They'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?
Y Combinator And Mithril Invest In Helion, A Nuclear Fusion Startup
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Re: Y Combinator And Mithril Invest In Helion, A Nuclear Fusion Startup
#22Re: Y Combinator And Mithril Invest In Helion, A Nuclear Fusion Startup
#23It'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.
Re: Y Combinator And Mithril Invest In Helion, A Nuclear Fusion Startup
#24> Helion CEO David Kirtley says that his company can do it in three. Three... years? Decades? Days? Millennia?
We 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.
Re: Y Combinator And Mithril Invest In Helion, A Nuclear Fusion Startup
#25Can someone with some knowledge on nuclear energy explain to me how this solution varies from say, General Fusion ( 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.
they 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.
Re: Y Combinator And Mithril Invest In Helion, A Nuclear Fusion Startup
#26Anyone 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?).
Heavy 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.
Re: Y Combinator And Mithril Invest In Helion, A Nuclear Fusion Startup
#27The 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-bot....
Re: Y Combinator And Mithril Invest In Helion, A Nuclear Fusion Startup
#28Anyone 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?).
Right 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
Perhaps low cost (25L, ~$600) is relative, depending on the purity, but am unsure how much scale a project like this would use.
Re: Y Combinator And Mithril Invest In Helion, A Nuclear Fusion Startup
#29Excellent news, I can't wait to drive a Tesla powered by fusion power.
Re: Y Combinator And Mithril Invest In Helion, A Nuclear Fusion Startup
#30> Helion CEO David Kirtley says that his company can do it in three. Three... years? Decades? Days? Millennia?
Later in the article it mentions three years. So I assume that first mention was a case of forgetting to type a word.