General Fusion in the news

[mvanwink5]

Milestone Results on the Pathway to Fusion
Nathan Gilliland, General Fusion CEO
During 2016 General Fusion hit several key milestones on its path to practical, commercial fusion energy. We recently shared this progress at conferences and meetings around the world (see article below). A key to reaching fusion conditions in nearly all approaches is centered on the quality of superheated hydrogen plasma. Our SPECTOR plasma injectors are producing stable plasmas with uncompressed temperatures consistently reaching nearly 5 million degrees Celsius, and lifetimes approaching 2 milliseconds. These are new benchmarks for this type of plasma in the fusion field. In particular, 2 millisecond plasma lifetimes mark a 10x improvement for General Fusion since 2013. Beyond this solid technological step forward, this quarter we’re also highlighting some new additions to our team, media coverage, and much more.

- Nathan Gilliland, CEO, General Fusion

Plasma quality is key for GF. The rest is engineering. Tri Alpha is also making milestones with 'plasma quality'.

I have seen no such reports on 'plasma quality' from Helion and as far as I can tell plasma quality is also key for Helion, after all, Helion is an FRC, pulse or not. Some take the position that Helion is just being secretive, but I have seen 'secretive' for special projects to mean no progress.

The good news it seems to me is that progress in any FRC project bodes well for all FRC projects. It means that spheromak plasma can be tamed.

The only milestone I want to hear from EMC2 is finance milestone.... No cash, no project.

[Skipjack]

Milestone Results on the Pathway to Fusion
I have seen no such reports on 'plasma quality' from Helion and as far as I can tell plasma quality is also key for Helion, after all, Helion is an FRC, pulse or not. Some take the position that Helion is just being secretive, but I have seen 'secretive' for special projects to mean no progress.

They are working on various prototypes with funding from ARPA-E (and private investors) right now. They showed some of their latest results with the prototype "VENTI" at the recent ARPA-E Alpha meeting:
http://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/ ... SLOUGH.pdf

[mvanwink5]

I saw that. Nothing on quality of the plasma and I have never seen Helion report on any efforts on the plasma quality itself. Zero, which was my point. Tri Alpha and General Fusion have put tremendous effort into spheromak plasma quality itself with resulting hard earned milestones, both reported, efforts and results, Tri Alpha with scrape off layers, velocity profile, etc. General Fusion by shaping the plasma. Effort, results, reports.

Helion seems not to have done anything. The companies making progress have spent considerable effort and expense where it seems Helion has spent nothing. All I see with Helion is a bigger machine.

General Fusion is a pulse machine too....

Or are you saying Helion is also doing work on plasma quality and not reporting it in contradistinction to GF and TA? Maybe Helion researchers are just so much smarter or have far better financial backers. That is why I have doubts. Lots of doubts.

[Skipjack]

I saw that. Nothing on quality of the plasma and I have never seen Helion report on any efforts on the plasma quality itself. Zero, which was my point. Tri Alpha and General Fusion have put tremendous effort into spheromak plasma quality itself with resulting hard earned milestones, both reported, efforts and results, Tri Alpha with scrape off layers, velocity profile, etc. General Fusion by shaping the plasma. Effort, results, reports.

Not that it really matters, but IIRC, John Slough helped TAE build CW.
You can't compare General Fusion's and Helion's designs. Even Helion's and Tri Alpha's designs are too different to be compared directly. Helion's reactor will only need confinement times of less than 3 ms, which has already been demonstrated in their IPA device. The magnetic field strength and plasma density was previously demonstrated in Grande. IIRC, their biggest remaining concerns are the plasma temperature and how everything finally comes together in a single prototype (vs several prototypes demonstrating different aspects of the device).

[mvanwink5]

You can't compare General Fusion's and Helion's designs.

All 3 are compressing spheromaks and 3 ms is forever, so yes, the issues being faced are comparable. The fields in the plasma are what contains the plasma and they are huge, the external fields are small in comparison. Finally, funny, all three are working on temperature now.

It is why I wonder if Helion has the technology themselves, maybe once TA or GF patent what is needed, maybe Helion will just license it? Saves on research cost. But then they will be tied to someone else's schedule.

[Skipjack]

You can't compare General Fusion's and Helion's designs.

All 3 are compressing spheromaks and 3 ms is forever, so yes, the issues being faced are comparable. The fields in the plasma are what contains the plasma and they are huge, the external fields are small in comparison. Finally, funny, all three are working on temperature now.

It is why I wonder if Helion has the technology themselves, maybe once TA or GF patent what is needed, maybe Helion will just license it? Saves on research cost. But then they will be tied to someone else's schedule.

Helion's reactor is pulsed. It is accelerating two FRCs towards each other at supersonic speeds (300km/sec), simultaneously compressing them until they collide in a central burn chamber. When they collide, the kinetic energy is converted to ion thermal energy. The FRC is compressed adiabatically to fusion temperatures.
Unlike TAE, they do not have to hold the merged plasma steady for any prolonged period of time. They have already demonstrated ~3ms confinement with IPA, which is more than they need anyway. According to my information, Helion is ahead of TAE and also GF, when it comes to plasma temperature. Their current task is to combine all their previous results in a single machine and proof their scaling laws.
Helion has applied for a patent for their reactor design:
http://www.patentsencyclopedia.com/app/20110293056

TAEs reactor is not pulsed.
TAE is merging two CTs into a single stable FRC. To my understanding, they are only using this for FRC formation. They are not accelerating the plasmoids to relevant speeds and they are not compressing them. They are not converting the kinetic energy of the plasmoids into heat but instead are holding the merged FRC steady with neutral beam injection for so long that it can pretty much be considered "indefinitely".

I think we should take further discussion of Helion to the Helion thread. It is off topic here.

[Skipjack]

It looks like one of the inventors of the LINUS approach at NRL, Peter Turchi has come out of retirement to head the SLC development at a company called NumerEx. LINUS is what GFs design is inspired by. Linus had the problem that their liquid liners were too slow. GF is trying to overcome this by using coherent shocks. But that seems to have its own set of problems.
From what I gather, the advantage of the SLC is that they are using liquid metal liners (not lead) that they are accelerating at subsonic speeds but with very high pressure through a gas compression system. Seemingly this will avoid the problems of droplet forming that GF had. They don't seem to have a plasma target yet but could easily buy that from TAE or Helion.

http://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/ ... TURCHI.pdf

[mvanwink5]

GF is also pulsed, method of compression is various. However, compression is not automatically adiabatic, it assumes 'quality' plasma. That is the point. Also the point is that both pulsed and non pulsed machines the spheromak plasma is not some generic, make it, and everything is the same. Hand waving conversion of 'kinetic' energy doesn't cut it, sorry, too many things easily go sideways.

Reports. Why no reports on the plasma 'quality'? At this point Helion progress can't be gauged by published reports. Not publishing is not a good sign in my book. If Helion is so far ahead they should be lining up serious, serious investor money like both TA and GF, and that requires reports, or at least it does for the two best funded companies TA and GF.

[Skipjack]

mvanwink5, I moved the conversation over to here:
viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1669&p=126911#p126911

[crowberry]

General Fusion has published a set of posters presented at the 58th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics. The five posters show the current status of their work at http://www.generalfusion.com/blog/categ ... ic-papers/.

[mvanwink5]

Nathan Gilliland has stepped down as CEO and the CFO is now their interim CEO.

And their latest video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcU9hyjY6go

It seems that based on this latest video that the full scale plasma injector being built is a good sign of confidence. No way to know if they think they are close, but I am guessing that they need the full scale to make the final plasma tuning.

[mvanwink5]

Looks like a big announcement to me.
http://generalfusion.com/2017/03/longer ... ent-plans/

For a recent review of GF progress shown in a pdf poster published in December 2016
http://generalfusion.com/2016/11/acoust ... -overview/

I may be misreading the statement but it looks like the big 200 or more piston sphere is the next step.

[Skipjack]

Sounds like good news!

[mvanwink5]

General Fusion recently brought the first in a series of new sub-component machines online, with our new large plasma injector forming its first plasma on December 22. This was enabled by significant performance gains in our plasma injector program and is allowing us to progress to the next stages of development.

[crowberry]

This is good end interesting news indeed. It would be interesting to know what result made General Fusion decide that they are ready to go for the prototype experiment? The press release points to the results shown in posters presented at the Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics, but the latest General Fusion newsletter mentions that actually first plasma was achieved with the latest plasma injector on December 22nd 2016. Since December 22nd there has been ample time to get quite a few pulses from the new plasma injector. It would also be interesting to know if the new plasma injector has already been used with the chemical compression experiments (aka explosive tests)? Also the schedule and details of the prototype experiments would be very interesting to see.