Talk-Polywell.org

Helion got the cables for Polaris delivered recently. 1000 km worth of cabling! That is a lot of cables. Received a massive shipment of cable - over a megameter in total! Our team has meticulously hipot tested every 500-meter spool, ensuring they're all set for installation on Polaris. HelionCabling...

New newsletter is out. Not much news. They went to a conference. According to presenters there PB11 fusion yield surpasses simulations. LPPF is going to use decaborane for fuel. Since it is toxic, they need some filters, which they are currently working on. https://www.lppfusion.com/storage/LPPFusio...

New Helion Energy Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/helionenergy/coils-capacitors-customers We are working to get Polaris built as quickly as possible, with an aim of having the full machine together early next year. Over the past three months, the work our team has been doing to prepare for Polaris ov...

Thank you Skipjack, very interesting. I just rechecked their website to confirm that my memory was accurate, and yes, that data point is still not there. I know it is not on the website. I assume that Helion have their reasons for that. Helion is in their absolute right to tell as much or as little...

It they had tried burning D-T (which at the 8 keV ion temp they reached is ~750 times more reactive than D-D), they would have a clue, but they didn't, or at least Helion's web says they didn't (which confuses me because Dr. Kirtley is shown in one of the videos from last year with a small tank of ...

1) Stability of the FRC during the fusion stage: Starting with a 10^22 - 10^23 m(-3) ion density, 20-30 keV ion temp, D-3He FRC. If 1% undergo fusion, that will create 10^20 - 10^21 high speed charged particles, directionally isotropic at birth (I think). Will that perturbe the FRC structure? I ima...

The point of the Nucor deal is to explore "beyond the meter" electricity production for various purposes. Right now, it takes over seven(!) years to get a license for grid connection in the US. In order to accelerate commercialization, Helion is looking at alternative routes. Kinda sucks, but the US...

RERT wrote: ↑

Tue Oct 03, 2023 6:35 am

Thanks: so, barring something surprising, the 2028 Nucor power will be 50MW units, I surmise.

I think 2028 is Microsoft. Nucor might be later.

mvanwink5 wrote: ↑

Sun Oct 01, 2023 9:13 pm

It is not clear from Helion's press release on the 500 MWe power plant for NUCOR, but I presume it is ten 50 MWe fusion electric power generators?

Yet undetermined. They can generally build these machines as big as they want. So it it could be one or 10 or anything in between.

One cool thing about Helion's machines is that they can load follow really, really well. That means that they do not have to rely on a large grid for stabilization. I think that should help with smaller consumers that need/want their own plants. It is a shame though, that it is so hard to get a grid...

Helion is collaborating with Nucor for a 500 MWe power plant for the steel sector. To my understanding, this will happen some time after the one for Microsoft. One goal of the collaboration is to accelerate behind the meter timelines. From my understanding, the US permitting system is too slow for g...

Great talk at the All-In Summit 2023 with David Kirtley and Bob Mumgaard. There is not really much new information in case you are wondering. Love the optimism and the friendly competition between the two. And mind you, they emphasize that the market is so huge, that it is not really a competition. ...

Yeah, they have a paper coming up on diagnostics for Trenta and I believe there are more papers coming. But that process takes a while. So be patient.

New paper by Zap! They are not talking about achieved Q quite yet. It seems like they are still optimizing the machine and are also improving diagnostics before they want to talk about that. What is important is that their scaling laws still seem to hold up in experiment. There are nuances though. I...

Helion's David Kirtley is in the schedule for the 65th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics, for a short intervention at 09:30 on next November 3: https://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/DPP23/Session/YO08.7 From the abstract, it seems he is not going to talk about anything new (so, no Pol...