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Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft

helionenergy.com

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Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft

#111

Post by DennisP »

gpm wrote: post #109
chasil wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft

#112

Post by jackmott42 »

nindalf wrote: post #96
SeanAnderson wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's admittedly a 12 year old YouTube, but I always liked watching this when I was feeling especially cynical about the overall trajectory of the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo

Before clicking that link I wondered what I would recommend to people who were feeling cynical about the world. It's a book by Hans Rosling - Factfulness, and it turns out that's the guy in your video.

Sadly he is no longer with us to let us know how things have gone the last 10 years :(

Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft

#113

Post by jbverschoor »

thepasswordis wrote: post #58

HN, what the heck has happened to you? What is with all of these cynical comments? Helion is an awesome company, their technology is real, and this is cool. >oh no this might not work! Do you guys not understand that you’re posting on the forum of a venture capital firm/startup accelerator?

See Dropbox’ first post on HN. Nothing new

Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft

#114

Post by sourcecodeplz »

schainks wrote: post #61
mola wrote: post #40

Sounds like Altman used his personal relationship with Microsoft CEO to do this meaningless PR stunt, so he can more easily pursaude stupid money to actually invest in this.

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.

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

Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft

#115

Post by pfdietz »

DennisP wrote: post #107
pfdietz wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And realize this also depends on how much the competition costs. If renewables and storage continue to get cheaper, fusion that "works" in an economic sense could transition back to "doesn't work". It's the fate of most technologies to fail this way, so it shouldn't be surprising (or a source of dishonor) if the same thing happens to fusion. That doesn't mean money spent developing fusion is necessarily wasted; the s…

Bear in mind that Helion's reactor is 50MW, about the size of three large wind turbines. If it works they'll be mass-producing them in factories and shipping them by rail, and they'll have a declining cost curve just like anything else.

I am cautiously optimistic about Helion. IMO, they're the fusion team that has the best chance of reaching the economic finish line.

Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft

#117

Post by bmitc »

Does anyone have some thoughts on whether fusion will actually help fight climate change?

Of course, fusion is far more clean than coal or gas and less environmentally destructive, aside from the mining of materials required, than say hydro power plants. But from what I can tell, the primary contributor to damaging the climate and environment is consumption, as a process. I currently see no end result where fusion does not drastically increase consumption, which means more use of non-clean materials and processes.

So I guess the question is: will the benefits of fusion offset the increase in consumption?

Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft

#118

Post by pfdietz »

femto113 wrote: post #108
pfdietz wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is very needlessly cynical. Helion has a number of very clever ideas, integrated in a way that has impressed me over the years. I would not dismiss them out of hand.

If they are really only 5 years from producing sellable power they are already capable of a science demo that would render this sort of vapid publicity stunt pointless. I’ve set a reminder to check back in 5 years, if the cynicism was genuinely needless I’ll apologize.

I suggest you do a deep dive into the physics behind their design. It's quite clever. They are able to evade some of the practical showstopping issues that face most other fusion approaches.

Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft

#119

Post by anonuser123456 »

thepasswordis wrote: post #58

HN, what the heck has happened to you? What is with all of these cynical comments? Helion is an awesome company, their technology is real, and this is cool. >oh no this might not work! Do you guys not understand that you’re posting on the forum of a venture capital firm/startup accelerator?

>Do you guys not understand that you’re posting on the forum of a venture capital firm/startup accelerator?

Sure, but people here realize there is a difference between hand waving away the complexity of a potential software implementation and hand waving away how you are going to overcome the strong nuclear force.

Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft

#120

Post by stevenhuang »

ramraj07 wrote: post #92
thepasswordis wrote: post #58

HN, what the heck has happened to you? What is with all of these cynical comments? Helion is an awesome company, their technology is real, and this is cool. >oh no this might not work! Do you guys not understand that you’re posting on the forum of a venture capital firm/startup accelerator?

You can be optimistic when you’re just making an app to rent your room out or to find a dog walker. You can hustle and sell useless SaaS services long enough to get acquired for no real reason except managerial power plays in large companies. In the world of software you can kinda make almost any idea work with sweat and political maneuvering. You can literally see that they’re trying to play the same games here. How…

There are worse ways to destroy capital, and the VC capital destruction is going to happen anyways. Might as well put it towards fusion.

The criticisms raised in the video are fair, and also the first youtube comment has an interesting point:

> Why would he allow this reckless behavior? Why would he himself be standing right there with them next to the device while it was in operation? Then I watched the video more closely again - he never takes the grid potential higher than 6kV. There was no fusion and no x-rays that could penetrate the wall of the vessel or the glass window. It was a ruse. You need to have a potential difference on the grids of AT LEAST 30kV to even begin seeing any fusion reactions at all. He knows enough physics to be aware of all of this. He was therefore deliberately allowing them, and the credulous audience, to believe they were actually doing fusion reactions when nothing of the sort was happening at all - they were merely staring at a pretty glowing pink cool deuterium plasma in a bottle. I believe this to be very suspicious behavior from a CEO of a commercial nuclear fusion company.

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