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Real Engineering published a video about Helion Energy company. I don't have the tools to filter out commercial BS, still it seems to me to be most promising ef

Real Engineering published a video about Helion Energy company. I don't have the tools to filter out commercial BS, still it seems to me to be most promising effort. The idea to get electricity directly from magnetic fields instead of boiling water is very intriguing.

moffkalast 4y ago
I've also been quite surprised watching that one, it's completely novel approach to fusion and it may be the best way to mass adoption. If they can make it work that is. What most surprised me about NIF's ignition announcement was that this was even news. I'd assumed for years that most if not all tokamaks and stellerators could already achieve at least some brief fusion, just not to a useful degree. Turns out they're all just elaborate plasma heaters...
- albertopv 4y ago
  I'm very skeptical about those great announcements, even more when there's an announcement of the announcement. 300MJ in, 3MJ out, I wouldn't call it a breakthrough, maybe a milestone, nothing more.
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    I mean yeah it doesn't really change much in terms of usability, but it is the point from where onwards you can actually say you're doing fusion and not just heating stuff to high temps.
  - Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    And yet, they need to keep making announcements, else their funding will be cut. They knew all along that fusion energy would take decades to develop, and every year they need billions in funding to keep pushing for advancements. They can't just go radio silent until they're like "we've done it", they need to regularly publish papers and make big media announcements etc. Come to think of it, the LHC has been silent for a good while. Edit: It had a 3 year hiatus, started up again April this year.
    - albertopv 4y ago
      I understand, but twice the expectation, double the disappointment, at least for me and in this specific case.
    - jakeinspace 4y ago
      Their funding isn’t getting cut. US spending on updating the nuclear stockpile is going up substantially.
  - DennisP 4y ago
    That ratio is so bad only because they're using really inefficient decades-old lasers. Equivalent modern lasers have forty times better efficiency. https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.2.20211020a/full/ https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.2.2021102...
  - hinkley 4y ago
    Someone said in another comment that they elected to use old lasers, and that state of the art are about 40x more efficient. That’s still a big gap, and I’m dubious about the tritium supply, and the amount of beryllium they’re using to breed the tritium. Also tritium is nuclear proliferation of fusion bombs.
- hoseja 4y ago
  They basically have no real achievements yet - the energy harvesting system isn't working, they are just fusing D+He3 - even though the concept sounds impressive. The video was cool but not cool enough to break through healthy fusion vaporware skepticism.
  - albertopv 4y ago
    There is no energy harvesting system yet, next prototype will be include that. I like their "fast" (relatively speaking, of course) prototyping process.
    - hoseja 4y ago
      Why not do a major announcement with the working prototype though, is what's ringing the alarm bells for me. Yeah sure they can promise the next prototype will do the magic thing but why not wait for that.
      - zmgsabst 4y ago
        This one already does reliable aneutronic fusion using an unusual method. Why not announce that?
        hoseja 4y ago
        Because you can do reliable aneutronic fusion using usual methods? This seems explicitly commercial, therefore it needs to show value, which is in power generation, not making interesting gadgets.
        zmgsabst 4y ago
        Can you with any reliability and efficiency? As I understood it, reliably igniting aneutronic fusion efficiently was an open research problem. Whereas, they can consistently get to aneutronic burning plasmas. I’d love to read more about that.
        4y ago
- elihu 4y ago
  > What most surprised me about NIF's ignition announcement was that this was even news. I'd assumed for years that most if not all tokamaks and stellerators could already achieve at least some brief fusion, just not to a useful degree. I think they've done fusion in tokomaks and stellerators before, it's just that the energy applied to the plasma is greater than the additional energy that's created by fusion. It's not that no fusion is happening at all in the most powerful magnetic confinement devices yet built, it's that there isn't very much of it happening. That's my layperson's understanding anyways.
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    I'm not sure if it's true or not exactly, but I don't see how the NIF experiment would be any different from that if that were true, and in that case it wouldn't be news at all. It's not like they didn't use absurd amounts of laser power to get a tiny poof.
    - IanCal 4y ago
      But there was more energy released than laser power going in. That's what the news was about
      - emptyfile 4y ago
    - floxy 4y ago
      Going from a Qplasma of 0.9 to 1.5 for inertial confinement fusion seems like a step-change to me. For gains greater than one you have a positive feedback mechanism going for you -- the fusion you create makes more and bigger fusion. It is the difference between a tiny little bomb that works or doesn't work. It's this positive feedback that make scaling up potentially "easier". That's why it is a breakthrough, and concerns about lasers, etc. seem to be getting the cart before the horse. On the other hand, for magnetic confinement fusion, going from the same Q=0.9 to Q=1.5 is a much more "meh" event. I can see why some people are concerned about "where to draw the line" about total energy consumption, if it were MCF we were talking about. Maybe people have the expectation that ICF is further along the learning curve than it actually is? That's not to say that ICF is going to be viable for commercial fusion reactors in future. There are still many, many hurdles to cross. And maybe they will never be crossed for financial reasons.
- willis936 4y ago
  The milestone is that they surpassed Qplasma > 1. This has not been achieved before even though fusion has been done in ICF and MCF machines. Qplasma > 1 is significant because it now enters a regime where the burning fuel heats up unburnt fuel. In MCF machines this is referred to as a burning plasma. In ICF machines this is referred to as ignition. Ignition in MCF machines is Qplasma = infinity, where no external heating is used. This is on the table (maybe, theoretically), we just need to build machines with sufficiently high triple product and plasma control surfaces then learn how to do it. We'll have MCF burning plasma machines soon. https://twitter.com/jb_fusion/status/1506964692627034118 https://twitter.com/jb_fusion/status/1506964692627034118 Helion has not talked about triple product numbers. I wish they would, because that's the key metric for understanding how far they are from D-He3 burning plasma. Also, having the triple product history for all of their machines would help show scaling laws. These are currently closely guarded secrets. Targeting D-He3 fuel means a much higher coulomb barrier needs to be overcome and a higher triple product is needed to reaching burning plasma. Check out slide 40 for more details on fusion fuels. https://suli.pppl.gov/2022/course/IntroductionToFusionEnergy_SULI_20220613.pdf https://suli.pppl.gov/2022/course/IntroductionToFusionEnergy...
- DennisP 4y ago
  Tokamaks do fuse a lot of atoms, just not yet enough to get more energy out than they put in. The record so far is energy output at 70% of the energy input. The output scales with the square of plasma volume and fourth power of magnetic field strength, which is why net power is expected from ITER (which is huge) and SPARC (which uses new superconductors for especially powerful magnetic fields).
dghughes 4y ago
Everything about that was amazing. The design loos so simple and it's so small. The fuel used and the forward thinking of the fuel availability, separating fuel making from the reactor, how the fuel interacts with the reactor. Harnessing power from the magnetic field not by boiling water. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bDXXWQxK38 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bDXXWQxK38
myrmidon 4y ago
What made me super skeptical about the project is that I could not find out any numbers regarding economic viability: 1) How much energy per pulse is a commercial device expected to achieve? 2) How many pulses per second are realistic? 3) How many tons of copper/steel/capacitors per MW of power capacity are expected? Because if you're gonna need a warehouse full of capacitors, several big turbogenerators worth of high quality steel and copper PLUS all the vacuum/plasma tech just to hit a few 100MW of continuous electrical power-output, then I frankly do not see how that would EVER be viable/attractive ANYWHERE, and NO amount of scientific progress might be able to change that... But the concept to me at least looks more attractive than big magnetic-confinement plants, where the problems are even bigger (unaffordable plasmachamber + cryo-infra, super problematic neutron-flux, AND STILL needing all the heat => motion => electricity circus from a conventional plant).
- hinkley 4y ago
  In the video they’re trying to transition to 1/s from 1/10s, and targeting 10/s in a future generation. Always hard to tell from publicity shots, but it looked like their existing capacitor bank was around the size of a shipping container. That probably goes up with the frequency though. I’m not sure you can do single or dual banks when aiming to fire every hundred milliseconds. Plus I think you need somewhere to send the produced power for dumping into the power grid. But they’re already trying to produce their own capacitors to deal with that level of cycles per hour. I could see these guys spinning out a couple of companies that supply other designs or even industries. Especially if the money runs out.
hinkley 4y ago
I’m both intrigued and disappointed when people end up using ultra fast computers to solve these engineering problems. One, it’s a sign of progress and a potential solution. Two, it suggests a lie around the notion that we should have had an interplanetary civilization with flying cars, fusion reactors, and personal robots generations ago. We didn’t have the compute power for any of this stuff in the 80’s. I did some reading a while back and discovered that there are elements of Computational Fluid Dynamics that became state of the art around 1990, so we are maybe two decades behind, not five.

moffkalast 4y ago

I've also been quite surprised watching that one, it's completely novel approach to fusion and it may be the best way to mass adoption. If they can make it work that is. What most surprised me about NIF's ignition announcement was that this was even news. I'd assumed for years that most if not all tokamaks and stellerators could already achieve at least some brief fusion, just not to a useful degree. Turns out they're all just elaborate plasma heaters...

albertopv 4y ago
I'm very skeptical about those great announcements, even more when there's an announcement of the announcement. 300MJ in, 3MJ out, I wouldn't call it a breakthrough, maybe a milestone, nothing more.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  I mean yeah it doesn't really change much in terms of usability, but it is the point from where onwards you can actually say you're doing fusion and not just heating stuff to high temps.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  And yet, they need to keep making announcements, else their funding will be cut. They knew all along that fusion energy would take decades to develop, and every year they need billions in funding to keep pushing for advancements. They can't just go radio silent until they're like "we've done it", they need to regularly publish papers and make big media announcements etc. Come to think of it, the LHC has been silent for a good while. Edit: It had a 3 year hiatus, started up again April this year.
  - albertopv 4y ago
    I understand, but twice the expectation, double the disappointment, at least for me and in this specific case.
  - jakeinspace 4y ago
    Their funding isn’t getting cut. US spending on updating the nuclear stockpile is going up substantially.
- DennisP 4y ago
  That ratio is so bad only because they're using really inefficient decades-old lasers. Equivalent modern lasers have forty times better efficiency. https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.2.20211020a/full/ https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.2.2021102...
- hinkley 4y ago
  Someone said in another comment that they elected to use old lasers, and that state of the art are about 40x more efficient. That’s still a big gap, and I’m dubious about the tritium supply, and the amount of beryllium they’re using to breed the tritium. Also tritium is nuclear proliferation of fusion bombs.
hoseja 4y ago
They basically have no real achievements yet - the energy harvesting system isn't working, they are just fusing D+He3 - even though the concept sounds impressive. The video was cool but not cool enough to break through healthy fusion vaporware skepticism.
- albertopv 4y ago
  There is no energy harvesting system yet, next prototype will be include that. I like their "fast" (relatively speaking, of course) prototyping process.
  - hoseja 4y ago
    Why not do a major announcement with the working prototype though, is what's ringing the alarm bells for me. Yeah sure they can promise the next prototype will do the magic thing but why not wait for that.
    - zmgsabst 4y ago
      This one already does reliable aneutronic fusion using an unusual method. Why not announce that?
      - hoseja 4y ago
        Because you can do reliable aneutronic fusion using usual methods? This seems explicitly commercial, therefore it needs to show value, which is in power generation, not making interesting gadgets.
        zmgsabst 4y ago
        Can you with any reliability and efficiency? As I understood it, reliably igniting aneutronic fusion efficiently was an open research problem. Whereas, they can consistently get to aneutronic burning plasmas. I’d love to read more about that.
      - 4y ago
elihu 4y ago
> What most surprised me about NIF's ignition announcement was that this was even news. I'd assumed for years that most if not all tokamaks and stellerators could already achieve at least some brief fusion, just not to a useful degree. I think they've done fusion in tokomaks and stellerators before, it's just that the energy applied to the plasma is greater than the additional energy that's created by fusion. It's not that no fusion is happening at all in the most powerful magnetic confinement devices yet built, it's that there isn't very much of it happening. That's my layperson's understanding anyways.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  I'm not sure if it's true or not exactly, but I don't see how the NIF experiment would be any different from that if that were true, and in that case it wouldn't be news at all. It's not like they didn't use absurd amounts of laser power to get a tiny poof.
  - IanCal 4y ago
    But there was more energy released than laser power going in. That's what the news was about
    - emptyfile 4y ago
  - floxy 4y ago
    Going from a Qplasma of 0.9 to 1.5 for inertial confinement fusion seems like a step-change to me. For gains greater than one you have a positive feedback mechanism going for you -- the fusion you create makes more and bigger fusion. It is the difference between a tiny little bomb that works or doesn't work. It's this positive feedback that make scaling up potentially "easier". That's why it is a breakthrough, and concerns about lasers, etc. seem to be getting the cart before the horse. On the other hand, for magnetic confinement fusion, going from the same Q=0.9 to Q=1.5 is a much more "meh" event. I can see why some people are concerned about "where to draw the line" about total energy consumption, if it were MCF we were talking about. Maybe people have the expectation that ICF is further along the learning curve than it actually is? That's not to say that ICF is going to be viable for commercial fusion reactors in future. There are still many, many hurdles to cross. And maybe they will never be crossed for financial reasons.
willis936 4y ago
The milestone is that they surpassed Qplasma > 1. This has not been achieved before even though fusion has been done in ICF and MCF machines. Qplasma > 1 is significant because it now enters a regime where the burning fuel heats up unburnt fuel. In MCF machines this is referred to as a burning plasma. In ICF machines this is referred to as ignition. Ignition in MCF machines is Qplasma = infinity, where no external heating is used. This is on the table (maybe, theoretically), we just need to build machines with sufficiently high triple product and plasma control surfaces then learn how to do it. We'll have MCF burning plasma machines soon. https://twitter.com/jb_fusion/status/1506964692627034118 https://twitter.com/jb_fusion/status/1506964692627034118 Helion has not talked about triple product numbers. I wish they would, because that's the key metric for understanding how far they are from D-He3 burning plasma. Also, having the triple product history for all of their machines would help show scaling laws. These are currently closely guarded secrets. Targeting D-He3 fuel means a much higher coulomb barrier needs to be overcome and a higher triple product is needed to reaching burning plasma. Check out slide 40 for more details on fusion fuels. https://suli.pppl.gov/2022/course/IntroductionToFusionEnergy_SULI_20220613.pdf https://suli.pppl.gov/2022/course/IntroductionToFusionEnergy...
DennisP 4y ago
Tokamaks do fuse a lot of atoms, just not yet enough to get more energy out than they put in. The record so far is energy output at 70% of the energy input. The output scales with the square of plasma volume and fourth power of magnetic field strength, which is why net power is expected from ITER (which is huge) and SPARC (which uses new superconductors for especially powerful magnetic fields).

dghughes 4y ago

Everything about that was amazing. The design loos so simple and it's so small. The fuel used and the forward thinking of the fuel availability, separating fuel making from the reactor, how the fuel interacts with the reactor. Harnessing power from the magnetic field not by boiling water. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bDXXWQxK38 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bDXXWQxK38

myrmidon 4y ago

What made me super skeptical about the project is that I could not find out any numbers regarding economic viability: 1) How much energy per pulse is a commercial device expected to achieve? 2) How many pulses per second are realistic? 3) How many tons of copper/steel/capacitors per MW of power capacity are expected? Because if you're gonna need a warehouse full of capacitors, several big turbogenerators worth of high quality steel and copper PLUS all the vacuum/plasma tech just to hit a few 100MW of continuous electrical power-output, then I frankly do not see how that would EVER be viable/attractive ANYWHERE, and NO amount of scientific progress might be able to change that... But the concept to me at least looks more attractive than big magnetic-confinement plants, where the problems are even bigger (unaffordable plasmachamber + cryo-infra, super problematic neutron-flux, AND STILL needing all the heat => motion => electricity circus from a conventional plant).

hinkley 4y ago
In the video they’re trying to transition to 1/s from 1/10s, and targeting 10/s in a future generation. Always hard to tell from publicity shots, but it looked like their existing capacitor bank was around the size of a shipping container. That probably goes up with the frequency though. I’m not sure you can do single or dual banks when aiming to fire every hundred milliseconds. Plus I think you need somewhere to send the produced power for dumping into the power grid. But they’re already trying to produce their own capacitors to deal with that level of cycles per hour. I could see these guys spinning out a couple of companies that supply other designs or even industries. Especially if the money runs out.

hinkley 4y ago

I’m both intrigued and disappointed when people end up using ultra fast computers to solve these engineering problems. One, it’s a sign of progress and a potential solution. Two, it suggests a lie around the notion that we should have had an interplanetary civilization with flying cars, fusion reactors, and personal robots generations ago. We didn’t have the compute power for any of this stuff in the 80’s. I did some reading a while back and discovered that there are elements of Computational Fluid Dynamics that became state of the art around 1990, so we are maybe two decades behind, not five.