Talk-Polywell.org

AI compute clusters are power hogs & huge pressure to supply it is escalating exponentially. If Helion can scale there will be a market that dwarfs steel foundries.

SJ, any idea what the new earthwork is all about at Helion's new plant? Accelerating production plans??

I am not sure whether future power plants will need much larger capacitor banks. I would not be surprised if you are largely correct that there would not be a significant increase in capacitor energy storage to handle net power. 3 phase power summed is non time varying, constant, and transformers a...

Remaining gasses have to be evacuated after the pulse, and their patented high volume vacuum pump is key to doing this fast.

happy if they managed to power a light bulb. Yes. That was the context for Polaris power production, just to reach net electric, not commercial. I thought that was understood. Hence the capacitor sizing for polaris is just to form the plasma, accelerate, then compress it, then recover it minus loss...

The article conflates Polaris starting operation with operation to produce net electric power by mid 2024. I am happy to hear Helion's progress towards operation of Polaris. So is this schedule improvement or delay, I cannot tell; if it is a delay, any idea the cause?

Huge announcement by General Fusion. Their last hurdle was a proven liquid metal wall compression chamber for their plasma.
https://mailchi.mp/generalfusion/publis ... c2986861e1

pulse length in Polaris is somewhere around 1 ms Plasma duration at point of compression in the device center is one time, which I suspect SJ is saying is ~1ms, then there is the magnetic field sequential firing to accelerate the plasma from each end to collide & to be further compressed, and that ...

Dave, the speed of the plasma as I remember is accelerated to 1 million mph, so the pulse length is very short, so curent flow is huge (look at the conductors to the coils). You might recall that the power electronics capability is only recent if that gives you some reference. To calculate the time ...

Good list!

Plenty of time to have instabilities, Q(science)>1 is just the start, plenty more ramp to go to commercial. Still, why take the gloomy Gus doubter position for no reason? And if there is a stability issue, likely there is a workaround. On the other hand, Helion does not have the plasma stability iss...

Call me pedantic, but saying they won’t hit breakeven this year when it’s December 26 isn’t breaking my heart… Based on current capability, no matter running into early trouble delivering the current into an actual device pinch, they are close to proving their ability to reach breakeven. We see tha...

Merry Christmas!!! (Today's act of supreme rebellion).

"We have not and we will not hit break-even this year," a Zap Energy spokesperson said.

SJ's comment:

This might unfortunately be true, though

I wonder if this is a matter of ready to confirm & publish as it seems their FuseQ device test amps is high enough?

lol if they don't even need SC magnets and can harvest 90% of the fusion energy as electricity via plasma currents then even LWRs are are going to be obsolete overnight, let alone fusion competitors with low-beta SC designs As soon as I found out Helion was able to extract the plasma energy directl...