Talk-Polywell.org

They now have a blog and there is a video that sort of kind of explains more of what they are doing. It is an interesting take on inertial electrostatic confinement fusion. That said, it looks like their optimal parameter space is very small and while they have some simulation- results that align wi...

Sam Altman:

where @Helion_Energy will soon start to install polaris:

https://x.com/sama/status/1753250549045018728?s=20

and I think we're assuming the 1.01MeV tritium is harvested (both as ash and charged product) instead of reacting so ignoring the "fuel cycle" The Tritium is too hot and non- collisional on the timescale of the pulse and the chamber is evacuated between pulses. So no significant amounts of it react...

along with the 75% of the 10GW D-D reaction that ends up in MeV neutrons, of course... might also take a stab at calculating peak neutronicity for the shielding requirements Only about 33% of the D-D energy is released in neutrons. Over two reactions you get: 4.85 MeV (66%) in charged particles + 2...

The pulse only lasts 1 ms give or take a few microseconds. They can't keep it up much longer than that (for several reasons). So they have about 99 ms between pulses at 10Hz and 999 ms between pulses at 1Hz to evacuate the chamber using their custom turbo molecular pumps. Either one is a very long t...

Ok. Presumably yield is strongly related to B, so it seems quite unlikely that a generator targeting low-Q will produce a remotely similar yield per pulse with the mag field down by a third. The penny finally drops as to why they recently added DT to their program. It is down by a quarter . At B^4 ...

Ok, feels like closing in. Polaris runs at 0.1 Hz+. If each pulse is like the power plant, it would be net 5MJ, up to 45MJ in and 50MJ out net of losses. So 500kW is ball-park power if each pulse is as good as the final design. So expectation must be lower. You mentioned a light-bulb would do, but ...

Not entirely clear if that's Polaris or the power plant. If it's the plant at 50MW it doesn't work at 1 Hz: the capacitor bank will be empty after supplying the grid when the next shot cues up. At 2 Hz, I don't think it can work at a Q of 2, because of losses. A consistent picture at 3 Hz would be ...

mvanwink5 wrote: ↑

Sat Jan 13, 2024 2:42 am

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

Been trying to get information on that.

No, I don’t think so. If its producing a net 5MJ in each pulse, and doing one pulse per second, thats 5MW: a Watt is a Joule per second. What is strange is that the core seems to be idle something over 99.7% of the time. Seems like an opportunity…though I dimly recall 10Hz as the target for the com...

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...

HERT: So 1Hz, circa 50 MJ in, say 55 MJ out, is 5MW. yes but unfortunately it's only 5MW for 1ms, which is not very useful, practically speaking, as it would only provide 5KW over the 1 second, or enough to power an average home (although again I have to emphasize this is still 50 years ahead of ma...

https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsig ... -by-summer

This does confirm that the final assembly of Polaris has shifted to the right by a few months and is now scheduled for summer.

(theoretically Q-eng>1 should be possible even with Q-sci<1) at one point I also thought this might be true, but then I decided it can't be because then there's nowhere for the losses to come from (as per above) i.e., if per Kirtley's graph you have to spend 10MW in losses to get 50MW in output, th...

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 ...