Helion Energy to demonstrate net electricity production by 2024

[jrvz]

Good question. I have never really understood how the fuel cycle would work, if for every D-He3 fusion you need two D-D fusions (because half of the time you get tritium instead of He3), and D-D fusion has such a small cross section. I am guessing they were happy to hear about the recent announcement of a gas well that was yielding a lot of He3.

[sdg]

in Polaris every electric power pulse is in coaxial cable with tuned ends, every cable is measured precisely. LOL!! No one will copy Helion’s design because the engineering to make this machine work is far beyond patents.
Even the mechanical pieces like the vacuum pumps are Helion’s patented design.

Yes, and they're doing in-house research and testing and developing Accumulative Roll Bounding (ARB involving sub 200 nanometer layers) for advanced magnet materials, per recent social media posts. In Helion's case, we can assume the in-house ARB research and testing involve base copper with silver, niobium, zirconium, other exotic metals and nanostructures, that attain high strength and temperature stability while maintaining high conductivity. These high tech magnet materials and incorporation of non-magnetic stainless steel will be required to develop magnet coils that can withstand the up to 30T (my guestimate) magnetic foces needed for Orion commercial fusion.

Add to this Helion's patents (as you mentioned) and in-house development of diverter materials and pumps. In my modeling, I came across another direct-to-electricity recovery possibility: in order to protect the chamber walls, diversion/evacuation occurs before the plasmoid is completely extinguished, somewhere between 600 microseconds to 1.2 milliseconds or so post collision. That means charged particles will be accelerated out of the reaction chamber. Helion might be able to implement a diverter topology with screens or plates on the extreme ends of the device that capture and recover the energy in those charged particles as electricity, especially since the diverter ends are completely "out of the way" of the formation and acceleration plasmoid formation and collision critical pathway. Doing so would also cool them, reducing nuisance heating. Is there any realistic electricity energy recapture "there" there? Don't know. I'm virtually certain Helion knows, though, and has this and much more pressing design decisions already made and applied to implementation prototypes and testing for Orion and beyond.

The billion dollar capital keeps them way ahead with first mover advantage, and they're full throttle on production, with "gigafactory" design well underway. When they announce D-He3 fusion (not to mention net energy in Polaris), they'll be in line for another tranch. Demonstrating net energy, even at 1 < Qeng < 1.05 in Polaris will make the sky the limit, keeping them in the enviable position of NOT being constrained by capital.

I think it's going to be a fun ride to see play out!

[sdg]

As an electrical engineer, the efficiency and elegance of this design is extraordinary:

I mean, each pulse even sweeps out the exhaust from the last one

sometimes I feel a bit like a Neolithic looking at a ball-point pen

Yes, me too, LOL!

As mentioned above, I think they might even be able to recover, as electricity, energy from the accelerated charged particles evacuated during the "early quench" pahse implemented to protect the reaction chamber walls. Or not, who knows? But that it's even a rather straightforward implementation consideration is kinda crazy. Of course the energy to evacuate will be much higher than anything they could harvest electrically. But a joule saved is a joule earned, to paraphrase a famous old kite-flying electricity researcher . The Helion energy recovery topology is an "embarrassment of riches" to this old EE.

Did I mention "rational exuberance"?

[Skipjack]

Great answers sdg!

For the

Assuming things go as planned how many D-D burners would be needed to feed the D-He burners? I'm assuming the D-D burners would require more maintenance.

Answer is somewhere between none and one.
The initial machines will be producing the He3 they are burning. Unless something has changed recently, they might make dedicated D-D burners later. And in the more distant future, they will be able to add in He3 from Tritium decay for even better economics.
Personally, I would just sell as much of the Tritium as the market can take. Even at a high 3 digits price per gram, that would still be more economic than storing it for decades and then burning the He3 from the decay(assuming their 1 cent/kWh target).

[mvanwink5]

Apart from Helion, the rest of the Fusion industry is solely focused on the front end, fusion & plasma, for their advantage & optimization, yet the conversion of fusion & plasma energy to electric power is massive cost & constraint issue. Energy conversion for the rest of the Fusion industry is based on energy conversion through heat engines & that means massive size, capital cost, maintenance, & even more important for regulation, siting, environment, is massive waste heat due to the unforgiving thermodynamics, the Carnot cycle.

In contrast, Helion is solving the energy conversion at the same time due to their pulse strategy, whereas Energy Zap, Avalanche, TAE potentially have smaller capital & fusion front end, but at this point only have the heat engine for energy conversion strategy.

On Earth, Fusion will become a total system cost -later- (in the beginning heat engine plant conversion to fusion is a huge market).

The energy market outside of Earth puts solar in competition with fusion (Lunar, Martian dust is a huge issue for solar on the surfaces?)

[TallDave]

as we await Helion's transition from interesting temperatures to interesting yields, it occurs to me we don't really know what yields are necessary to generate net electricity

Fig 15 is described as conservative, but how does the actual loss fraction compare to the graph? are they truly losing... half the described losses? 10%? 90%?

and then of course we'd need to know what % of recoverable (aneutronic) fusion energy is recovered (this metric allows us to be fuel-agnostic in the analysis)

if circuit efficiency is 95% then on a 50MJ pulse they lose 2.5MJ to circuit losses, which obviously needs to be made up in recovered fusion power

but does that require (say) 3MJ of recoverable fusion power? or more like 10-20MJ?

I suspect Helion themselves still have a lot of uncertainty on these questions, hopefully we will get some answers before the summer

[TallDave]

Assuming things go as planned how many D-D burners would be needed to feed the D-He burners? I'm assuming the D-D burners would require more maintenance.

ideally the existing natural gas stream would add an additional cryo distilliation step (it's just a few more degrees) and drop the cost of He3 below the point it makes sense to produce it with D-D machines

but that's a large investment with a ten-year buildout

but at today's prices He3 is actually more valuable than the electricity, so...