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Y Combinator And Mithril Invest In Helion, A Nuclear Fusion Startup
- grondilu 12y agoWhen talking about breaking even, does that include the energy needed to make the deuterium? Or rather to collect it, considering it has to be extracted from water or something. IIRC deuterium costs quite a lot of energy to produce and as a result for a while it was only produced by countries having large amount of hydroelectricity available. Not exactly related, but this made me wonder : inside a tank full of liquid hydrogen, do the DH and DD molecules lie on the bottom? Is it possible to just siphon them from there?
- cpihl 12y agoThat's a good question. The short answer is the energy that it takes to extract D2 from water is so small compared to the fusion energy released it isn't a factor. That is reflected in the cost of D2O at about $0.70 per gram. In a fusion reactor, even with inefficiencies, that gram of D2O will create about $1000 worth of electricity.
- grondilu 12y agoYeah that makes sense. Now that I think about it, I realise the energy needed to extract deuterium is related to the chemical energy binding water molecules together. This chemical energy is orders of magnitude lower than the nuclear energy released by fusion. So the cost of fuel production will likely be irrelevant for fusion power.
- kayhi 12y agoAnyone have more insights into how this works? The figure, deuterium fuel is confusing as deuterium is an isotope and am unsure what they mean 'extraction' (how?).
- evo 12y agoIt's probably just referring to the separation of heavy water from normal water, which is then electrolyzed to produce the deuterium.
- sloughj 12y agoRight now we just buy deuterium off the shelf, it is low cost and plentiful. You can get deuterium by electrolysis of heavy water, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water
- kayhi 12y agoPerhaps low cost (25L, ~$600) is relative, depending on the purity, but am unsure how much scale a project like this would use.
- malandrew 12y agoI wouldn't be surprised if that cost is still a drop in the bucket compared to salaries though. How much deuterium is a startup like this likely to go through in a month?
- cpihl 12y agoTotally correct. Right now we simply purchase D2 gas in small quantity so the price is relatively high. But even at those prices we'll probably spend on the order of only $100 per month on D2 when we're operating.
- cpihl 12y agoI love this question because it helps illustrate just how different fusion is from other energy sources. If it works, a 50 MW Fusion Engine would run for 5-10 years on a single 55 gallon drum of heavy water.
- valarauca1 12y agoHeavy water (oxygen + deuterium) bonds slightly stronger then normal water (oxygen + hydrogen). So you cascade water over electrosis (pump voltage though water causing hydrogen and oxygen to separate). And you get a higher and higher percentage of deuterium with each stage. This how the German's did it in WW2.
- philip1209 12y ago$1.5 million is not much runway.
- noblethrasher 12y ago$1.5 million from YC is known as "smart money". You don't use smart money as runway, you use it to build runway.
- mjhouse 12y agoespecially for a product that is just hoping to break even on power generation.
- venomsnake 12y agoThey break even and are billionaires. They manage to create 2+ EROEI and we are talking trillions.
- baq 12y agoor dead; possibly both (i dearly hope not for both cases!). a working fusion reactor with advertised properties will disrupt the current political balance of power on the planet. intelligence agencies of certain fossil fuel-driven countries might get orders to not let the situation go that far. hopefully certain other intelligence agencies will be able to protect the effort.
- mikeyouse 12y agoThis is needlessly conspiratorial. Oil companies and sovereign wealth funds are some of the biggest investors in renewables on earth. Everyone knows we will reach peak oil at some point, whether through increasingly costly extraction/taxation or increasingly cheap renewable competitors. There is no 'grand conspiracy' to quash alternative energy sources.
- swalsh 12y ago
- porter 12y agoanother perpetual motion machine?
- sillysaurus3 12y agoThe same kinds of dismissals were probably said about everyone who tried to make an airplane. Someone eventually made it work, though.
- SideburnsOfDoom 12y agoYes, and it was a prominent physicist who most famously said it: "heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible" - Lord Kelvin, 1895 http://www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/speeches/fg_kitty_hawk_12.17.03_prt.htm http://www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/speeches/fg_kitty_hawk...
- tormeh 12y agoNah. Just a very risky investment. ITER uses "safe" physics that we know how works - it's a magnificent engineering exercise, but there are no new insights in fusion per se required. These guys seem to be aiming for an alternative solution with more eccentric science behind it. It will probably not work out, but neither does most start-ups.
- sillysaurus3 12y agoWhat is meant by eccentric science? Would you be specific?
- tormeh 12y agoWell, I don't know much about the subject, but the way I've understood it there's ITER and then there are a couple other reactor projects. Everyone except ITER is violating some kind of popularly held belief among physicists - they could be cheaper and better, but it's far from certain that they'll work at all. This just looks like another one of those.
- pinaceae 12y agois this the equivalent of throwing shit at the wall and see what sticks? why do vcs with a specialty in software suddenly stray into completely unknown territory? nothing left to fund in software? rarely does this end well.
- lukasm 12y agoExpected value.
- _delirium 12y agoI would guess either personal interest or PR, rather than a solid return calculation. YC doesn't want to be seen as the "web startup incubator", even if that's where they can best maximize ROI. And besides PR, the principals likely don't want to be that, either, but have loftier goals. Which is perfectly fine; maximizing investor returns is rarely a good way to do anything important or interesting.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- leephillips 12y agoThe NIF has never reached "break even" in the sense that most people might understand that phrase. Orders of magnitude more energy went into the system than could have been extracted from the resultant fusion reactions. However, post-analysis of a bunch of shots showed approximately two where, if you accept a model for the amount of laser energy that was incident on the target, somewhat more than that amount of energy was produced from nuclear fusion. Several other shots in the same series, under the same conditions, failed to produce this "break-even" energy. This is all in the actual papers, not, of course, in LLNL's press releases.
- FiatLuxDave 12y agoI think it's more a matter of there not being any VCs who specialize in fusion. There just isn't the deal flow to sustain any VC specializing in it, and so far the success rate has been 0%. Of course, because there are so few fusion startups (lets see, I can think of less than 10 in the past 25 years), its hard to know what the real statistics are: is the chance of failure 100% or really just 99%? From the point of view of a fusion startup, if you try 100 software VCs, you might find 2 or 3 who will be interested. However, you will wait forever if you want to find a VC specializing in fusion.
- iLoch 12y agoCan someone with some knowledge on nuclear energy explain to me how this solution varies from say, General Fusion (http://www.generalfusion.com http://www.generalfusion.com)? They're a company more local to me, and while these companies are looking to accomplish the same thing, their approaches are wildly different.
- trhway 12y agothey try to do the same - pulsed inertial confinement. Pulse of some force upon a speck of fuel (or a small plasma cloud of the fuel). Similar to compression stroke in ICE, specifically - diesel. Whoever masters the 250TW (that's "terra", like burning of 1g of gasoline in under 0.1 nanosecond) of power pulse delivery - wins the race. My bet is on Sandia Z-machine though to break even first. DPF (that Helion seems to be a kind of) is the next best contender (and probably more practical/efficient approach for household scale fusion reactors when we will reach that stage) i think.
- dkirtley 12y agoBoth GF and us (Helion) are attempting to dramatically shrink the size and cost of fusion reactors. We are doing that by compressing a fusion plasma repeatedly to generate energy, rather than trying to heat and confine it for long periods. The main difference is that Helion uses high field pulsed magnets to compress the plasma, GF uses pistons to generate liquid metal shocks.
- omegant 12y agoAre you guys thinking in a crowdfounding campaign, I'll give money to help projects like yours.
- dkirtley 12y agoNot yet, right now we are focused on pushing the technical milestones as fast as possible. This is a great question, what do people here think about a crowdfunding campaign for something like fusion, is it worth it?
- aetherson 12y ago> Helion CEO David Kirtley says that his company can do it in three. Three... years? Decades? Days? Millennia?
- dkirtley 12y agoWe are hoping three years, three decades is just too late to matter. Part of what was not mentioned are the years that we have put into this already. Fusion is definitely a tough problem, but one that is worth it to solve.
- cwal37 12y agoForgive me if this is forward, but are you guys hiring? I'm in no way a physicist, but I do know a few with strong experimental backgrounds (mostly in nuclear), and I try to keep my ear to the ground for intriguing job opportunities for my friends.
- jhartmann 12y agoBest of luck to you and your team, I really think that alternative paths to Fusion should have been explored since Farnsworth. Instead we have the crazy massive superconducting cathedral's that are literally trying to blow themselves apart when you turn them on. Your team and the teams investigating other approaches (General Fusion, Tri-alpha, the late Bussard's Polywell, Lerner's Focus Fusion) all should get several tens of millions to investigate and do hard science and try for the big payoff. Congrats on getting some more initial funding, I wish you the best of luck.
- cwal37 12y agoNature had a fun article a few weeks back on the current trickle of VC into fusion startups. http://www.nature.com/news/plasma-physics-the-fusion-upstarts-1.15592 http://www.nature.com/news/plasma-physics-the-fusion-upstart... It's certainly interesting, and I wish these companies all the best. The consternation I see occasionally over a company like this getting a (relatively) small amount of funding confuses me. There are so many software startups that receive equivalent or greater funding that eventually die or pivot into something else. Here, you have physical cutting edge engineering with potential implications that blow something like Slack, or Square, or even Uber away. Personally, I love seeing companies in the physical space get in on today's Silicon Valley high. Semi-related, but I've been to NIF (National Ignition Facility), since I spent a summer at LLNL, and the inside of that facility is like the dream vision of every little kid that was into science and science fiction. Unfortunately (as my physicist significant other who was not working there found out) the public tours are far more restricted and you don't get to see the cool stuff.
- dkirtley 12y agoThere was another good one in science. http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2014/07/fusions-restless-pioneers http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2014/07/fusions-restless-...
- ForHackernews 12y ago> or even Uber Talk about an understatement. Uber is just a cheaper cab. Commercially viable fusion is a game-changer on a planetary scale: Halting global warming by replacing fossil fuels, hydrogen fuel cells become viable by generating hydrogen through hydrolysis, energy-intensive desalinization plants deliver fresh water for drinking and irrigation.
- cwal37 12y agoI was trying to be nice. I'm a strong environmentalist via academics (BS/MS in environmental science), and currently a research analyst in renewable energy economics, so I have very strong feelings (and I like to think a well-grounded sense) about how fucked the environment and incentives around it are. I was giving a (very) charitable reading of the occasional claim that Uber will change the way everything works via its framework. A more tempered tone normally does better on HN, but to be totally honest, I don't think any of those companies I mentioned could even come near what Helion would achieve if successful.
- Symmetry 12y agoThey're using deuterium, but the figure mentions that they're fusing it with helium. But helium-3 is very expensive, and I'd been under the impression that deuterium / helium-4 fusion required impractically high temperatures to work?
- dnautics 12y agohelium 4 is stable (it's the alpha particle) so fusion with helium 4 either doesn't produce energy or it produces very little. It's possible that the reactor does two reactions: 1) D + D -> 3He + n, 3He + D -> 4He + p.
- rdl 12y agoIt's interesting that you can justify this investment in at least four separate ways, independently: 1) Even if there is a low chance of success, it would be wildly profitable if successful, and investing early gets you a good share if it's successful. 2) Fusion power would make the world a better place; investing in this way, when you already have huge returns and it's someone else's money, is actually rational even if you think it's not the best financial investment. 3) This looks like an amazingly smart team; even if they fail at fusion, they might find something worthwhile in the process. Just handling magnetics and high power well could be a useful toolkit for other problems. 4) "Halo effect" -- both because it's awesome science/engineering and because it shows a willingness to take extreme risks -- boosts YC (which probably doesn't need it) and Mithril (which is maybe even more awesome than YC, but nowhere near as widely known). If it loses $1.5mm but makes it more likely the next Facebook comes to either of these funds, it's a win.
- ChuckMcM 12y agoThe risk of #3 is that they don't create fusion but they do develop a machine that can emit streams of hot plasma which is then turned into the Navy's weapon of choice for close weapons support on carrier battle groups. That said, I am looking forward to at least one of the fusion efforts bearing fruit. I'm something of an optimist here but I expect a durable solution to the 'energy problem' to emerge from our developing understanding of both quantum mechanics and particle physics. I am also cognizant of the fact that it also raises the bar on both good and bad things that humans can do. The tricky parts are in the transitions, pre and post event.
- TillE 12y agoWe've already weaponized nuclear fusion into the most destructive bomb ever created. It probably couldn't get a whole lot worse than that. I think there are other paths to sustainable energy, but certainly viable fusion power is the holy grail.
- malandrew 12y agoI don't understand why this was downvoted. I'm not going to discount the possibility to invent something worse then our most powerful fusion bomb, but if we talk probability here, developing processes that allow greater control is likely to result in a worst case scenario where we have a weapon that is at most as powerful as what we already have, but more focused. IMHO focused fusion destruction is likely to be far more humane than the indiscriminate destruction caused by the weapons currently in our arsenal. i.e. a highly focused weapon is likely to to result in instant death for the victims instead of minutes to months to years of suffering for victims depending on their exposure levels.
- lquist 12y agoThe New Yorker wrote an amazing article on ITER and the pursuit of nuclear fusion: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/a-star-in-a-bottle http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/a-star-in-a-bot....
- fuddle 12y agoExcellent news, I can't wait to drive a Tesla powered by fusion power.
- bellerocky 12y agoI don't think mobile fusion reactors are what they're going for. And if you're looking to reduce global carbon emissions try walking, biking or using public transportation. It's true electric cars don't emit carbon the way a fuel based car does, but the production and maintenance of an electric vehicle certainly does.
- Thrymr 12y agoMy reading of "a Tesla powered by fusion power" was that the electricity charging the batteries would come from a fusion generator source. And indeed, a clean electrical source makes electric transportation much more environmentally attractive.
- cbr 12y agofusion plant -> mains electricity -> your tesla
- fuddle 12y agoYes that's what I meant, I think this is the future of transport.
- tomp 12y ago> Helion Energy [...] says it has a plan to build a fusion reactor [..], a challenge whose solution has been considered decades away for, well, decades. Helion CEO David Kirtley says that his company can do it in three. Three decades? Either this is a very long-term investment, or a very confusingly written article.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- xexers 12y agoYeah, that's a clumsy sentence. He means 3 years. In this article, he estimates commercial viability by 2019: http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/07/helion-energy-plans-to-enable.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/07/helion-energy-plans-to-enab...
- beambot 12y agoThey're using a deuterium reaction? That's not bad (per se), but the neutron production can create difficulties: major regulatory hurdles (can be used for nuclear material refinement?), difficult to extract energy, and causes a lot of nearby material fatigue. Another big contender (IMHO) is Tri Alpha's aneutronic approach: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tri_Alpha_Energy,_Inc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tri_Alpha_Energy,_Inc. Either way, cool stuff!
- DennisP 12y agoFwiw, high school kids build small reactors and fuse deuterium with basically no regulatory hassle at all. Lots of larger fusion experiments use deuterium too and do fine. Getting permission to experiment with fission is far more difficult. I'm sure there will be some regulation but it's unlikely to be very burdensome. Boron fusion is pretty much the ultimate of course.
- crassus2 12y agoThe most important question: what are the demographics of the founding team?
- abstractbill 12y agoYC used to get a lot of criticism for only funding "trivial web companies". You don't hear that so much these days.
- jes5199 12y agoI'm not up to date on everything YC funds - what other non-web companies have they funded?
- swalsh 12y agoThey're doing some non-profits, which i'm not sure if that's what he was getting at... but is still pretty cool.
- abstractbill 12y agoCruise Automation, for example, is working on self-driving cars. There are some biotech companies too, but I don't know much about those.
- outericky 12y agoThere a number of hardware companies as well.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- sam 12y agoWhat's the plasma configuration of the machine? I think there's a research group at U of Washington working on merging spheromaks which create a field reversed configuration. Is this a spinoff of that group? edit: looks like it is - this is the group: https://www.aa.washington.edu/research/plasmaDynamics/phdx.html https://www.aa.washington.edu/research/plasmaDynamics/phdx.h...
- dkirtley 12y agoYes! Prof. John Slough is the Chief Scientist at Helion and the inventor of the Fusion Engine. UW has been leading the field of 'alternates' fusion for decades. Our 'About Us' page has a short blurb: http://www.helionenergy.com/ http://www.helionenergy.com/
- tim333 12y agoThere's a video of him talking about his earlier fusion rocket engine prototype http://on.aol.com/video/peripheral-vision-003--professor-john-slough-517930800 http://on.aol.com/video/peripheral-vision-003--professor-joh...
- keerthiko 12y agoAm I the only one who finds the names in this headline SO FRICKIN AMAZING?! They are all so apt -- A steampunk-sounding mechanism for combining things[1], a mythical element/alloy of magical powers, and a naked Helium nucleus. It just tickles something very artistic for me. Edit: [1] ok fine it's actually a math function, but I like my perception of the name better.
- sbierwagen 12y agoSafe: With no possibility of melt-down, or hazardous nuclear waste, fusion dose not suffer the drawbacks that make fission an unattractive alternative. Eyeroll. D-He3 fusion produces less neutron flux than D-T, but it's hardly aneutronic-- otherwise they couldn't breed He3 from it. After a decade, the whole reactor will be nuclear waste. I wonder what the service interval on an installed reactor will be? Or are they doing isotope separation on the produced helium on-site? (Fun fact: you can get deuterium from water[1] but helium comes from natural gas fields![2] It's literally a fossil gas, which is why we're running out of it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium#Occurrence_and_production http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium#Occurrence_and_productio... ) 1: Commercially, heavy water is a byproduct of electrolysis plants: since deuterium doesn't electrolyze quite as easily as light water, it tends to accumulate in electrolysis stacks 2: The same rock formations that trap natural gas also trap helium.
- scythe 12y ago>D-He3 fusion produces less neutron flux than D-T, but it's hardly aneutronic-- otherwise they couldn't breed 3He from it. You can't "breed" 3He; you have to breed tritium, which decays to He3 with a half-life of 12 years. D-3He reactors do produce some neutrons, roughly 1% of the flux of D-T, and almost entirely from D-D side-reactions. Actually, a big problem with D-3He as of today is the lack of neutrons -- since you only get one neutron per 100 (e.g.) reactions, you can't possibly breed enough tritium to break-even. You have to come up with some other neutron source, or send rockets to Jupiter. >After a decade, the whole reactor will be nuclear waste. Fusion reactors are generally made from boron carbide -- a material unique for the fact that it does not become very radioactive when irradiated with neutrons. 14C which is produced can be extracted by oxidation and centrifuging, and in any case is not nearly as scary as, say, 90Sr. No other concerning radioactive isotopes exist with atomic masses between 10 and 21 (cf 22Na). >commercial helium comes natural gas fields! It's literally a fossil gas, which is why we're running out of it: Nope, that's 4He. There's basically no 3He in natural gas (because the helium there is radiogenic), so obtaining fuel that way wouldn't work even if we wanted to.
- jhartmann 12y ago
- marcell 12y agoCan someone explain why this team is confident that they can build a commercially viable reactor in 3 years? Conventional wisdom is that nuclear fusion is "decades away". What does this team know that others don't?
- malandrew 12y agoMy bet is either: (1) They have a solid lead we don't know about; or (2) Saying you are 3 years away generates hype and interest that keeps netting you the funding to work on something as long term as decades away. Even if they secretly think it is exactly one decade away, it is in their interest and the interest of the current investors to say it's only a few years away since they will depend on other investors to get piling in on this investment in 1-2 years time. My advice to anyone working on inventing something truly new instead of putting a startup together from off the shelf parts: Never under-estimate the value of optimism in your time frames and communicating that optimism and timeframe often. Every truly big idea I can think of has depended on a similar optimism since it's the only way to actually net you the amount of money needed to accomplish something truly novel. Even Kennedy did this when he talked about putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade. It took 8 years, one month and 26 days from the date of his speech to accomplish something that was pretty far fetched in 1961. Only those willing to make bold claims are capable of taking such bold claims to fruition. That's how you raise the money you need and recruit the people you need to make that a reality. Moonshot startups require a moonshot attitude.
- robertfw 12y agoThis is something I've struggled with - I am always the cautious type. This is good advice I think for many projects , even those that are not quite moonshots.
- ghshephard 12y agoThe type of Nuclear Fusion they are talking about is quite different than what ITER is working on. It's on a much smaller scale - around 50 MW, which is on the scale of a large diesel generator. The cost is also not that ground breaking - around $0.04/kWh, which is around where Natural Gas and Coal plants are.
- curtis 12y agoI think these guys are using MagLIF (Magnetized Liner Inertial Fusion). Here's an article about MagLIF research using the Z Machine at Sandia Labs: http://www.nature.com/news/triple-threat-method-sparks-hope-for-fusion-1.14445 http://www.nature.com/news/triple-threat-method-sparks-hope-...
- cpihl 12y agoClose but with some important differences. We've tried that approach and it has some interesting potential applications but, when it comes to building a power plant that has to last decades, we think the engineering is just too difficult. Instead of pushing on a liner that then pushes on the plasma, we directly push on the plasma with magnetic field. The engineering, while still difficult, is much easier to tackle.
- higherpurpose 12y agoFor that kind of money they could've just kickstarted it.
- swalsh 12y agoThe funny thing is if this was a kickstarter campaign, all the comments on this post would be super negative.
- NortySpock 12y agoFocus Fusion tried that, and it netted them only $180k plus some private investments. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/focus-fusion-empowertheworld--3 https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/focus-fusion-empowerthewo...
- DennisP 12y agoTrue but their goal was only $200k, and they started with minimal funds for marketing.
- kumarski 12y agoThe reasons Nuclear Fusion presents a difficult problem: 1.) There's no chain reaction mechanism. 2.) The probability of a reaction constrains reaction size. 3.) The absurd amount of heat generated by fusion. I think I once heard it was 100M degrees. Curious, anybody know how they design around this? Are they using some form of magnetized containment? Excited to see this funded.
- mschuster91 12y ago> Curious, anybody know how they design around this? Usually the stuff is hidden in a vacuum, which is a pretty good shield for heat.
- drjesusphd 12y ago> 1.) There's no chain reaction mechanism. There's something like it. Fusion happens because plasma is hot -> fusion products heat the plasma to keep it hot -> more fusion happens. A chain reaction is exactly what you don't want in a nuclear reactor. > 2.) The probability of a reaction constrains reaction size. Can you be more specific? The probability of reaction does constrain the design, but via the Lawson criterion [1]. > 3.) The absurd amount of heat generated by fusion. I think I once heard it was 100M degrees. That's about right, but temperature != heat. Even though the plasma has a very high temperature, it is also extremely diffuse: about 3 million times less dense than air. The main concern is keeping it hot in the proximity of colder stuff and managing the electromagnetic energy (the fields have many times more energy than the thermal energy, and has the potential to all be dumped in a single spot), not necessarily worrying about the heat. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawson_criterion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawson_criterion edit: lots of silly typos
- cletus 12y agoAs much as I hope this succeeds and as glad as I that HN is betting on such "moonshots", I remain skeptical about the practicality of nuclear fusion as a commercially viable power source. Fusion works particularly well for stars because of gravity. We're trying to use magnets to contain superheated plasma. The Sun generates less energy on a kg-for-kg basis that compost [1]. And it has gravity to contain the byproducts (other than energy). But the real problem is neutrons. To start a fusion reaction with a small amount of matter we use heavy isotopes of hydrogen (specifically deuterium = 1 neutron, tritium = radioactive isotope with 2 neutrons). The fusing material releases neutrons that damage the containing reactor. This is using the most "promising" deuterium-tritium reaction. Alternatives are suggesting using He3. Unfortunately that's super-rare, which kinda defeats the point of "free" energy. I remain skeptical but hoping to be proven wrong. [1]: http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/04/17/3478276.htm http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/04/17/3478276.ht...
- DennisP 12y agoThe second-easiest reaction is deuterium-deuterium. Half the time it produces He3, and the other half it produces tritium, which decays into He3. So start with D-D and bring in He3 as you get it to reduce neutron output. Even with D-D alone the neutrons are a lot less energetic than with D-T.
- todd8 12y agoThis whole discussion about weapons seems strange. It's true that the words "nuclear fusion" appear in the article, but my reading of the article doesn't make me feel that this research will lead to some terrible, existential risk to mankind. For comparison, consider robotics, drones, nanotechnology, and AI. I am fascinated by these subjects (and, apparently, so are many other HN readers), but I have some concerns that these non-nuclear technologies may end up having very negative consequences. Yet these high tech areas, with which I would guess the HN readers have a better understanding than fusion, don't engender such negative reactions here.
- jonknee 12y agoAmazing that this kind of research can be funded with a mere .0015 Instagrams (or even better, .00008 Whatsapps).
- mbesto 12y agoGuess that explains this: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/499448951372660736 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/499448951372660736 I had office hours today with a co in the current YC batch whose (genuine) TAM is so big I worry investors won't be able to parse it.
- netcan 12y agoSlightly tangental but "end energy dependance on other nations" grates me. It sounds so nationalistic.
- cycrutchfield 12y agoIt's not really a nationalistic sentiment, but rather one of economic independence. See, for example, Europe kowtowing to Russia because they supply a large fraction of their natural gas.
- SideburnsOfDoom 12y agoOne thing that I am curious about: What does it mean by "the expanding plasma is converted directly into electricity" ? Directly how? No boiling water driving pistons, no intervening steps at all? It seems a bit like "and then a miracle occurs" to me.
- sbierwagen 12y agoThere's a couple of ways of doing it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion
- misterfusion 12y agoNuclear fusion is a good investment for the world. Truthfully, fusion power is the final answer to our future energy needs. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8n7j5k-_G8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8n7j5k-_G8