Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cynicism has nothing to do with nuance.
Nor does unbounded positivity and optimism.
I agree. I have nothing against the people sharing actual technical critisisms of the approach.
Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft
221–230 of 258 posts
Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The guy did a much longer Q&A livestream afterwards and he did slightly roll back his critique. He admitted there were some advantages of Helion's approach even if he still doesn't think it is overrall the best way forwards.
Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
>then that has a downstream effect of more roads being built and maintained, which is far more polluting than the cars themselves. Surely this is negligable compared to the carbon currently being emitted by ICE cars? The first source I can find says that building and maintaining one lane mile of highway emits 3,500 tons of CO2, whereas the vehicles driving on it will emit 90,000 tons of CO2.
I shouldn't have included maintained in there because I just meant the emissions for manufacture. The emissions for building an electric car is more than that of a combustion engine car, and building a mile of single lane road dwarfs both of those. So switching to electric cars keeps us building roads and increases emissions at the time manufacture. To get the real story, one needs to consider the use of and maintena…
Why do you keep talking about building a mile of road? There are many more cars in the US than there are miles of road, and the replacement time of roads is at least decades.
Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's almost exactly what they said to Elon Musk when he started SpaceX, and now they are on a streak of >100 successful missions in a row.
Yes but spacex didn’t promise anything physicists said is impossible. Engineers saying impossible is different from physicists saying it. The equivalent would be if spacex said something that violated the rocket equation. They didn’t. And also while they promise the Mars, they can settle for the largest reusable rocket as a consolation prize. In fields like biotech and fusion there’s often no consolation prize. So sp…
What has Helion promised that physicists say is impoossible?
Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's almost exactly what they said to Elon Musk when he started SpaceX, and now they are on a streak of >100 successful missions in a row.
SpaceX uses technology that started to work in 1961.
And if you squint a lot then Helion is continuing a development process that started in the 1950s.
Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft
#226HN, 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?
It's 2023. Even if they had a reactor ready and functional today, the NRC would not give them the approval by 2028, and once they gave them the approval, it would take them a decade to build a reactor.
In a world where the NRC does not exists maybe this makes sense, but that's (thankfully) not the world we have.
Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft
#227HN, 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?
Cynism is not disencouraged in the HN guidelines, but the sneering at the community and meta complaint in your comment is. I don’t care for the tone in those comments buy they are expressing something real. Helion can be a cool company with real tech, and this deal a marketing play, both possibly true.
> Cynism is not disencouraged in the HN guidelines, but the sneering at the community and meta complaint in your comment is. I don’t care for the tone in those comments buy they are expressing something real.
This guideline needs to be revised: It is extremely easy to be a cynic compared to being an optimist, and the rewards for being such a cynic are mismatched, as per piloto_ciego's outline on the advantages that being a pessimist/cynic has over being an optimist.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35892166
The ever-increasing levels of dread coming from HN is a deadly combination of Neo-Luddism & doomerism that I'm an avid crucifier of.
Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft
#228HN, 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
Look for the article "Geeks, mops, and sociopaths" which has been posted here a few times. We are currently in the sociopath part of the cycle, and people recognize that.
Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not that difficult. You can mine it from the surface of the moon, or produce it via Tritium decay.
> 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.
Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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?
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.