They're a company that's showed nothing so far and claims to know how to do something that's apparently eluded a dozen other fusion power projects with quite literally 1000 times more funding. The likes of ITER and Wendelstein, or the NIF.

Helion's only got about 80M of venture investments, which in the field of energy innovation is basically chump change.

I mean call me a sceptic, but I have a feeling they may not be able to completely deliver on their promise hah.

They announced a $500M - $2200M series E funding round on Friday:

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

Relatively tiny budget is not a sign of weakness. The history is teemed with well-founded ventures beaten by much less funded ones.

Well I sure hope that ends up being the case, but unfortunately history is also teeming with startups promising the world, getting funding and then collapsing while getting nothing done.

ITER is commonly cited as the most expensive science project of all time. I just don't believe a start up is on the forefront of research that even everyone involved with ITER is behind.

ITER is committed to a certain large scale design.

Helion is trying to do something very different and much smaller.

They’ve shown nothing to you.

That doesn’t mean investors haven’t seen prototypes.

If they had something substantial it would make sense to patent it, instead of keeping it hidden and the potential for it to be stolen as an option. Either the principle their reactor will work on isn't conceptually done yet or they're being seriously irresponsible with their achievements.

I think it's a reasonable assumption that US fusion companies would have the same patent policy as SpaceX.

Elon is quoted in HBR, “We have essentially no patents. Our primary long-term competition is China. If we published patents, it would be farcical, because the Chinese would just use them as a recipe book."

Or even the US government. Good luck to SpaceX asking the government to enforce its patents against... the government itself!

Wait, what? The Government protects you against the Government itself all the time. What exactly is tha Bill of Rights?

That's the whole point of patents: to be used as a recipe book.

The deal is that you provide the recipe book in exchange for legal protection and a short-term legal monopoly. The other side of that deal is not honored by China, which is Elon's point.

The legal monopoly (which is the same thing as the legal protection) has always been geographically limited, and has always existed at the pleasure of the government granting it.

Patents usually take a few years to issue. In the US, for the first six months, the patent application is confidential

They have serious funding, so they have more than nothing. Given the investors don't seem to be naive idiots, I'd say they are making a calculated bet and there might be more to this than wishful thinking.

You see nothing, they see opportunity. You can't both be right.

Heard of Theranos?

They have built several prototypes, but none of the size necessary for useful energy production. Their prototype planned for 2024 is apparently also just supposed to be useful He3 production, but not useful energy production (though they do want it to produce more energy than it consumes).

They also have the local mayor and governor saying good things about them, and given that they're aiming for aneutronic fusion I wouldn't expect regulation to be a huge hurtle, it's a very safe scheme with very minimal waste.

(Just based on googling them a lot yesterday, and mostly from comments on /r/fusion)

An optimistic take is they may be keeping a bit quiet on the details to avoid competition? Some results "first private fusion company to heat a fusion plasma to 100 million degrees Celsius" from their Trenta prototype and Altman says "...they and their team have built a generator that produces electricity. Helion has a clear path to net electricity by 2024..."

The design is quite interesting - twin electromagnets shove plasma at a million miles an hour into the middle chamber and then hopefully fusion flings it out again pushing back on the currents in the electromagnets and producing electrical output directly. Bit like a petrol engine where the piston / crank compress the mix and then after ignition it shoves back harder adding energy to the crankshaft.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210622005366/en/Hel...