Talk-Polywell.org

This from the UK: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jan/29/gas-fired-plants-uk-lights-on-cost-profits-energy-crisis Producers getting up to £6 ~$7 per kWh at some times. Yeah, that is for gas peaker plants. They are notoriously expensive. One reason is that they are on so rarely. So in orde...

It should be more like 50 cent/kWh. They would make ~7 kg of Tritium/year. Also, do not compare end consumer prices to the price the producer gets. E.g. nuclear fission plants produce electricity at between 4 cents to 8 cents/kWh. Solar and wind can be lower than that, but then they have hidden cost...

The point about selling the Tritium is a good one. Yeah, this is the crazy part. At the projected cost of 1 cent/kWh a 50 MWe Helion mixed mode power plant would make about 4 million/year in revenue. At the current price of 30,000 USD/gram, selling the Tritium from the same power plant would make H...

If they don't evacuate the chamber every time, D-T reactions, and subsequently 14 MeV neutrons, become a much bigger problem. Yes, I was aware, but there may be compensating advantages. Given the T is highly reactive, is it safe to assume that all of the T from one pulse would react with D in a sub...

But I don't see the other scenario. If they had enough 3He, operating at 25 keV, with a 1:1 D-3He mix, then for each 2 D-3He reactions they would have 1 D-D. Am I wrong? I am not sure what you are getting at here. Are we just assuming a 1:1 ratio of Deuterium to He3? Generally, Helion NEEDS a ratio...

charliem wrote: ↑

Sun Feb 11, 2024 11:41 pm

If they don't evacuate the chamber every time, D-T reactions, and subsequently 14 MeV neutrons, become a much bigger problem.

This! That is also what they talk about in their fuel cycle patent.

Yeah, I think they are still aiming for 10 Hz for the power plant design. As for the math: A D-He3 reaction should be 18.3 MeV in charged particles 2He4 (3.6 MeV) + p ( 14.7 MeV ) IF they have enough He3 from T- decay, then D-D reactions would be 1/2 of the total. If they do not, then they would be ...

Making vacuum vessels for our fusion systems!

https://x.com/Helion_Energy/status/1755 ... 68320?s=20

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 ...