Talk-Polywell.org

2.5’ thick borated concrete shielding walls are going up in Ursa. These walls will shield the rest of the facility from neutrons generated during Polaris operations.

https://x.com/Helion_Energy/status/1732 ... 50670?s=20

TallDave wrote: ↑

Fri Dec 01, 2023 8:48 pm

of course they probably won't need to ship nearly as much tritium as coal

Yeah and the Tritium will be leaving the plants, not going there.

yes Kirtley says in the last video they are focusing on making modular components small enough to fit through a train tunnel, and mentions Falcon in that context as well so apparently rail transport is the plan, but he does not mention the vacuum chamber specifically, so that might only cover the o...

Helion seems to be playing their cards very close to the vest, it's surprising how little information there is in about them in many common resources They have been a lot more open recently (though still keeping a few things secret). They have a few interviews and stuff with various engineering cha...

Having worked in heavy industry, I've seen things much bigger than 3m transported by road. Let's consider too, the current Helion facility won't be the only production facility, if for no other reason than there's a much larger manufacturing base on the other side of the Rockies from them, with far...

With Starship using steel for the structure, I wonder how many tiles it can lose before catastrophic failure.

The problem is that most fusion reactor vessels are not made from steel. Neutron environment is very different too.

Transport by road may imply other difficulties than size. Ask SpaceX! They dimensioned their first stages to be transportable by road. That is why Falcon 9 is so long and thin. If Helion plans to produce and deliver 20 machines a day, they need to consider logistics. Also, is that really important ...

Bigger problem with larger machines is that they can not be transported by road. You need to stay under 3 meters diameter for effective road transport. Length is less of a problem though.

Helion's magnets are just standard aluminum magnets. Not super conducting. I can't unfortunately give more details in their past magnet experiments. The alternative to stronger magnets are bigger machines. From what I understand, there is currently no noticeable limit for how big you can make them a...

Again, I know that the graphs in their papers are for 20 Tesla. I believe that 30 Tesla would be hard to achieve. We will see how things go.

The launch was pretty cool and the test achieved their main objective to getting through staging. They will have plenty of data to sift through and make improvements for the next launch.

For example, this one from 2016 speaks of 40 Tesla (page 2). That one was for low pulse rate, high gain D-T, not the high pulse rate low gain they are going for. I know for certain that the graphs in their recent papers were for 20 Tesla magnets. They might go up a tiny bit with field strength and/...

I have never heard about it being 30 Tesla. Last number I got was 20 Tesla used for the graphs in their recent paper.

Helion capacitor manufacturing: https://x.com/Helion_Energy/status/1722366083653320932?s=20 We continue to scale up capacitor manufacturing in Antares. Our team is now producing 20 new capacitors a week, which will make up 10% of Polaris’ capacitor bank. So Polaris will need 200 capacitors, or 10 we...