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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

#151

Post by DennisP »

nforgerit wrote: post #124
nindalf wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too often I've seen people inventing things in a lab being denigrated for not commercialising and scaling their invention. That's the top comment on any battery announcement by a research group. > Tesla did not invent the e-car nor did SpaceX have the idea to go to space. You're doing the opposite, taking credit away from people who've actually succeeded at scale. I don't like Twitter guy at all, but even I can give…

Credit given! This is not, what I was up to. I was more referring to the marketing stunts behind those startups. In case of Helion this looks definitely like a marketing gig because they don't nearly seem to be there in any way. That together with things like this weird "fusion success story" at NIF (not nearly there, even further away than pretty much all fusion research before it but a proof of concept for alternat…

Helion has built six reactors. Their sixth maintained a vacuum for 16 months while doing thousands of fusion shots, exceeding 100 million degrees. Now they're building their seventh reactor, which will attempt net electricity in 2024.

NIF's results were a scientific milestone that people have been working towards for half a century. Regarding overall energy balance, NIF uses lasers from the 1990s that are less than 1% efficient. Equivalent lasers today are over 20% efficient, so their results were not as bad as many articles made out. They're still off by a factor of five, but also they got a 230% jump in output by increasing the laser power only 8%.

Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft

#152

Post by foobarian »

jnsaff2 wrote: post #50
Tenemo wrote: post #41

Real Engineering did a great video on this company and their approach, specifically: https://youtu.be/_bDXXWQxK38

Also a rebuttal to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vUPhsFoniw

This critique seems very reasonable and accessible. So I'm puzzled how the caliber of people like mentioned in the article, who are technologists and familiar with physics, can get on board with the kind of investments they are getting. What do they know that we don't? At least in the case of Theranos the investors were not technical.

Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft

#153

Post by DennisP »

anonuser123456 wrote: post #133
sourcecodeplz wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft

#154

Post by Rnonymous »

moh_maya wrote: post #8

From [0] ‘ This is a binding agreement that has financial penalties if we can’t build a fusion system,” Helion founder and CEO David Kirtley tells The Verge. “We’ve committed to be able to build a system and sell it commercially to [Microsoft].” Assuming the financial penalties are a significant fraction (i.e they are, say, greater than 5%) of the agreement value, I would interpret it as a more serious / confident co…

So it sounds like Microsoft have committed to buy the first system when it's ready. Without investing anything now? So i guess they get a good discount on that.

Elsewhere, i saw that Helion already raised billions.

So what's in it for Helion? If they can make it happen, and build a sustained fusion system, they will surely be able to sell the energy/systems once ready, and don't really need to sell it at discounted rates now. I could imagine a deal with Microsoft is good for marketing, but seems way too soon for that isn't it?

Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft

#156

Post by haarts »

deweller wrote: post #67
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?

8 years ago, HN was a place full of optimism and excitement. I've noticed a marked increase in cynicism in this place. Like most of the world, it suffers from extreme tribalism and group think. I miss the former positive HN. And the positive world. sigh

Is that feeling of yours actually founded in reality?

You can have a look! https://hackermoods.com/

(I only did a quick search)

Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft

#157

Post by Rnonymous »

sfpotter wrote: post #150
stevenhuang wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

A better way to destroy that capital: have it appropriated by the government and used to fund actual science.

But (academic) science doesn't usually develop commercial products.

Science would develop the concept underlying helion, for instance, but then a startup should bring it to market.

Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft

#158

Post by gcheong »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #125
bmitc wrote: post #117

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 do…

I don't understand your argument at all. In a world where people can produce power through fusion cheaper than they can through coal or oil, why would use of non-clean materials increase?

There's more to environmental destruction than just emissions. If we're net zero emissions with something like nuclear energy, and clean energy is ubiquitous and cheap, people are still going to want to do things with the energy and that will potentially dramatically increase consumption of finite resources in general. For example, clean-fueled fishing boats don't matter much if we still fish the oceans to extinction.

Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft

#159

Post by matrix_overload »

deweller wrote: post #67
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?

8 years ago, HN was a place full of optimism and excitement. I've noticed a marked increase in cynicism in this place. Like most of the world, it suffers from extreme tribalism and group think. I miss the former positive HN. And the positive world. sigh

Startups used to be a way to create your own solution to a non-trivial problem, and make money off selling it to people that will benefit from it and enjoy it. It was a highly rewarding experience for those who didn't want to play corporate politics (or at least, play it to a lesser extent).

But then it attracted too many people that would just emulate the KPI in order to get funded, and instead of letting it crash and rise from the ashes, we lowered the interest rates and bailed out a bunch of "too big to fail" banks in 2008, pretty much guaranteeing viability of shitty investments. Oh, and when people started calling it out in 2012 with Occupy Wall Street, they were redirected using the centuries-old divide-and-conquer techniques.

So now it's a shell of former self. Founders try to create something that looks like a great company. VCs pour money in, hoping to resell to the next fool. Founders are now more like figureheads than idea-driven people. Most big successes (Uber, AirBnb) could be attributed more to regulatory capture than a revolutional way of doing something.

Smart people understand it very well and it doesn't make you very optimistic. You can pretend well enough to convince an average layperson, but deep inside you know the game is fake, and it kinda builds up. Notably, game-changers that are appreciated by users (rather than speculative investors) now mostly come from China (e.g. TikTok), because the vibe there (with all the downsides) is now closer to the "good old SV" than the current SV.

Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft

#160

Post by nescioquid »

piloto_ciego wrote: post #101
deweller wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8 years ago, HN was a place full of optimism and excitement. I've noticed a marked increase in cynicism in this place. Like most of the world, it suffers from extreme tribalism and group think. I miss the former positive HN. And the positive world. sigh

The cynicism is an op, or something - because I don’t have the evidence to say it’s definitively an “op” - as the kids say. But legitimately, there is a strong cynical bubble in the zeitgeist now, and it’s dangerous. There are a few things this cynicism says. 1. “People suck and are terrible.” 2. “People are stupid.” 3. “We can’t change anything.” 4. “Great calamity is going to happen and we are powerless to stop it.…

In reading about the Weimar Republic, I encountered an observation (I think it was by Hannah Arendt) that cynicism emerges from a society that no longer believes in itself. In trying to confirm the quote, I found perhaps a better quote to explain (found on Arend't wiki article):

>> ...leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness

This all sounds rather familiar and feels like more a cultural question than one of personal virtue.

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