AIUI Helion’s bottleneck is the number of capacitors needed to run a sustained reaction at a given scale.

The numbers don’t seem out of this world to me, and it’s probably smarter money than what we are throwing at ITER given time to market.

I mean I won’t put MY money in to Helion. From whatever I’ve read it’s not that simple for Helion to get their reactor to work and even if they did it likely won’t produce meaningful net power. But let’s see.

Of course you shouldn't unless you have billions lying dedicated for leaving your legacy. It is a semi moonshot semi charity project, I don't think even investors would disagree with this. Similar to what OpenAI was like 4 years ago when it raised $1B as a non profit.

Well as a small investor there's no way to get in really. But if they sold shares at a modest valuation I'd give it a punt.

I mean I kind of agree that the microsoft thing is probably a bit of a stunt give that I think they haven't generated any net electrical output at all yet. But I think they have a reasonable chance of getting it working at some point.

Wasn't the bottleneck that it was difficult to get H3?

It’s not that difficult. You can mine it from the surface of the moon, or produce it via Tritium decay.

Or do D-D fusion, which produces half tritium and half He3 directly. That's what Helion plans to do.

> It’s not that difficult. You can mine it from the surface of the moon...

Ha! One of those "only on HN" comments. What would qualify as "difficult"? Mining it on Pluto?

Not criticizing though. I'm glad there are people out there who aren't deterred by these sorts of challenges.

Watching MOON like it's a documentary.

Having watched a short documentary on ITER it seems like an incredible waste. A bunch of mismanagement and bureaucratic nonsense. As an American, it seemed like exactly what we would expect from a Euro-based project.

By the time any actual work can be done at ITER, won't the technology have progressed beyond they design they are trying to test?

Even if ITER succeeded tomorrow on every one of their goals, it would be worthless.

Why the anti-European sentiment in your comment? Let's not talk about the Space Shuttle or the SLS, should we?

Why? How does it compare to Europe’s Space Shuttle?

This is one of those all too common misunderstandings of how engineering works. There's some idea that once designs and theory are done, that engineering is some kind of straight forward act of stamp collecting and that the best thing is always to wait until the problems are worked out on paper before we start to build.

But in fact the engineering itself is exploratory. And often times, to understand something, you just have to start building.

That's what ITER is about. When the project started, we had gone about as far as theory and design could take us. You can see the same thing with other unproven fusion designs getting underway as well including the one at Lawrence Livermore.

Right... But given how quickly our understanding is evolving on how we can create fusion, did it make sense to take on a project this big and settle on a specific design type?

I don't think that was the case when ITER was conceived or started. The flood of fusion news we see is relatively recent.

And to be perfectly frank, a lot of it bursts onto the scene with sensational claims, never to be heard from again. At the end of ITER, there will be a thing. And probably, it will do most of what it was projected to do. We can't say the same for almost any of these other advances, compelling as they may sound.

Lastly, I'll point out this. "Breakthroughs" are rarely made in isolation. Are you so sure that without the billions that have gone into Lawrence Livermore, ITER and such that these other "breakthroughs" would even be happening? If there is no market for nuclear engineers, there will be fewer nuclear engineers. There's fewer people to bounce ideas off of and peer review your work. There's fewer people to come up with the small innovations that add up to a big result. There's fewer colleagues to get you that next gig where your team might beat a hard problem.

what you are saying is, he found money for a startup he invested in, and is good at his job.

What the hell is this cynicism? Seems completely inappropriate.

Helion isn’t vaporware.

While you’re probably right about GP’s cynical tone, this announcement does seem fairly meaningless. Does Helion have a working prototype that can be reasonably moved into production? Or is that still years away?

Their sixth reactor achieved 100M degree temps, ran for 16 months under vacuum, did thousands of fusion shots, and demonstrated D-He3 fusion.

Their seventh will start up in 2024, and is supposed to demonstrate net electricity from D-He3.

Their eighth is supposed to be the commercial reactor. If they don't achieve that, they will have to pay penalties to Microsoft.

Divorced from both cynicism and hype, how does this compare to the recent advance in hohlraum laser fusion?

https://www.llnl.gov/news/lawrence-livermore-national-labora...

It's a completely different approach to fusion.

Lasers are really inefficient (poor at transforming electrical energy into light energy). They got more energy out than they put into the pellet, but nowhere near as much energy as they put into the lasers. Which means that turning that experiment into commercial fusion is... "not straightforward".

NIF's lasers are only 1% efficient but they date back to the 1990s. Equivalent modern lasers are over 20% efficient. If they had modern lasers they'd have produced fusion power of about 20% of the input power.

They seem to scale well, too. In their big shot they increased the laser power by 8% and output went up 230%.

That said, compared to Helion it'd still be a lot harder to make a practical reactor with NIF's approach.

It's much more promising than the laser approach, IMO.

> Their sixth reactor achieved 100M degree temps, ran for 16 months under vacuum, did thousands of fusion shots, and demonstrated D-He3 fusion.

I don't have anything near the expertise to evaluate Helions approach, but I know enough about fusion to say that just because you have a design that can achieve fusion conditions does not mean the approach could even theoretically lead to a power plant. e.g. electrostatic fusors

True, but FRCs like Helion uses are thought to be workable.

Also from the WSJ this AM: https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-bets-that-fusion-powe...

Helion in 2014: We're about 3 years away from break-even energy.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-VCDB-15246

They didn't get the funding they needed until 2021.

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

Even if it doesn't work, it's more noble to work on this than say, Juicero.

A century from now, Juicero will be honored for the wonderful stupidity that it was. That's an achievement in itself.

What about this detailed criticism of Helion's entire reactor and long term plans:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vUPhsFoniw

In a world drowning in self-interested promotional 'puffing," calling this cynicism is in itself cynical. I prefer to see what your referring to as HN's community hype-filter.

Welcome to venture capitalism.

Maybe people are getting desperate enough for meaningful progress on environmental stuff they've decided to throw money at the problem on the theory that if we don't find real solutions soon, we're all dead anyway.

(A la the scene in The Titanic: "You're money won't do me any good at the bottom of the ocean.")

Sounds like you've no clue what you're talking about.