[HN Gopher] Helion
___________________________________________________________________
Helion
Author : sixhobbits
Score : 369 points
Date : 2021-11-05 13:49 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.samaltman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.samaltman.com)
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I have no idea whether this would work. I read the really great
| debate linked by another commenter,
| https://old.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/qkvzjs/fusion_energ...,
| and while it was 98% Greek to me, was good to see some of the
| ideas and challenges.
|
| Main thing I wanted to say is that we all _love_ to shit on how
| Silicon Valley has basically gotten rich off investing in
| websites and SaaS products over the past ~15 years, areas which
| the Internet has provided a natural monopoly to the winner but
| haven 't really been the type of "societal innovation" we've been
| craving. This, however, is obviously different, and if it works
| (a huge if), would be on par with the transistor in terms of
| societal effects. Kudos to Sam for swinging big.
| deltree7 wrote:
| If they hadn't invested in SaaS, they wouldn't have had the
| money to invest in this.
| eldavido wrote:
| > Main thing I wanted to say is that we all love to shit on how
| Silicon Valley has basically gotten rich off investing in
| websites and SaaS products over the past ~15 years
|
| 500 years ago, these people would've chased Jewish financiers
| out of strongly catholic areas, or shit on Dutch merchants
| getting rich in the spice trade.
|
| When it comes to human nature, things don't really change.
| finnh wrote:
| The Dutch East India Company deserves to be shat on, for
| eternity.
|
| Also I think you mean "Catholic", not "catholic".
| sbierwagen wrote:
| I mostly didn't follow the talk about confinement, but I am
| slightly concerned about neutron activation. He3 fusion is more
| "neutron-light" than it is completely aneutronic. Operating at
| reasonable power levels, the reactor is going to be fairly
| radioactive after a few years. Widespread adoption of fusion is
| going to require the general public to be more relaxed about
| low level radioactive waste than they historically have been.
|
| The quotes about total system efficiency is also odd. "95%
| efficient"? They're not planning on capturing heat energy, so
| neutron heating is totally wasted, and they're talking about
| using entirely resistive 12 tesla magnets, which will also
| throw off a lot of heat.
| twarge wrote:
| It's not just a slight concern.
|
| - Fusion reactors are an order of magnitude physically larger
| than fission reactors,
|
| - The particle energies are an order of magnitude higher than
| fission, resulting in much nastier activation
|
| and that results in orders of magnitude more highly
| radioactive waste.
| nharada wrote:
| Didn't this same company make the same "three years" claim in
| 2014? "Helion CEO David Kirtley says that his company can do it
| in three years."[1]
|
| Happy to see investment in this space, but also tempering my
| expectations that having a _commercial fusion reactor_ in three
| years is anything approaching realistic.
|
| [1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/14/y-combinator-and-
| mithril-i...
| trhway wrote:
| still looks like a speedup of 10x - the 30 years into 3 years.
| chirau wrote:
| I didn't know Sam was that loaded. Where did he get all that
| money from? I know he made some money back in the day, but I
| didn't think it was that high. Or he raised a fund or something?
| guynamedloren wrote:
| He did announce "Apollo, funding for moonshots" last year. I
| want to say it's a self-funded fund, but I may be
| misremembering.
|
| https://twitter.com/sama/status/1273315232367042560?lang=en
| tofuahdude wrote:
| President of Y Combinator goes a long way.
| robbedpeter wrote:
| Might be his altcoin paid off in a ridiculous way?
| uranium wrote:
| I don't see a quote as to how much he personally put in. $500M
| went in so far in total; the rest is milestone-based.
|
| I recently saw an 8-figure round in which the lead put in $25K.
| But they did the legwork to arrange the round and get everyone
| else in, so they were the lead. Sam's the board chair, an early
| investor, and super connected, so he's certainly able to lead a
| round whether or not he puts in the majority of the cash.
| [deleted]
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Sam, through YC, is an investor in basically some of the
| biggest unicorns in history.
|
| IIRC YC's investment is 7%, correct? I'm not sure how much they
| participate in subsequent rounds, but Stripe _alone_ is now
| valued at about $95 billion.
|
| I'd be shocked if Sam _weren 't_ that loaded.
| lifekaizen wrote:
| He's a shrewd 'stock picker' and ran a fund with $21 M from
| Peter Thiel, among other things:
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...
| mjfl wrote:
| does anyone in fusion field know what type of reactor Helion is
| trying to make? I did a brief stint in fusion research but the
| architecture they are trying to make work is unfamiliar to me.
| apendleton wrote:
| It's a field-reversed configuration design:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-reversed_configuration
| creeble wrote:
| Okay, a little further digging into their claims and successes
| reveals what I think Sam's point of "they built a generator that
| produces electricity" means.
|
| As some one else mentions, part of Helion's novelty is that they
| don't use heat to produce the electricity (through steam and
| traditional generators). They use the Faraday effect on the
| (pulsed) magnets.
|
| This is (I think) unique to their approach. Therefore, if they
| actually have "built a generator that produces electricity", it
| may prove that part of their concept.
|
| Then all they need to do is get the fusion part working for
| longer than 1ms.
| chillacy wrote:
| Their current prototype fuses 1ms every 10m, their next is
| aiming for 1ms every 1s: https://www.helionenergy.com/faq/
| DennisP wrote:
| The reactor is supposed to be pulsed, so 1ms might be fine.
|
| Skipping the heat cycle is possible if they achieve their goal
| of using aneutronic fuel. With D-T fusion (the easiest) the
| output energy is 80% neutrons, so you're stuck with heat. With
| aneutronic, you mostly get fast-moving charged particles.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| Given that nuclear fusion is 30 years away in perpetuity, after
| their Z-Round of funding in 2047, what comes next? AA-round?
| StreamBright wrote:
| And we have a lot of fission based technologies to investigate,
| develop and improve to have sort of similar outcome.
| boringg wrote:
| Very different process though.
| gfodor wrote:
| What comes next is they crack it in the next 24-36 months and
| people like you finally are forced to eat some crow.
| glofish wrote:
| is it fair to say "finally are forced to eat crow"?
|
| weren't the doubters right all along?
|
| And yes I understand that it is more exciting to support the
| new technology, but it would be foolish to dress that up as a
| proof that the other people were wrong - if it indeed in the
| past 30 years the clean fusion was right around the corner.
| gfodor wrote:
| people who say the 30 years thing say it generally implying
| that the failure has been due to humans underestimating the
| difficulty. when in reality, this is not a justified
| position, given the lack of funding for fusion. now that we
| have the tailwinds of improved tech and more investment and
| unified desire to address climate change, the "30 years
| away" assumption seems likely to capitulate if anyone is
| continuing to make it today, as the OP did.
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/U.S._hi
| s...
| [deleted]
| jahnu wrote:
| Can anyone tell me if this is a net + like the lay person would
| understand it or something like the net + qplasma thing often
| misleadingly used when talking about tokamaks?
|
| Sabine Hossenfelders explains here:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY
| jjk166 wrote:
| Helion hasn't published the triple product results for their
| latest Trenta reactor, but for the previous Venti they achieved a
| triple product of ~10^19 keV.s/m^3 at an ion temperature of 2
| keV. The Trenta reactor has achieved an ion temperature of 9 keV.
| For D-T fusion, you need a triple product of about 3x10^21
| kev.s/m^3 at 10 keV. For the D-He reaction that helion intends to
| use, they need to achieve a similar triple product at 50 keV. So
| it looks like they're still 2-3 orders of magnitude off from
| where they need to be to achieve ignition. Their neutron
| production rate is comparable to industrial fusors at ~10^11 n/s,
| which while useful as neutron sources are nowhere near producing
| net power. Compare this with tokamaks that have achieved a triple
| product around 1.5x10^21 keV.s/m^3, or about half of what they
| need to achieve ignition.
|
| While it's possible that helion has made improvements to ion
| density and confinement allowing them to achieve a significantly
| higher triple product and close the gap to power production, I
| see no reason why a company looking for investment would hide
| such a result, especially while putting out press releases
| celebrating other milestones. I doubt they're anywhere near the
| point where an economical plant could even be considered, though
| I'd love to be proven wrong.
| levi_n wrote:
| IIRC, ITER wont be fully operational until 2035, and will only
| ever be a research reactor. Even if it can produce net energy
| (I'm skeptical), it's cost and size are way up there.
|
| Even if Helion is behind the tokamaks, perhaps this play is
| more about reaching an economically viable reactor design? Not
| first to fusion, but first to scalable fusion?
| bloudermilk wrote:
| They're not exactly looking for investment, are they? With
| close connections to investors with deep pockets, in a race to
| commercialize fusion, it's not exactly surprising that they
| would keep their cards close to their chest.
| pmarreck wrote:
| So basically it's a low probability win with an extremely big
| payoff and the added difficulty of a general lack of
| transparency to the public (but perhaps not to angel or series
| A/B/C investors), same as any startup investment.
| [deleted]
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| Reading their websites it seems they have magically solved every
| single major problem that the worldwide fusion research community
| (which probably received hundreds of billions of dollars in
| funding over the years) has struggled with for decades. Sounds
| really good but also quite hard to believe, to be honest. But hey
| I don't always want to be the pessimist, so I'm hoping it's
| actually true what they claim.
| jkelleyrtp wrote:
| There's dozens (hundreds?) of different types of conceptual
| fusion designs. Are you talking about fusion in general or just
| with FRCs?
|
| In general, there's so many ideas that "don't seem like they
| wouldn't work" without evidence one way or the other. It
| wouldn't surprise me that the path with FRCs is more fruitful
| than tokamaks/stellarators/lasers. FRCs are rooted in the
| inertial-electrostatic-confinement realm of fusion research
| which actually does produce neutrons even on the smallest of
| scales.
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| The idea seems very nice of course, but most fusion ideas
| seem nice on paper. The problem is just dealing with the
| imperfections of a real-world setup. I'm not an expert in
| fusion and just briefly worked in the field as a physics
| student, but from what I've learned people still struggle
| with even producing suitable materials that can withstand the
| occasional plasma plume (which I think is probably inevitable
| to happen in Helion's design too) that can deposit 200 MW/m2
| of energy into the walls of the fusion vessel.
|
| So as I said I really hope this works and makes the founders
| rich while also producing cheap & clean energy, but I remain
| at least a bit skeptical.
| cmollis wrote:
| exactly. sounds really good.. but two guys in Seattle vs like
| the rest of the world's particle physicists? hmm..
| seph-reed wrote:
| Large groups of people are really only useful when a problem
| can easily be broken into smaller, self-contained parts. Or
| when the work requires little "moving in lock-step." This may
| be one of those fields where "more people" just means "more
| politics."
| stevespang wrote:
| :) Another one get's taken for his money . . . .
| ConcernedCoder wrote:
| I would love to know how they deal with structural degradation
| via neutron bombardment.
| nynx wrote:
| They're using D-H3, which is aneutronic. There are also side-
| reactions which do produce neutrons, but perhaps it's not
| enough to result in degradation.
| twic wrote:
| Atomic Rockets says 5% of the energy comes out as neutrons
| for D-3He fusion, as opposed to 79% for D-T fusion:
|
| http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/fusionfuel.php#.
| ..
|
| No source given, but this is usually well-researched.
| csense wrote:
| Extracting tritium between pulses seems to be the key
| approach to reducing degradation. One of the company's
| patents [1] explains:
|
| "The D-3He fusion reaction produces no neutrons as well
| (D+3He-4He (3.6 MeV)+H (14.7 MeV). However the D-D side
| reaction, while not as frequent, can generate 14.1 MeV
| neutrons through one of its fusion product reactions
| (D+T-4He+n+14.1 MeV). There is also the D-D reaction itself
| that produces a lower energy neutron (2.45 MeV) which is
| below the threshold for activation of most nuclear materials
| and is thus far less detrimental...Example systems and
| methods described herein may employ a 3He fuel cycle which
| may reduce or suppress a dangerous D-T side reaction by
| extracting the tritium ions as they are created. The
| extracted tritium is unstable and may beta decay in a
| relatively short period of 11 years to 3He, a primary fuel
| for the D-3He reaction. Accordingly, example systems,
| reactors and methods described herein may enjoy a self-
| sustaining fuel cycle where the required 3He to operate the
| reactor may be generated by the decay of tritium ions
| extracted from the reactor itself..."
|
| The FAQ on the website [2] acknowledges their process "does
| create some 'activated materials' over the operating life of
| a power plant. Helion's plants have been specifically
| designed to only use materials that would result in low
| activation, similar to what might be created by medical
| devices or other particle accelerators.
|
| Our expectation is that a Helion plant could be fully
| decommissioned within a week without any lasting
| environmental impact."
|
| [1] https://patents.justia.com/patent/20170011811
|
| [2] https://www.helionenergy.com/faq/
| varjag wrote:
| It's one of those posts where I feel unqualified to judge if am
| facing brilliance or a mount Everest sized pile of hubris.
| belval wrote:
| You and me both, fusion is this thing that I wish I could drop
| everything and work on, because it would be world-changing, but
| at this point we see a new fusion reactor design/startup every
| other month and nothing viable so far.
|
| In this environment it's hard not to see all of this as snake
| oil.
| hobscoop wrote:
| There are more plausible and less plausible
| concepts/companies out there.
|
| Helion in particular was founded by respectable scientists
| who have a background in plasma physics, and they've
| developed their idea pretty quietly for the last 10 years,
| only de-stealthing this summer (presumably after reaching a
| key milestone). What they're trying to do is difficult, but I
| wouldn't say it's snake oil.
| deft wrote:
| His other recent investment is the glowing orb worldcoin. I
| think its safe to say the second, and in the off chance it
| works, put it down as luck.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| So, what is the expected efficiency of this system?
|
| Like, are we actually getting net power output?
|
| edit : The idea to capture the EM energy directly, without using
| the heat from the system is ingenious. Gives me a huge boost of
| hope, however limited my exposure / knowledge about fusion
| reactor design is.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| >Like, are we actually getting net power output?
|
| Yes, that's the idea.
|
| If you don't need power generation, several vendors offer
| commercial deuterium-tritium fusion reactors for sale today, as
| neutron sources. Here's one:
| https://www.thermofisher.com/order/catalog/product/151762A?S...
| chillacy wrote:
| The FAQ says they're net negative, recovering 95% of the input.
| They don't really define what that encompasses though.
|
| https://www.helionenergy.com/faq/
| dang wrote:
| Related: https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/05/helion-series-e/
| glofish wrote:
| > In Trenta, we ran fusion pulses once every ten minutes. Polaris
| will pulse once a second (1 Hz).
|
| It feels really far out from practicality. They have demoed a
| system that ran once every ten minutes, and they hope to build a
| system once per second.
|
| I frankly don't think it is possible to heat things up to 100
| million celsius and have that process work reliably. It is just
| too extreme.
| [deleted]
| iheartblocks wrote:
| Does anyone know what the efficiency is, and what the consumables
| are?
| mateo1 wrote:
| The only thing I have to say is that I'm glad my younger self was
| stopped by the accredited investor requirements some 10 years ago
| and didn't invest in a fusion startup that never worked out.
| Investing in these startups if you don't at a minimum have an
| undergrad degree in physics is high risk gamble.
| xhrpost wrote:
| Kind of felt like I would die before the Energy Age gets here.
| This gives me hope that it may come sooner than expected.
| gpm wrote:
| I went looking for more information about their technology, and
| found the top thread on this reddit post from a few days ago
| interesting. It's a debate between two people involved in the
| field about whether or not Helion's approach appears to be
| viable:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/qkvzjs/fusion_energ...
| aresant wrote:
| Positive View - "In 2021, the firm announced that its 7th
| prototype, Trenta had reached 100 million degrees C after a
| 16-month test cycle with more than 10,000 pulses. Magnetic
| compression fields exceeded 10 Tesla, ion temperatures surpassed
| 8 keV, and electron temperatures exceeded 1 keV.[16][17] Helion's
| seventh-generation prototype, "Polaris" is under development and
| is expected to be completed in 2023.[18] It will increase the
| pulse rate from one pulse every 10 minutes to one pulse per
| second for short periods.[19] The Polaris facility will
| economically produce helium-3 on a commercial scale."
|
| Criticism - "Retired Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
| researcher Dr. Daniel Jassby mentioned Helion Energy in a letter
| included in the American Physical Society newsletter Physics &
| Society (April, 2019) as being among fusion start-ups allegedly
| practicing "voodoo fusion" rather than legitimate science. He
| noted that the company is one of several that has continually
| claimed "power in 5 to 10 years, but almost all have apparently
| never produced a single D-D fusion reaction".[24] However, the
| Helion team published peer-reviewed research into its colliding
| FRC system demonstrating D-D neutron production as early as
| 2011,[11] and further detailed D-D fusion experiments producing
| neutrons in an October 2018 report at the United States
| Department of Energy's ARPA-E's annual ALPHA program meeting.[25]
| According to the independent JASON review team,[26] VENTI, a sub-
| scale prototype Helion had developed partially for the ALPHA
| program, achieved initial results of 8*1022 ions/m3, 4*10-5
| seconds confinement time and a temperature of 2 keV for a triple
| product of 6.4*1018keV*s/m3 in 2018."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion_Energy
| beervirus wrote:
| > Helion has a clear path to net electricity by 2024
|
| That seems impossibly ambitious.
| fmakunbound wrote:
| I've got maybe $4500 for investing. How do I get in on this?
| dharmaturtle wrote:
| You need to be an accredited investor, aka have a net worth of
| 1 million dollars or an annual income of 200k+
|
| https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/092815/how-b...
| boringg wrote:
| You don't get access to the deal though.
| m12k wrote:
| Using the plasma's pressure on the containing magnetic field to
| induce a current (rather than heating water in order to use steam
| to run a turbine, as is currently what we do with fission) is
| pretty damn clever, and might lead to smaller reactors and lower
| costs - I really hope this works out.
|
| I'm curious though, what happens to the plasma before the next
| pulse - in the animations it neatly dissipates, but I doubt it's
| that simple.
|
| The big issue with other fusion reactor designs is how to make
| sure this incredibly hot plasma doesn't touch and melt any part
| of the reactor. Current designs try to "levitate" and contain the
| plasma with a magnetic field, but it's really, really difficult
| to successfully contain something as energetic and chaotic as
| plasma. I'm guessing part of the point of the pulses here is to
| answer the problem of "we can't contain it for long" with "we
| don't have to".
| jkelleyrtp wrote:
| The field-reversed-configuration (FRC) creates a somewhat-
| stable moving donut of plasma that doesn't need to be
| "contained" per-se. The configuration of the plasma induces a
| magnetic field, tightening the donut as it moves.
|
| TAE is exploring static FRC which has instabilities over longer
| timescales. Helion uses a pulsed approach which means they
| don't need to worry about these long-term stabilities and can
| simply optimize for peak power in non-equilibrium systems.
|
| Over the years, many fusion designs have been shut down due to
| losses at equilibrium. It seems that Helion avoids these
| factors altogether by having a non-equilibrium system.
| creeble wrote:
| >they and their team have built a generator that produces
| electricity. Helion has a clear path to net electricity by 2024,
|
| Explanation required. Does the first sentence have any bearing on
| fusion, and how does it relate the the second?
|
| I mean, _I have_ a generator that produces electricity (it doesn
| 't use fusion). What is the point of having one that uses fusion,
| but doesn't have net output?
| qeternity wrote:
| > but doesn't have net output?
|
| Well, this is what the investment is for.
| creeble wrote:
| Then what is the meaning of "have built a generator that
| produces electricity" other than meaningless hype?
|
| Edit: fix quote
| qeternity wrote:
| Because building a reactor that actually works is part of
| the process. The next step is making it efficient.
|
| It's like any other business: you invest to establish it,
| and then you make it profitable.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| My understanding is that most of the fusion net balance
| problems are proportional to scale.
|
| Machinery to initiate fusion must be at least this big,
| consume at least this much power, and cannot be scaled
| down arbitrarily.
|
| However, if one were to scale it up in size, the same
| doesn't hold. Output power scales faster than increased
| input requirements.
|
| Consequently, most current fusion work is (a) find a
| design that _theoretically_ has those scaling
| characteristics, (b) build a prototype to investigate /
| prove any unknowns (net negative power, but not ITER/NIF
| expensive), & (c) if able to prove (b) then scale up into
| a net positive example.
| OnlineGladiator wrote:
| Investing in a prototype and believing it will turn into
| a successful product, when that prototype can't even
| demonstrate the fundamental technology itself, just seems
| like wishful thinking. And I see no evidence to suggest
| they have a path to viability other than "trust me bro."
|
| I see a bunch of patents and hand-waving that seems
| intentionally complicated. I spent much of my career
| helping companies raise money based on demos (I'm talking
| billions of dollars) and this just seems like more
| bullshit to me. And all of those demos I worked on were
| smoke and mirrors, despite building quasi-functional
| prototypes you could interact with.
|
| I'd love to be wrong but they aren't make an effort to
| convince me otherwise, they just want to raise a shitload
| of money.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| It's called Research. It's much riskier than traditional
| investments and you need to know the technology deeply
| and have high trust in the team in order to effectively
| make such risky investments. But the payoffs of net-
| positive fusion energy are nearly incalculable. Step
| change in humanity type of thing.
|
| _> I spent much of my career helping companies raise
| money based on demos_
|
| And I've made a bunch of money sitting on my ass watching
| a few stocks go to the moon. Knowing how to invest in
| webshit or getting lucky picking stocks can make you rich
| much easier than R&D can make you rich. Sam isn't
| investing because this is the best risk-adjusted return
| for his portfolio. He's investing because, if it does pay
| out, it also very literally changes the course of
| humanity in the process.
|
| _> And all of those demos I worked on were smoke and
| mirrors, despite building quasi-functional prototypes you
| could interact with._
|
| The investment isn't being made on the basis of an
| existing reactor. There are _tons_ of existing fusion
| reactors. The investment is being made on the basis of
| the team 's plan to get to net positive energy.
|
| * I'd love to be wrong but they aren't make an effort to
| convince me otherwise*
|
| Luckily there are other folks in this world who are
| willing to make risky investments in important ideas.
|
| (BTW, no one's getting rich on fusion research until
| fusion works... every year the fusion community leaks a
| bunch of folks to finance and tech because even entry
| level positions pay 3x and offer more stability.)
| OnlineGladiator wrote:
| > Knowing how to invest in webshit or getting lucky
| picking stocks can make you rich much easier than R&D can
| make you rich.
|
| It seems like you missed my point, because I make all my
| money investing nowadays too after failing forever trying
| to turn R&D into viable products. It's easy to raise
| money on bullshit and almost impossible to actually make
| it work. In fact, it likely is actually impossible, we
| just don't know yet.
|
| > Sam isn't investing because this is the best risk-
| adjusted return for his portfolio. He's investing
| because, if it does pay out, it also very literally
| changes the course of humanity in the process.
|
| I've met Sam and I don't think he cares about making the
| world a better place. I think he just likes money and
| attention.
|
| You seem awfully idealistic. I'm terribly cynical. We're
| not going to agree and that's fine.
| DennisP wrote:
| Some day some billionaire is going to save the Earth from
| a giant asteroid impact and there will be a bunch of
| people saying "meh, he only did it as an ego trip."
| OnlineGladiator wrote:
| I'm happy to thank people when they give me a reason to
| thank them. Having personally met Sam I feel confident in
| my assessment he does not merit your gratitude. If the
| founders of Helion pull it off and actually usher in a
| new era of plentiful cheap energy I will be _ecstatic_ to
| congratulate them on their success.
| DennisP wrote:
| If someone does a good thing, I don't much care why they
| did it.
|
| And if this works out, between (a) Sam funded the project
| that cracked cheap fusion and saved the planet, and (b)
| HN's OnlineGladiator met him and disliked him, I think
| the balance will tilt toward feeling some gratitude
| towards Sam.
| OnlineGladiator wrote:
| I hardly think my opinion is going to sway the majority's
| view of a public figure. If the world wants to love him
| I'm not going to change that. But it still doesn't change
| my opinion about him since it's not based on what I read
| about him online but based on actually interacting with
| him in person. Also if Helion turns out to be successful
| I'll have no problem admitting I was wrong. I hope they
| succeed, or rather I hope someone succeeds in creating
| cheap and plentiful energy.
|
| What does it matter what I think, anyway? Think for
| yourself and come to your own conclusions. I don't care
| if you disagree.
| dntrkv wrote:
| What is the point of your comments here?
|
| First you point out that this seems like bullshit and a
| waste of money.
|
| Then you point out that Sam doesn't care about making the
| world a better place and just likes money.
|
| You're contradicting yourself, and on top of that,
| publicly insulting a core figure in this community. I've
| never met Sam, I don't care about him or if he wants to
| make the world a better place or not, but your comments
| are completely uncalled for.
|
| You're a cynic, cool, that's fine. Comment on why you
| think the technology is bogus and don't publicly insult
| others.
| OnlineGladiator wrote:
| My point is I think it's a shitty investment. You're
| welcome to celebrate it and I'm welcome to criticize it.
| I don't take back what I said about Sam and think he
| deserves more criticism, not less.
| dntrkv wrote:
| What you said is not criticism, it's just an insult. It
| adds nothing to the conversation and lowers the level of
| discourse.
|
| I'm not celebrating anything. I'm a skeptic at heart and
| don't believe in any hype until I see meaningful
| progress. I just don't see the need to shit all over
| something because my gut tells me it's hype.
| OnlineGladiator wrote:
| Well when the person I was responding to said:
|
| > Sam isn't investing because this is the best risk-
| adjusted return for his portfolio. He's investing
| because, if it does pay out, it also very literally
| changes the course of humanity in the process.
|
| I thought I'd reply with my personal experience why I
| disagree. And again, I stand by what I said about Sam. I
| really think he deserves much more criticism than he
| gets. If criticizing someone's character is an insult
| then I think we need more insults. I don't want a nicer
| world, I want a world with less bullshit.
| dntrkv wrote:
| The problem with your comment is that anyone could have
| made it. I could make the same comment about you because
| for whatever reason I don't like you. It may be true or
| not. Anonymous attacks on the internet do nothing but
| lower the level of discourse.
|
| Now if you posted about a specific negative experience
| you had with the individual and actually put something on
| the line, that would be different. But as it is, there is
| no reason to believe you. For all I know, you just
| dislike him because he didn't invest in your company.
| OnlineGladiator wrote:
| I don't care about your opinion the same way you don't
| care about mine. Making a vague comment about disliking
| someone is a lot less damning than being specific about
| why I don't like him, and unfortunately I can't really
| get into that without doxxing myself and frankly it isn't
| worth the hassle anyway. If you want to write me off as
| worthless then go for it. It seems you already have,
| that's fine.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| Maybe. I don't really care. My point wasn't about him per
| se.
|
| I'm willing to concede you're right about Sam. Sure.
| Investing in fusion is a terrible way to make money. If
| rich folks' egos get more money thrown at the right
| problems, so be it.
| kneel wrote:
| Sam is probably one of the most well connected VCs
| around. I'm willing to bet his due diligence is decent.
| moralestapia wrote:
| It produces less energy than what it spends producing it.
| creeble wrote:
| What is the point of that?
|
| Edit: I'm not trying to be (too) pedantic. But the brief
| investment announcement went to the trouble of saying
| "they built a generator that produces electricity" and
| (effectively) "but no net electricity".
|
| Isn't thathat generator a nothing-generator then? Why
| even mention it?
| qeternity wrote:
| Proof of concept.
| creeble wrote:
| What concept has been proven?
|
| Have they achieved fusion? Or the concept of generating
| electricity from heat, proven long ago?
| apendleton wrote:
| Neither: their proposed design doesn't generate
| electricity from heat, so what they're talking about here
| is proving out the alternative mechanism of electricity
| generation that they propose to use. That's a valuable to
| demonstrate because it's novel, and necessary to
| eventually being net-positive, so showing that's possible
| shows that their eventual plan could work.
| creeble wrote:
| Yes, I figured that out long after my original post.
|
| It's just that Sam's post didn't mention any (semi-)novel
| method for generating electricity from fusion, so the
| actual words - "they and their team have built a
| generator that produces electricity" - appear as either
| hype or non-information outside that context.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Could be many things,
|
| * Better techology (that still needs to be R&Ded) makes
| it more efficient and net positive in the future.
|
| * Prototype v1 is a required step towards v2(-v3...vn?)
| that actually accomplishes the goal. An example of this
| is SpaceX's Starhopper -> Starship.
|
| * Some economy of scale makes it work at some point.
| Example, put a single box in a big ship from Shanghai to
| LA, cost of shipping = millions of $; vs. put a million
| boxes in the same ship, cost of shipping = a few $.
| jccooper wrote:
| You don't think there's some benefit to working subscale
| hardware?
| JacobDotVI wrote:
| My understanding is that fusion power theoretically has net
| positive output, but practically no one has achieved this yet.
| If they are able to achieve such it would be a scientific and
| commercial breakthrough.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| Have you watched The Imitation Game? This is exactly the same
| question that the antagonist had about Turing's computer. "The
| human computers can do 10 things a day and your machine does 0
| things a day". Well, yeah, until you get it working it's
| useless. But once it works it does all the things.
|
| Getting a fusion reactor to work is trivial; at least one 12
| year old has done it [1]. Getting net energy out of the reactor
| is much more difficult. The point of the funding is to figure
| out how to increase the gain factor. Once that's figured out,
| the rest (manufacturing and deploying reactors) is
| comparatively trivial.
|
| [1]
| https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a34312754/12...
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| I have a clear path to the bathroom, doesn't mean I'm gonna
| make it there. Pure hype.
| gorkish wrote:
| Their "generator" in this case appears to be the reactor which
| generates helium-3 fuel by fusing deuterium fuel. Their
| eventual endgame is a first stage D->3He (dont know the exact
| process) fusion generator followed by the second stage
| D+3He->He+p (or 3He+3He->He+p+p) fusion reactor. They claim
| that even the precursor process of fusing Deuterium into He3 is
| net-electricity-positive overall, which is a claim that kind of
| works on a napkin as long as there is a physicist nearby
| engaging in some wild hand waving. It will be quite amazing if
| true.
| rkangel wrote:
| By analogy, imagine an aeroplane in a wind tunnel. It's not the
| real aeroplane - it's a scale model. It has no engine and it's
| not moving, the wind is moving over it. On one level the
| experiment hasn't achieved anything - that model can never do
| anything useful in the real world.
|
| But we are making measurements on aerodynamic performance - on
| another level we have learned that if you can make an aircraft
| that shape and give it an engine that moves it at the same
| speed as the airflow, then the aeroplane will generate enough
| lift to keep it in the air. That's a really important result
| that gets us significantly closer to a useful aeroplane. If
| separately someone has demonstrated an engine with suitable
| weight and power characteristics to match, then we can say "now
| we just need to build the aircraft and it should fly".
|
| Helion involves a unique method of extracting energy from the
| fusion process (direct extraction from the magnetic field).
| That's new and therefore uncertain. Producing a reactor that
| performs something fusion-like and generates electricity in
| that way is a great result even if the fusion process isn't
| generating as much power as it should and is fundamentally
| driven by electricity. Like the plane above, if they have
| separately demonstrated a fusion process that is powerful
| enough, "all" they need to do now is put the two things
| together.
| creeble wrote:
| I guess I'll forever be apologizing for that post, but (as I
| mentioned in another, after digging into their technology)
| there was no mention of the novelty of their approach to
| generation in Sam's announcement. So "they have built a
| generator that produces electricity" has little meaning
| outside of the context of most commonly-known methods of
| generating electricity from fusion, i.e., heat.
|
| I think if I were a billionaire investing in fusion
| technologies, I think I'd be sure to mention my investment's
| special sauce when I drop a few sticks on it.
| rkangel wrote:
| It was a reasonable question based on the linked article.
| Fusion announcements (like new battery chemistries) are
| almost worthless on their own - you have to read more about
| the company, what stage they're at, what the tech actually
| is etc.
| Shadonototra wrote:
| https://www.helionenergy.com/who-we-are/
|
| Where are your scientists? researchers? engineers?
|
| Oh i see ycombinator..
| gallerdude wrote:
| I'm curious what they've figured out that generations of
| scientists have missed. More power (ha) to them, but I'd be
| surprised if the solution to this infamously hard problem is just
| 3 years away. It's like civilization leaving a few trillion
| dollar bills on the ground.
| dqpb wrote:
| All solutions to all problems were at some point just 3 years
| away.
| [deleted]
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| > I'm curious what they've figured out that generations of
| scientists have missed.
|
| The scientists didn't miss this - on Helion's website they
| state that idea here was thought about in the 1950s, although
| they lacked the computational power to test their theories.
| tinco wrote:
| I don't think they haven't figured out anything super
| fundamental. There's a bunch of fusion companies all with
| aggressive time schedules that are aiming to generate
| electricity within the next 5 years or so.
|
| What you've missed is that most scientists have been expecting
| electricity will be generated from fusion soon for the past 10
| years or so, almost definitely before ITER comes online. The
| development of High-temperature superconducting tape basically
| guarantees it.
| DennisP wrote:
| So we've been working on fusion for a long time, now it looks
| like we're getting close, but if we were actually close then we
| would have gotten there already so we must not be close? Is
| this a new version of Zeno's paradox?
| gorgoiler wrote:
| A wonderfully understated announcement for how important this
| could be.
|
| One thing I didn't really think about with fusion, until reading
| the comments here: when the energy is basically free, you don't
| have to try too hard to capture the output to make something of
| it. Is that actually the case with harvesting fusion energy?
|
| Is the waste heat an issue? Where does the pink stuff go after
| it's been squished into the middle of the ribbed magnetic bonbon
| thing? Apologies if I'm blinding you with science technobabble.
| chriswarbo wrote:
| > when the energy is basically free, you don't have to try too
| hard to capture the output to make something of it. Is that
| actually the case with harvesting fusion energy?
|
| We still haven't got more usable energy (electricity and/or
| heat) out of a fusion reactor than it takes to run the thing,
| so capturing as much of the energy as possible is still
| absolutely important.
|
| However, in the long-term (e.g. 100 years from now) you're
| right that working fusion power plants would make energy
| "basically free". The main reasons would be (a) the abundance
| of fuel (assuming the source would be heavy water) and (b) the
| fact that nuclear reactions are so much more energetic than the
| chemical reactions we're used to (so even a few percent
| improvement may be a large amount of extra energy).
| hobscoop wrote:
| It's not plausible that even fusion power plants would make
| energy 'basically free'.
|
| 1) Fusion plants still require site infrastructure, power
| conversion technology, waste heat removal, and (though not
| for this particular concept) steam generators (or other fluid
| cycle generators). These have significant capital costs but
| finite lifetimes. You're right that the variable cost of
| energy is pretty low, probably comparable to current fission
| plants, but that's still more expensive than the variable
| cost of electricity from solar and wind.
|
| 2) The price of electrical transmission and distribution
| starts to become important (I forget what the typical cost of
| that today is, but it's a few cents/kWh.) This doesn't matter
| if you can put a small power plant at your local industrial
| park though.
|
| 3) There's a big difference between $0.05/kWh, $0.02/kWh,
| $0.01/kWh, and $0.005/kWh, and then a huge difference to
| 'true zero'. This is because there's probably lots of
| industrial processes that we might like to do if electricity
| and heat were cheaper than it is today, each becoming
| reasonable at a certain price. There could be a large market
| at each price floor 'step'.
|
| 4) Yeah, the fuel is abundant, which is good, but fuel costs
| are not significant drivers of the cost of fission.
|
| While not free, I'd like to think that fusion will help make
| a world with energy much cheaper than the world without
| fusion.
| lainga wrote:
| Am I correct in thinking that, from looking at Helion's website,
| their design resembles the Lockheed Martin "bottle" design that
| popped up a few years ago?
| endisneigh wrote:
| I liked the website's explanation but have a question.
|
| So with a regular gas generator you go to the gas station and buy
| some 93 unleaded gas, then pour it into your generator. You might
| then pull something or use an electric start to turn on the
| generator and then you have electricity.
|
| With this power plant the site says it requires helium. Where
| does this helium come from? Presumably energy is needed to get
| the helium just like energy is needed to pump natural gas and
| frack for oil.
|
| Will the total output in electricity be greater than the inputs
| for this?
|
| Extra: what happens if there's too much expansion or things are
| too hot? Could this explode or implode? If so would it be a huge
| deal?
|
| Cool tech!
| hobscoop wrote:
| Helion's scheme would require a specific isotope of helium, of
| which there's not much of in current stockpiles. Assuming that
| you had some He-3, remember that since this is a reaction
| between nucleons, the typical energy scales are a million times
| higher than typical chemical energy scales. Therefore the
| amount of fuel (in kg) is a million times smaller. And so,
| there's a significantly larger margin for extracting and
| purifying the helium fuel from whatever source.
|
| > Will the total output in electricity be greater than the
| inputs for this?
|
| Yup, that's the goal!
|
| > Extra: what happens if there's too much expansion or things
| are too hot?
|
| Fusion reactions are difficult enough that if it were
| physically possible to make them run 'hotter' or release energy
| faster, frankly we would already be doing so.
|
| > Could this explode or implode? If so would it be a huge deal?
|
| The radiation risks from fusion are orders of magnitude smaller
| than from nuclear fission power. We still need to think about
| them and make sure that plants are safe, but it should be
| significantly easier to manage.
| smaddox wrote:
| > The radiation risks from fusion are orders of magnitude
| smaller than from nuclear fission power. We still need to
| think about them and make sure that plants are safe, but it
| should be significantly easier to manage.
|
| Strictly speaking, it depends on the fuel cycle. They're
| targeting a fuel cycle (D+He3) with minimal neutron flux.
|
| A commercial D+T fusion reactor would generate much larger
| neutron flux than a fission reactor. But it still wouldn't
| generate all the long-lived fission byproducts that are so
| problematic with (non-breeder) fission reactors (assuming
| proper sheilding).
| sjg1729 wrote:
| The isotope of helium they want to use doesn't exist on earth
| in significant quantities. They want to make their own by
| running another fusion reaction between two deuterium nucleii.
| Deuterium is plentiful but this reaction will take energy and
| "activate" (make radioactive) some components of their feeder
| reactor.
| csense wrote:
| The website answers this question [1]. "Helion produces
| helium-3 by fusing deuterium in its plasma accelerator
| utilizing a patented high-efficiency closed-fuel cycle."
|
| Wikipedia provides a bit more detail [2]: "The helium-3 is
| produced by D-D side reactions and is captured and reused,
| eliminating supply concerns. Helion has a patent on this
| process."
|
| [1] https://www.helionenergy.com/faq/
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion_Energy
| andrewcamel wrote:
| This is the type of investing one (at least me) dreams of doing
| if you're fortunate enough to get to $B+ in net worth. Sam knows
| enough people who knows how this tech works to get a read on
| quality / achievability, and if he gets it right (however
| challenging/unlikely), it means incredible things. If it doesn't
| work, whatever -- at least he's shooting at something
| interesting. And talk about something intellectually interesting
| to be involved with -- it must be a collection of great minds at
| this company.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| No comment on this technology but only commenting on the
| thought process that Sam or any of these "intellectual
| billionaires" are right about complex scientific problems
| because they know enough people who know how this tech works is
| not valid. The people who circle billionaires have a huge
| conflict of interest to convince them to fork over billions,
| and they know people like Sam are smart enough that you can't
| lie to them. So they do (subconsciously often) what George
| Costanza said which is believe in the lie themselves. So yeah
| don't trust experts If they're looking at you for a cheque
| (even if they themselves won't directly get the check).
| frazbin wrote:
| at the end of the day it's all "money... for people!"
| dash2 wrote:
| It seems like this would be a great place for a prediction
| market. Anonymously aggregate the information of people who
| know enough that they are prepared to lay money on the line.
| Replace the conflicts of interest with a direct interest in
| profiting from being right.
| rotexo wrote:
| I have been thinking a lot about this. I wish I could invest my
| paltry funds into climate-focused ventures as part of a crowd
| of like-minded small-scale investors. So I am investing in
| things like renewable energy ETFs. But my impression (correct
| me if I'm wrong) is that I am investing in companies deploying
| proven technologies, rather than moonshots. I want to invest in
| moonshots, given the fact that I think we need moonshots in
| order for human civilization to survive. But a) I would need
| significant funds to do so, and b) realistically, I wouldn't be
| able to evaluate those moonshots for technical and economic
| feasibility. It is a discouraging realization.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| For us, I think the sweet spot is a little riskier than
| renewable energy ETF's but a lot less risky than a fusion
| moonshot.
|
| If electricity gets just a little cheaper (and it's fairly
| obvious that it will), then Power-to-Gas technology becomes
| viable, and could displace fossil fuels quite rapidly.
|
| I'm looking into it. Email in profile if you're interested.
| rotexo wrote:
| Definitely agreed!
| jacquesm wrote:
| Consider creating a fund with this explicit goal.
| rotexo wrote:
| That would be the obvious move, but my background is so far
| from finance that I have no earthly idea how I would begin.
| Open to ideas though for sure!
| jjk166 wrote:
| If you're more of a technical person, starting an analyst
| firm that provides insight for existing venture capital
| firms might be a solid play. Lots of people would like to
| save the planet and get rich doing it, they just need
| someone to tell them how.
| boringg wrote:
| I spend a lot of time thinking about this as well as someone
| who has worked in climate tech for > decade and am currently
| looking to deploy capital. It's quite tough.
|
| 1. Impossible to get anywhere close to good investing rounds.
| And deal flow requires serious capital on any meaningful
| technology (sorry carbon accounting software doesn't move the
| needle, needed but it isn't a game changer).
|
| 2. Investing in companies in the market as an equity holder.
| It feels like it doens't actually help the company - there's
| an argument that it helps the industry as there is more
| money/attention/talent attraction. Seems like a poor
| investment for myself given the P/E ratios on most of the
| companies.
|
| 3. Investing in actual projects - small returns but
| meaningful results. You don't get the outsized returns on
| companies growing quickly.
|
| 4. I do believe the success of humanity in the climate tech
| space is actually not through moon shots but a constant
| deployment of ready tech (read solar, ESS, wind, etc) and
| getting our politicians to probably signal the value
| proposition that climate tech brings. I do think moon shots
| have a place and we should bet on them.
|
| I am open to ideas on how to help and new models if anyone
| has any!
|
| _edit for formatting_
| snewman wrote:
| I'm in a similar position (haven't worked in climate tech,
| but have been diving in recently), and am interested in
| connecting with others who are trying to find the most
| useful way to deploy capital in service of a better climate
| outcome. If you're up for connecting, my email is in my
| profile.
| chillingeffect wrote:
| Plant-based vegetarian diet, bicycle-friendly cities and
| towns, anticonsumerism, locally-grown food, 4 day work
| week.
| human wrote:
| Sorry but not even close. Think about the fact that 80%
| of the world population lives on so little compared to
| America/Europe. If 100% of the planet follows your
| lifestyle advice, we would still be in trouble. It's sad
| but the only "positive" thing right now about climate
| change is that most of the world is too poor to leave a
| big imprint.
| marvin wrote:
| We actually don't need to lower the cost of permanent CO2
| sequestration by very dramatic anounts before it's
| feasible to finance a CO2 neutral Western lifestyle via
| taxes. The big challenge is scaling it up, and also
| having a society that's productive enough to finance
| this.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| This stuff is all "personal responsibility", and the
| fossil fuel industry invests a lot in making us think
| that recycling, etc will save us. It's really about
| making sure the fossil fuel industry can continue to
| pollute without having to pay the social costs.
|
| The bottling industry similarly ran campaigns in the 70s
| to convince people that litter pollution was a personal
| responsibility problem, so that it wouldn't have to pay
| to clean up its mess.
|
| Similarly, rather than making safer cigarettes, the
| cigarette industry ran commercials and hired "experts" to
| testify that the cause of household fires was flammable
| furniture ( _not_ cigarettes). As a consequence, several
| generations grew up around toxic flame retardants.
|
| Ultimately personal responsibility _cannot_ carry the
| day. Not only is it politically impossible to convince
| everyone to give up their luxuries and frivolities, but
| even if we could, these things account for a small share
| of our pollution. We _need_ to transition our economy to
| clean energy. Carbon tax (or "pricing" if you chafe at
| the word "tax") is necessary (but probably not
| sufficient).
|
| Yes, this will probably "harm the economy" in the same
| way that limiting one's credit card debt "harms their
| personal finances".
| rotexo wrote:
| Thanks for this very thoughtful reply! I thought 2) in
| particular was a very good point, and one I hadn't really
| considered. I would definitely be interested in hearing
| more about specific opportunities in 3) if anyone has any.
| At this point, I'm not terribly interested in monetary
| returns when it comes to climate stuff, so I almost think
| of these activities as donations. That also means that my
| funds available are quite limited in the comparison to
| usual capital for this stuff (on the order of a few
| thousand).
| brightball wrote:
| Completely agree. More abundant clean power, combined with the
| eventual takeover of Graphene in the battery sector
| (dramatically increases power density, recharge time and
| reduces weight) and I believe we will have a path to
| significantly decrease global emissions.
|
| When we get to the point of putting Graphene batteries in
| planes than can fully recharge in the time it takes to unload
| and reload passengers/luggage it's going to be pretty
| incredible.
| deltree7 wrote:
| Capitalism / Billionaires : 1 -- Bureaucratic Government : 0
|
| Note: The government possibly couldn't invest $1B in this
| because the founders may be white
| boringg wrote:
| Completely agree with this. This is throwing money at an
| interesting problem with an incredibly low outcome of success.
|
| Given the amount of public dollars already put into this
| without success and the amount of money they are going to have
| too continually pour into this to make it successful it seems
| like a serious hail mary. Even if they do have the brightest
| minds working on it. I wish them the greatest success - we need
| this.
|
| To your point it's an incredibly privileged investing position
| to be in and to be honest - he can take a lot of the gains he
| has already had in _relatively_ uninteresting companies that
| have been successful and hope to something truly remarkable for
| humanity.
| jacquesm wrote:
| s/outcome/probability/
| chadash wrote:
| > This is throwing money at an interesting problem with an
| incredibly low outcome of success.
|
| But an incredibly high return if successful. Nuclear fission
| (edit... accidentally wrote fusion here), if we can figure it
| out, is potentially the golden ticket to reducing our carbon
| footprint. Unlike geothermal energy, it can be done anywhere.
| Unlike wind or solar, it can be done at any time. It doesn't
| have the safety issues associated with fusion, nor does it
| generate waste products nearly as hard to deal with.
|
| Right now, carbon emissions breakdown in the US are broken
| down by:
|
| Transportation - 29% Electricity _production_ - 25% Industry
| - 23% Commercial and Residential - 13% Agriculture - 10% Land
| use and forestry - 12%
|
| By moving to fusion, you can all but eliminate fossil fuel
| usage in the first two (and largest) categories. You can
| knock a large chunk out of the next two categories, where
| much of the emissions is due to burning fossil fuels for
| energy (heating, etc.). You'll still have emissions from
| agriculture and land use, but you can clamp down on most
| emissions in a big way.
|
| If you can figure out fusion and get it working on an
| industrial scale level on par with other forms of electricity
| production (which is a big if), then you'll have achieved a
| monumental technological leap and you'll make a lot of money
| while at it.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| As others have mentioned, you have your terms backwards. We
| already have _nuclear fission_ , and its only problem is
| political FUD[1]. I can't imagine that the fossil fuel
| industry's FUD machine will spare fusion energy.
|
| [1]: Nuclear is one of the safest kinds of energy we have
| even including every absurd disaster. We already know how
| to deal with the waste, and the unit cost of managing
| nuclear waste is very low (the up-front costs are high, but
| we're already committed to those costs).
| wombatpm wrote:
| Three Mile Island Chernobyl Fukushima Plus the cleanup at
| Savanah River by the DOE/DOD
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Now do the numbers for coal, LNG, or even rooftop solar.
| Throw in the cleanup costs for a terawatt of solar panels
| while you're at it.
| dangrossman wrote:
| Even better: much of the "industry" emissions are from
| producing fuel for the "transportation" category. Oil
| refineries are the biggest emissions generators in the US
| manufacturing sector, and some of the largest consumers of
| electricity in the process, to the point that many
| refineries have their own power plants on site. If we had
| fusion power and electric cars, much of those "industry"
| emissions go away too.
| [deleted]
| bananabreakfast wrote:
| You have your terms backwards.
|
| Fusion is what they are doing here. Fission we have already
| figured out and have been generating power from for
| decades.
|
| Fusion does not have the runaway reaction safety issues
| that fission has.
|
| Also, what you're describing is what we've known since we
| fairly easily harnessed fusion to make a hydrogen bomb.
|
| Controlling the reaction rate so it doesn't explode is
| metastable with fission, and nearly impossible with fusion.
| This solution is basically just using tiny explosions.
| boringg wrote:
| Listen I'm all for these kinds of investments. Its very
| high risk and potentially a high reward. I think likely the
| reward will be some technology development in the process
| that helps something else but not in the direction they
| currently are going. Thats just the way things typically
| shake out. Especially grandiose plans like this.
|
| They need to prove that the research works to actually
| produce net electricity - which requires a scientific
| breakthrough. Next after a research breakthrough - they
| need to make this a product -- then a commercial product.
| During that process they need to make this a commercially
| viable economically viable product that can compete against
| other forms of energy in the marketplace. They will need to
| get through serious regulatory requirements. And remember
| that they need to make this commercially viable to produce
| electricity at a very low cost - its super competitive at
| baseload power cost range.
|
| By the time this comes to market the energy landscape will
| be completely different. It is already moving incredibly
| quickly.
|
| Like I've said on other post - we need these kinds of
| moonshots but let's not have them distract against the
| other important work of deploying already commercially
| ready technology into the market.
| DennisP wrote:
| Helion might not work out like they hope but if it does,
| it'll use aneutronic fuel, producing only 6% of its
| energy as neutron radiation. That's low enough that they
| don't need a heat cycle, which gives them a shot at a
| pretty low cost per kWh. I think they've estimated four
| cents, which is pretty good for scalable, dispatchable
| power without batteries.
|
| The UK recently announced a regulatory regime for fusion,
| with significantly lighter requirements than fission
| since safety and proliferation issues are much less
| troublesome. That would be even more the case for
| aneutronic fusion. Possibly the US would be silly enough
| to get in the way but many other countries certainly
| wouldn't, including China.
| throw9000 wrote:
| > Possibly the US would be silly enough to get in the way
| but many other countries certainly wouldn't, including
| China.
|
| As an American this is accurate and depressing.
| dcow wrote:
| How is anybody supposed to regulate a nonexistent
| technology? And why? We cant even regulate internet
| stalkers... why is fusion more of a target?
| boringg wrote:
| The term nuclear and that energy is a highly regulated
| marketplace
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > - they need to make this a product -- then a commercial
| product. During that process they need to make this a
| commercially viable economically viable product that can
| compete against other forms of energy in the marketplace.
|
| They're in a really good position here because they
| actually don't. Being a no-carbon power source puts them
| in an almost new market. The government can (should)
| regulate carbon fuel away, and pour money into this in a
| non-market way to tip scales. Energy is heavily regulated
| but also heavily government funded.
| boringg wrote:
| Actually not quite - it still needs to be economically
| attractive in order for it to be a viable product in an
| energy marketplace that is already deploying @ scale zero
| carbon generation.
| richardw wrote:
| Externalities are not baked into the current price of eg
| coal power. The fully loaded price should be compared.
| boringg wrote:
| Externalities are actually starting to get baked in
| (depending on jurisdiction) or are essentially getting
| mandated in by policy (i.e. no coal in-state via
| political process). For most of North America coal isn't
| financially viable unless it gets political beneficial
| treatment - its been losing to natural gas for awhile
| now.
|
| To be fair to your comment though air pollution relating
| to climate warming has been treated as a tragedy of the
| commons problem for ever.
| Veedrac wrote:
| > an incredibly low outcome of success
|
| Why d'you think? Helion has been super successful with their
| demos so far. The timelines are optimistic but I don't see
| why you'd expect the technology itself to fail with, say,
| >80% probability.
| boringg wrote:
| That's quite bullish. If it is an 80% probability of
| success I'd write a check myself if I could get in on the
| deal.
| mempko wrote:
| This! I'm not positive on nuclear fission reactors because I
| don't think they are robust against the climate challenges we
| face. Too much bad waste that requires functioning societies to
| maintain. However, fusion doesn't seem to have these problems.
| I'm hopeful something comes out of it and the world moves fast.
| blueyes wrote:
| Maybe worth pointing out that fusion has been a long-term project
| of Sam's. Back when PG asked him to lead YC, the other thing he
| was considering was working on fusion. He's been following the
| sector for a long time.
| marcus wrote:
| I haven't checked their technology yet but if their iteration
| speed is an order of magnitude faster than the competition my
| money is on them
| fataliss wrote:
| Somewhat tangential topic, but ... It's interesting to me how
| most of the companies with real transformative potential have
| very little need for (dedicated) software engineers.
|
| I think half of that is that most other engineering professions
| now come with some non negligible coding skill and the other half
| is simply that "software can solve anything" is a plain and
| simple lie.
|
| I can't help but feel a little left out of innovation with "just"
| software skills. Am I too sorry for myself or is that a shared
| feeling?
| unbalancedevh wrote:
| Software doesn't solve anything by itself -- You have to apply
| it to something. I guess some developers are just pure code
| monkeys that implement routines as specified, but there are
| plenty of software engineers who use their knowledge of the
| field their working in to create software to help solve the
| problems in a good way. I suppose the main difference between
| the two groups is the level of experience and interest in the
| field.
| DantesKite wrote:
| Software engineering is an amplifier in almost every domain.
|
| There's a nuclear technology company that open-sourced a tool
| for measuring fuel efficiency.
| https://github.com/terrapower/armi
|
| But it's by no means the most important tool. There's a lot of
| hard, physical engineering problems that can be solved.
|
| I think of software engineering like motor oil. You can apply
| it across a wide variety of contexts, but it's by no means the
| engine.
| pkaler wrote:
| Looks like Helion has a long-term target of 1C//kwh.
|
| Conveniently, BCHydro just emailed me my bill this morning. They
| charge $0.2077/day. Then $0.0939/kWh for the first 688kWh and
| then $0.1408/kWh after that.
|
| It looks like Helion is targeting to be somewhere between 10x to
| 15x cheaper than hydro-electricity.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| I think you're comparing the retail price of energy to the cost
| of generation. Usually there's a big difference.
| Ciantic wrote:
| MIT's SPARC has been many times in HN, can anyone knowledgeable
| tell how does Helion's approach differ from SPARC? Which is
| supposed to be completed 2025.
| apendleton wrote:
| Shorter version of my response to a different comment: CFS's
| approach builds on more mature theoretical foundations; it's
| basically ITER but with new magnets using technology that has
| arisen since ITER was conceived. It has a decently high
| probability of working, but will have practical/operational
| challenges that some more moonshot-y approaches would avoid
| (neutron damage to the reactor housing, having to breed
| tritium, complicated cooling systems, making electricity by
| boiling water). That's at one end of a spectrum, and as you
| move away from that, you get to things that involve more
| unknowns in terms of theory, but, were they to succeed, would
| avoid many of these challenges. Helion's proposed technology is
| towards the other, more moonshot-y end of that spectrum, using
| a less-well-established reactor design that's higher-
| risk/uncertainty, but should it work, would avoid tritium,
| wouldn't involve high neutron flux, and wouldn't require steam
| turbines.
| hobscoop wrote:
| SPARC is very important, but it's a physics demonstration
| facility, not a reactor. Its not going to generate any
| electricity. CFS (SPARC's parent company) will use SPARC to
| demonstrate that their magnet technology and plasma physics can
| be scaled to a reactor -- I think they're aiming for 2030 or
| 2035 to 'put electrons on the grid' with their 'ARC' reactor.
| SPARC stands for 'smallest possible ARC'.
|
| Compared to CFS's approach, Helion's approach is different in
| two or three key ways.
|
| First, it's a different fusion reaction, which has important
| engineering consequences. The reaction that Helion wants to use
| generates fewer damaging neutrons, which makes the rest of the
| reactor easier to engineer and eliminates several tricky
| subsystems.
|
| Second, it's a different geometry, which does not require huge
| powerful steady-state superconducting magnets. However, it does
| require very _fast_ magnets. It 's a pulsed machine (they would
| fire several shots per second; each shot lasts on the order a
| milliseconds if I recall). So it requires more pulsed power
| systems and the components may need a different kind of high-
| repetition lifecycle testing.
|
| Third, they want to use a 'direct energy conversion' scheme,
| which means eliminating the need for gas turbines (i.e. steam
| turbines) coupled to generators. This is important since the
| heat exchangers and turbines make up very roughly half the cost
| of a traditional power plant, so this would allow the
| electricity price to be lower by about a factor of two!
| dosshell wrote:
| SPARC is a tokamak with state of the art magnets.
|
| Helion uses Field-reversed configuration [0].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-reversed_configuration
| rwmj wrote:
| Vague explanation of how their technology works here:
| https://www.helionenergy.com/our-technology/
|
| I wish there was a good summary article of all the mainstream and
| alternative fusion approaches out there, like ITER, (SP-)ARC,
| General Fusion, Wendelstein 7X, etc.
| apendleton wrote:
| I read Arthur Turrell's "The Star Builders":
| https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Star-Builders/Art...
| a few months ago, and it gives a decent overview of many of the
| players and approaches, with the caveat that I don't think it
| talks about FRC reactors at all (what this and TAE are) at all
| from what I remember, probably because I think many people in
| the "mainstream" academic/government fusion community seem to
| not think it's a particularly serious contender.
|
| The general sense that I get (as a purely amateur observer but
| one who reads a fair bit about the various efforts) is that
| pretty much everyone thinks ITER will reach a decently high Q,
| but that it will take forever and be incredibly expensive, and
| that beyond that, of the people that think any of the startups
| have a chance (which seems to be a minority among fusion people
| but a decently big one), there's the most consensus around the
| potential of the high-field tokamak startups (so that's
| CFS/(SP)ARC and Tokamak Energy), because the physics is
| basically the same as with ITER, except facilitated by the much
| higher-strength fields allowed for by high-temperature-
| superconductor magnets; there are engineering challenges there
| still, but it seems like if the physics underlying ITER are
| sound and the magnets work (which has at this point been
| demonstrated as a stand-alone thing), the math all adds up.
| Stellarators (Wendelstein etc.) seem like the next-highest
| consensus: people seem to think the physics is sound, but it's
| less far along. Beyond that, other things seem to fall into one
| of: "the physics basis seems fine but the economics seem
| questionable" (probably most inertial approaches), "this has
| been considered at length and many believe this is physically
| impossible, but it'd be amazing if they're wrong" (TAE,
| arguably General Fusion, possibly also Helion), or "it'd be
| incredible if it works and physics doesn't forbid it but it's
| wildly novel and nobody really knows yet if it has legs"
| (things like Zap Energy's shear-stabilized Z-pinch plan).
|
| The overarching tldr is that it seems like the approaches that
| the most people think will work also have some of the most
| significant operational challenges if they do (breeding
| tritium, dealing with high neutron flux, etc.), which is why
| anybody is bothering with the quirkier approaches: _if_ they
| work, they will probably ultimately work better than the
| tokamaks do, but they might not work.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Everything is still either magnetic- or inertial confinement-
| based, right?
|
| And within those there are the variety of designs.
|
| I hate to say it, but a tiny part of me doesn't discount the
| possibility of energy majors subtley killing small-scale fusion
| approaches and pushing internation-scale huge projects (i.e.
| ones unlikely to be delivered quickly).
| OneTimePetes wrote:
| How else? Soundwaves or Lightpressure confinement? Diamond
| Anvil hammered?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Most of the fusion energy we are consuming uses gravity for
| containment.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| It's a proven method, but I have concerns about its
| scalability.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It scales just fine in the 'up' direction.
| omnicognate wrote:
| Up to a point. Such reactors hit a size threshold above
| which they violently explode, leaving a dense,
| radioactive core that cannot be disposed of.
| gpm wrote:
| I mean, that's just a failure in the EOL decommissioning
| mechanism of large instances, in terms of making them
| bigger, there becomes a point where it becomes difficult
| (or even impossible) to add more fuel [1], but they don't
| violently explode until the decommissioning phase.
|
| [1] https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/328/is-
| there-a...
| jacquesm wrote:
| I think we can safely leave that to the next generation
| to clean up, like with all those other contaminated
| zones.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| With all the extra energy, I'm sure we'd be able to find
| and budget for an EOL solution.
|
| After all, I'd be insanity to consume massive amounts of
| energy without accounting for its future costs.
| apendleton wrote:
| > Everything is still either magnetic- or inertial
| confinement-based, right?
|
| Pretty much, but there are some that are kinda-sorta both
| (General Fusion's approach is "magneto-inertial"), and also a
| lot of variety within each bucket. Like, Zap Energy's
| approach is magnetic, but involves no external magnets,
| whereas developing the fancy magnets is a key operational
| challenge for CFS.
| hobscoop wrote:
| There's some interesting arguments in favor of the
| combination of magnetic and interial approaches. This is
| broadly known as 'magneto-inertial fusion', and there's a
| continuum of ideas between 'mostly inertial' and 'mostly
| magnetic'. I'd put Helion's approach far toward the
| magnetic side.
| foobarian wrote:
| It's interesting that they do direct electricity capture
| instead of the usual heat -> steam -> turbine approach. They
| also seem to be loaded with patents around this. I totally see
| why this investment might make sense and hope it works out.
| willis936 wrote:
| Direct conversion geometry was worked out a long time ago.
| The patents aren't very useful because the plasma
| temperatures that make aneutronic fusion attainable are far
| out of reach. If you can't demonstrate D+T then you have no
| hope for D+D or p+B11.
| sounds wrote:
| They're not doing direct capture of the He ion from
| aneutronic fusion.
|
| I'm not the best one to explain what it is Helion is doing,
| but it's not p+B11 -> 4He.
| randyrand wrote:
| In the timeline of Fusion I imagine 20 year patents will all
| be public domain by the time they're useful.
|
| In a sense, them patenting it so early is sort of a public
| good =)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-11-05 23:00 UTC)