- systemvoltage 4y agoHow is it exploitation when both parties voluntarily engage in an agreement? Is anyone forced or coerced here? Is there any ambiguity or deceiving language? It is better than calling it "Unlimited Vacation" and then leaving it up at discretion. They're being up-front and honest about it. It should be totally OK to advertise a job with 0 vacation days. We're talking about fully functional and grown up adults who have great college education who can make that decision if they would like to take on a high-responsibility and high-risk job. In fact, I would argue the complete opposite. Doing anything else is interference and forceful coercion.
- swatcoder 4y agoIf you apply for 30 jobs, advance to 5 interviews, and receive 1 offer, all while your savings (do you have savings?) are being depleted on living expenses and college debt, are you really on even footing for fair negotiation? Or are you in a position to "take what you can get" and thereby find yourself vulnerable to an offer well below market norms? We use the word exploitative to capture that sort of scenario. It suggests that the employer is exploiting candidates' extenuating circumstances. It's generally not sustainable for either party and the side effect for the employer is high churn and low productivity/quality.
- systemvoltage 4y agoThis is a made up scenario that fabricates "exploitation", but even in this case I disagree. If there are no jobs out there, then tough luck. You are still getting paid vastly more than probably 99.99% of the world's jobs. The entitlement is simply astonishing and incongruent, completely untenable even in the most charitable interpretation. Furthermore, I believe that in jobs like this, companies cannot afford to hire someone that is going to take 8 months parental leave, for example. That would be consider exploitation of the employer by the employee in my view.
- ThePhysicist 4y agoFeasibility of this fusion work aside, I think it must be quite amazing to really believe in all these things to come true, it's like living in the future. I wonder whether Sam really believes in all these ventures, or if he's just building hype? I mean according to his timeline the whole world will run on Helion fusion energy in 15 years, A.I. will write all of our software code, we'll all pay in cryptocurrency using our biometric data and quantum computers will be a proven, practical technology (among other things). Would probably be amazing if these things came to pass (at least for some of us), but if I would go around and tell people stuff like that everyone would think I'm crazy. Then again I don't live in SV, so maybe that's on me.
- perlgeek 4y ago(Disclaimer: speculation ahead, never having met Sam). > I wonder whether Sam really believes in all these ventures, or if he's just building hype? Part of being a VC is having many moonshots in your portfolio; if only some of them work out, that's still a huge win in total, even if the others go bust. So he likely "believes" all these things in the same way that he believes in his portfolio: not that literally all of them turn out to be true, but some of them will, if you just believe in enough of them.
- newaccount2021 4y ago
- lazzlazzlazz 4y ago> pay in cryptocurrency using our biometric data This is incorrect — Worldcoin orbs[1] use iris scans to create privacy-preserving proofs (these are called zero-knowledge proofs[2]) of uniqueness client side, which are just metadata for creating social graphs. The data is never used beyond the construction of the proof.[3] If you're going to be critical you should at least understand why the idea is exciting to some. :) [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MA2ttYtUbF8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MA2ttYtUbF8 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof [3]: https://worldcoin.org/privacy https://worldcoin.org/privacy
- sdfhdhjdw3 4y ago> the ability to manufacture enough power plants to satisfy the current electrical demand of earth in a ten year period. LOL. Is Helion backed by the same VCs that back all those shitcoins?
- Animats 4y agoThis is for real? I read the web site. It's all web glitz, not much content. Are there peer-reviewed papers on the technology?
- pnw 4y agoYes, the founders published this research before they incorporated. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0029-5515/51/5/053008 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0029-5515/51/5/05...
- capableweb 4y agoThis is what I came across: > Helion has demonstrated the concept[4] in a D–D reactor with plasmoids that fire once every three minutes, and it is now seeking $15 million in private financing over the next five years to develop a full- scale machine that could use D–T fuel to reach the break-even point, when it generates as much energy as it takes to run. The company hopes that its reactor could eventually reach the hotter conditions needed to fuse deuterium with helium-3, another combination that produces only α-particles and protons, with no neutron by-products. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mitch-Waldrop-2/publication/264204212_Plasma_physics_The_fusion_upstarts/links/53e0dfa20cf24f90ff60be1f/Plasma-physics-The-fusion-upstarts.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mitch-Waldrop-2/publica... - [4] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0029-5515/51/5/053008 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0029-5515/51/5/05... (https://sci-hub.se/https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0029-5515/51/5/053008 https://sci-hub.se/https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.108...)
- sbierwagen 4y ago>produces only α-particles and protons, with no neutron by-products. Magnificent use of weasel wording there. D-He3 is aneutronic, but of course a mixed plasma hot enough for that reaction is going to have tons of fusions among deuterons, producing plenty of neutrons. I'm not sure if the sky high price of helium-3 is worth just reducing the neutron output of a reactor, rather than eliminating it.
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- epaulson 4y agoI know that I should be skeptical of all fusion claims, so I'm not asking anyone to predict if this actually WILL happen from Helion, but this machine claims to be smaller than other designs. Does anyone know how small this approach to fusion could scale down? Is it conceivable that it could deployed as the power source for an ocean-going ship, or could it be small enough that it could be part of a campus-scale microgrid?
- lacker 4y agoThat is conceivable, if it works as intended. Small enough to fit in a shipping container is small enough to put on a ship or on a campus. Of course, that's a big "if", and I don't have much to go on besides material that Helion itself puts out.
- DennisP 4y agoIt's also about the right power output. Largest diesel engines on ships put out about 40MW of power.
- perlgeek 4y agoI would love to support this endeavor, but a distinct lack of remote jobs makes this not very feasible for me. Best of luck though!
- elsherbini 4y agoAs a very much non-nuclear engineer, I found this video [1] explaining different fuels, size, magnetic field strength, and the orders of magnitude physics and engineering that goes into current fusion efforts. Curious where Helion would put themselves on the nτE vs ion temperature plot he uses to evaluate how feasible a technology is. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor
- willis936 4y agoHartwig gave a similar talk for SULI a few weeks ago. Really awesome stuff and accessible too. Note that he is assuming steady state confinement. Fuel viability is a more complex beast for high-density low-confinement-time plasmas. Scroll down for table of lectures. https://suli.pppl.gov/2022/course/ https://suli.pppl.gov/2022/course/ Slides https://suli.pppl.gov/2022/course/IntroductionToFusionEnergy_SULI_20220613.pdf https://suli.pppl.gov/2022/course/IntroductionToFusionEnergy... Video https://mediacentral.princeton.edu/id/1_u3eelkrl https://mediacentral.princeton.edu/id/1_u3eelkrl
- dang 4y agoRelated: Helion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29119180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29119180 - Nov 2021 (250 comments) Helion Energy achieves fusion milestone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27915833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27915833 - July 2021 (80 comments) Y Combinator And Mithril Invest In Helion, A Nuclear Fusion Startup - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8178450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8178450 - Aug 2014 (192 comments)
- borissk 4y ago"in 2024 to 1) demonstrate Q > 1 fusion" You wish :) I used to work in CERN a long time ago and still keep in touch with a few physicists. All of them are very skeptical about commercial nuclear fusion before 2050 - 2070. It's going to take huge advances in science and engineering and a lot of money (on a scale similar to Manhattan or Apollo projects).
- hef19898 4y agoNay sayers! All it takes is some innovative, VC backed start-up. Until IPO / SPAC that is.
- Shadonototra 4y agoVCs funding a company has nothing to do with innovation Their goal is to make a profit That's why we don't have fusion energy yet And that's why Nuclear plants have stagnated for many decades already Education is where innovation comes from, it's been like this for centuries (scientific, health, industry) and yet it's been neglected for decades, go look at the salaries of teachers, even in private schools VC backed startups prevent innovation, look at today, we living a recession since 2008 because the market invested and moved their wealth in for profit pockets If you invest in schools, you don't expect profit in return, you expect innovation in return If you invest in a startup, you don't expect innovation in return, you expect profit in return It is very simple Galileo wasn't a VC and he wasn't backed by a VC Even Tesla and SpaceX couldn't be where they are with only just VCs, they had to get massive help from the fed and the government to stay afloat, as well as a shit ton of internships from all around the world to sustain their R&D efforts
- DennisP 4y agoThe Manhattan project cost $23 billion in 2020 dollars. The ITER project alone is spending more than that. Helion is spending a couple billion, but draws on decades of published research.
- borissk 4y agoHow many % of the country GDP did the Manhattan cost? How much would that percentage be in dollars today?
- AdamH12113 4y agoThe Sam Altman article and the Helion web site have some major red flags, but this[1] item from the FAQ in particular jumped out at me: > Where is Helion going to get helium-3? > Helion produces helium-3 by fusing deuterium in its plasma accelerator utilizing a patented high-efficiency closed-fuel cycle. That sounds like it might be relevant for the overall efficiency of the system. Are there any outside fusion experts who can comment on the legitimacy of this company and their process? [1] https://www.helionenergy.com/faq/ https://www.helionenergy.com/faq/
- DennisP 4y agoFrom what I've seen, it's not a separate accelerator. The fusion reactor itself is a plasma accelerator and will run a hybrid reaction of D-D and D-He3. The combination will release 6% of its energy as neutron radiation.
- naillo 4y agoFor all the cynicism in this thread, I can't really deep down dislike sama for investing his money like this. There's plenty of ways to get more money and this isn't one of the most secure ones so money going to physics and smoothing out the engineering here may or may not get us all the way but it's nice that he's spending money to try to get us closer.
- kilroy123 4y agoI agree. A simply b2b sass startup is hard enough to make work. This is probably 10x as hard to pull off. I still think it's great he and others are trying.
- capableweb 4y agoProbably closer to 100x or 1000x. I don't know how to build reactors, but I do know how to build SaaS, and as long as you solve a problem, implementation matters less than people think. You can really screw the pooch in so many ways and still won't kill people and you can be relatively "successful". I'd image building reactors require you to really nail everything or you won't be anything close to "successful". The requirements and stakes seems to be unfathomably higher.
- pedalpete 4y agoI think the way good investors look at it is based on the potential impact vs investment size. Yes, investment in Helion is likely huge, 100x the cost of developing a SaaS app, but IF it works, the payoff is likely 1000x the return of a SaaS app. This can't be ignored when looking at investments. Most investments will fail, but the larger investments won't necessarily fail at a higher rate than smaller investments. Market size to investment size must be considered along with probability of success. Investors know they can't judge probability of success very well. But they try to judge opportunity return size. This is why outliers like AirBnB are so difficult for investors. Sure, many investors didn't think it would be successful, but more importantly, they also didn't realize if AirBnB was successful, just how large it could be. When you are looking at energy, it isn't difficult to figure out just how large the opportunity is, the risk is all in the execution of the technology.
- mrlonglong 4y agoI dislike steam. Their approach to this is to extract electrical energy direct from the reactor is what I really like. If they actually succeed, this is perfect for space travel.
- TheDudeMan 4y agoNo software jobs posted. Does that mean they have what they need or does it mean they outsource the software? Maybe both. Just curious.