Helion Energy to demonstrate net electricity production by 2024

[TallDave]

go high beta or go home

[Skipjack]

Helion's magnets are just standard aluminum magnets. Not super conducting. I can't unfortunately give more details in their past magnet experiments.
The alternative to stronger magnets are bigger machines. From what I understand, there is currently no noticeable limit for how big you can make them and they scale volumetrically.

[usesbiggerwords]

The alternative to stronger magnets are bigger machines. From what I understand, there is currently no noticeable limit for how big you can make them and they scale volumetrically.

Larger machines are also easier to manage from a thermal perspective, assuming the effective surface area increases faster than the ability to generate waste heat. It's not like Polaris is some beast like a tokamak; it's only 19m long. I can foresee a Mark II commercial machine that's larger than Polaris, maybe 1.25-1.5x, to get better gain (IIRC, the gyroradius was little larger than expected, yes?) and solve any heat management problems that may arise, but still MUCH smaller than most of the other competing fusion technologies.

[Skipjack]

Bigger problem with larger machines is that they can not be transported by road. You need to stay under 3 meters diameter for effective road transport. Length is less of a problem though.

[charliem]

Transport by road may imply other difficulties than size.

How tough will Helion's reactors be ? With an aspect ratio of over 6:1, moving one by road might be hard on the vacuum seals. Transporting by sections, to be assembled on site, seems intuitively gentler on the hardware.

Also, is that really important ? Judging by Helion's own concept design, the ancillaries will take quite more space than the reactor (capacitor banks, power electronics, monitoring and control circuitry, exhaust treatment, cooling, etc.) so, multiple containers anyhow.

[Skipjack]

Transport by road may imply other difficulties than size.

Ask SpaceX! They dimensioned their first stages to be transportable by road. That is why Falcon 9 is so long and thin.
If Helion plans to produce and deliver 20 machines a day, they need to consider logistics.

Also, is that really important ? Judging by Helion's own concept design, the ancillaries will take quite more space than the reactor (capacitor banks, power electronics, monitoring and control circuitry, exhaust treatment, cooling, etc.) so, multiple containers anyhow.

All of this can be transported on trucks by road and will be assembled on site. Even the building can be delivered in pieces by road.
But the core will likely need the most maintenance. Just replace the entire thing, transport it back to the factory, refurbish, then use that to replace another machine, etc.
Otherwise, you have to take crews out to the site, disassemble there, then when re- assembling on site, re- adjust alignments, etc.
I am sure they can package these things up in a way that they are stable for road transport. There are much more fragile things transported by road all the time.

[charliem]

... Even the building can be delivered in pieces by road.
But the core will likely need the most maintenance. Just replace the entire thing, transport it back to the factory, refurbish, then use that to replace another machine, etc.
Otherwise, you have to take crews out to the site, disassemble there, then when re- assembling on site, re- adjust alignments, etc.

Good point.

[Munchausen]

Good point.

Well, I have sometimes wondered why the russian technology of on site reactor tank annealing is never discussed in fusion. From the start of the russian nuclear program they had an issue with producing reactor vessels in the size needed for commercial power plant.

The first work around was the RBMK model which is made up from individual cells of graphite blocks and pipes which are assembled into a reactor core of desired size.

Later they made pressure vessels of sufficient size but still had problems with neutron embrittlement in the alloys available to them. Instead they developed a method for heat treating the vessel in place to relieve the neutron damage. Simply leading electricity through in a controlled manor.

It should be even more useful in fusion than in a fission plant since there are no core installations that has to be removed before the work is started.

[Skipjack]

The problem is that most fusion reactor vessels are not made from steel. Neutron environment is very different too.

[Munchausen]

Found this recent interview with David Kirtley:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_D4vaUULfog

[usesbiggerwords]

Transport by road may imply other difficulties than size.

Ask SpaceX! They dimensioned their first stages to be transportable by road. That is why Falcon 9 is so long and thin.
If Helion plans to produce and deliver 20 machines a day, they need to consider logistics.

Also, is that really important ? Judging by Helion's own concept design, the ancillaries will take quite more space than the reactor (capacitor banks, power electronics, monitoring and control circuitry, exhaust treatment, cooling, etc.) so, multiple containers anyhow.

All of this can be transported on trucks by road and will be assembled on site. Even the building can be delivered in pieces by road.
But the core will likely need the most maintenance. Just replace the entire thing, transport it back to the factory, refurbish, then use that to replace another machine, etc.
Otherwise, you have to take crews out to the site, disassemble there, then when re- assembling on site, re- adjust alignments, etc.
I am sure they can package these things up in a way that they are stable for road transport. There are much more fragile things transported by road all the time.

Having worked in heavy industry, I've seen things much bigger than 3m transported by road. Let's consider too, the current Helion facility won't be the only production facility, if for no other reason than there's a much larger manufacturing base on the other side of the Rockies from them, with far fewer impediments to road transport. State governments will be falling over themselves to attract a Helion fabrication plant (or a licensee of their technology) once the technology proves itself.

[TallDave]

Helion's magnets are just standard aluminum magnets. Not super conducting. I can't unfortunately give more details in their past magnet experiments.
The alternative to stronger magnets are bigger machines. From what I understand, there is currently no noticeable limit for how big you can make them and they scale volumetrically.

thanks, I had assumed Polaris must be SC to reduce the losses in their plasma electric conversion scheme -- they are talking 95% efficiency:

Our earliest machines demonstrated that we could take electricity stored in capacitors, convert it to magnetic fields, and then recover it back out as electricity at as high as over 95% efficiency

lol if they don't even need SC magnets and can harvest 90% of the fusion energy as electricity via plasma currents then even LWRs are are going to be obsolete overnight, let alone fusion competitors with low-beta SC designs

SPARC is envisioning 30T with high-temp SC tape (and seems to be using a molten salt blanket to reduce the maintenance load) but frankly doubtful they ever get to Q>1

thanks for the video Munchausen, Kirtley is quite impressive

Helion seems to be playing their cards very close to the vest, it's surprising how little information there is in about them in many common resources

[mvanwink5]

lol if they don't even need SC magnets and can harvest 90% of the fusion energy as electricity via plasma currents then even LWRs are are going to be obsolete overnight, let alone fusion competitors with low-beta SC designs

As soon as I found out Helion was able to extract the plasma energy directly from the magnetic field push back, it completely changed my outlook to what you have stated. The only other competitor IMO is Zap Energy, and that is because it can retrofit steam plant heat sources.

[Skipjack]

Having worked in heavy industry, I've seen things much bigger than 3m transported by road. Let's consider too, the current Helion facility won't be the only production facility, if for no other reason than there's a much larger manufacturing base on the other side of the Rockies from them, with far fewer impediments to road transport. State governments will be falling over themselves to attract a Helion fabrication plant (or a licensee of their technology) once the technology proves itself.

Sure, you can, but they won't fit through underpasses, you need special permits, it slows things down tremendously. Helion wants to produce (eventually) 20 machines a day. That is a lot of machines to transport. Tactics wins a battle, logistics wins the war.

[Skipjack]

Helion seems to be playing their cards very close to the vest, it's surprising how little information there is in about them in many common resources

They have been a lot more open recently (though still keeping a few things secret). They have a few interviews and stuff with various engineering channels on Youtube. E.g. Real Engineering and the Plasma Channel. The Real Engineering one has a lot of details about their work but still leaves out some things. Helion is trying to walk a thin line between revealing enough and revealing too much. They were rather shocked when they learned about the Chinese clone of Venti. There is now a new, bigger one in the works also. I believe it was called HUFF- FRC, or something like that.