Helion Energy to demonstrate net electricity production by 2024

[jrvz]

With He3 selling for $20,000/g and tritium for $30,000/g, I wonder if they can make a profit running on D-D without generating net electricity. At least until the markets for those gasses crash.

[Skipjack]

Yeah, that is something that I have been saying for a while. They will likely burn the He3 and sell the Tritium until the market is saturated. They can go pretty low with the price too (below 1000 USD/gram) before it becomes more profitable to let it decay and burn the resulting He3.

[KitemanSA]

With He3 selling for $20,000/g and tritium for $30,000/g, I wonder if they can make a profit running on D-D without generating net electricity. At least until the markets for those gasses crash.

The problem with saying that tritium is $30,000/g is that it may be because the production cost is very high, or the demand is very low; or both!

[Skipjack]

With He3 selling for $20,000/g and tritium for $30,000/g, I wonder if they can make a profit running on D-D without generating net electricity. At least until the markets for those gasses crash.

The problem with saying that tritium is $30,000/g is that it may be because the production cost is very high, or the demand is very low; or both!

Considering that the whole world is talking about a Tritium shortage, I think that lack of demand is currently not the issue. It is likely production and storage. Helion can go below 1000/g and still make more profit than they would from burning the He3 from its decay.

[sdg]

Just to wrap my head around the cost of D-He3 reactions in initial testing, i tried some reverse-engineered back of the envelope calculations for Orion (or maybe more likely Polaris), assuming 100MJ of harvestable ⁴He (alpha particle) energy, but 50% harvest efficiency factor due to all loses (e.g., non-collisions, electromagnetic recapture, etc.) , and 1 Hz pulse rate:

D + ³He → ⁴He + p, with 80% energy in p (due to mass) and 20% from ⁴He
With e=mc2, that's 3.69 MeV per ⁴He:
³He = 3.016 g/mol divided by 6.022 × 10²³ atoms/mol. = 5.009 × 10⁻²⁴ g. 3.69 MeV per ³He
and 1 MeV = 1.602 × 10⁻¹³ J
So to yield 100MJ ⁴He per pulse requires 1.7 × 10¹⁴ ³He reactions.
With the 50% all-cause energy harvest loss, that's 50MJ, and 1 pulse per sec dials in at 50MW, the design goal for Orion.
That means ³He mass = (3.4. × 10²⁰ atoms) × (5.0 × 10⁻²⁴ g/atom) = 1770 μg of He3 per pulse * 3600 pulses per hour at 1Hz = 6.37 g/hr ³He.
At $20,000 /gram ³He, that's about $127,000 per hour for 50MW machine at 1 Hz.

Which is actually a lot less than I was imagining, as this is the cost assuming current market (no breeding). Or, for example the cost for experimental D + ³He runs on Polaris. Lot's of assumptions here, and maybe I got the math wrong. And post any corrections if so inclined.

But if ballpark, Helion could buy a million dollars of ³He and expect to be able to run almost 8 experimental hours @ 50MW. Which is not cheap but certainly not prohibitive, and I would argue it's a drop in the bucket for proving out net energy, if in fact it can achieve that under these simplistic assumptions. That's a boatload of diagnostic and engineering design validation and/or fault identification/resolution time.

Obviously, this is not cost effective at that high ³He cost, as 8 hours of 50MW produced from a natural gas fired plant is about $12K.