Helion Energy to demonstrate net electricity production by 2024

[TallDave]

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.

yes Kirtley says in the last video they are focusing on making modular components small enough to fit through a train tunnel, and mentions Falcon in that context as well

so apparently rail transport is the plan, but he does not mention the vacuum chamber specifically, so that might only cover the other components

[Carl White]

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.

I've suggested it before and will suggest it again, probably: delivery by dirigible.

[KitemanSA]

I've suggested it before and will suggest it again, probably: delivery by dirigible.

And heck, the product being delivered makes the gas that floats the ship!

[Skipjack]

yes Kirtley says in the last video they are focusing on making modular components small enough to fit through a train tunnel, and mentions Falcon in that context as well
so apparently rail transport is the plan, but he does not mention the vacuum chamber specifically, so that might only cover the other components

Well rail and road. Rail only gets you so far...

[Carl White]

From Twitter:

First FRC in our Polaris Formation test!

What an awesome photo of our deuterium plasma injector testing! This is the first at this scale of FRC to be made by fully semiconductor switching – think billions of pulses (decades) instead of tens of thousands (months). We are also testing out new controls, diagnostics, and higher efficiency operation.

[TallDave]

Well rail and road. Rail only gets you so far...

depends what you're doing, heavy industry has traditionally been located along rivers and railroads for that very reason

not unusual to find coal power plants with dedicated tracks

the last mile problem has been around forever

of course they probably won't need to ship nearly as much tritium as coal

[Skipjack]

of course they probably won't need to ship nearly as much tritium as coal

Yeah and the Tritium will be leaving the plants, not going there.

[Enginerd]

Companies say they're closing in on nuclear fusion as an energy source. Will it work?
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/04/12155391 ... will-it-wo

"In a gleaming warehouse complex north of Seattle, David Kirtley is building what he hopes will be the future of power generation...."

[Skipjack]

2.5’ thick borated concrete shielding walls are going up in Ursa. These walls will shield the rest of the facility from neutrons generated during Polaris operations.

HelionBoratedConcrete.jpg (102.85 KiB) Viewed 1496 times

https://x.com/Helion_Energy/status/1732 ... 50670?s=20

[Bumblebee]

Assembly line installation for accelerating our capacitor bank production output! Now we can build and test capacitor assemblies on a single assembly line, reducing movement time.

https://twitter.com/Helion_Energy/statu ... 4188451992

[Skipjack]

New Helion news letter is out. It is quite long, so I can't post screenshots.

Link to web- version:
https://mailchi.mp/helionenergy/recappi ... fb0f77adc2

Team is now 220 people strong.

They are currently upgrading the Polaris formation test section after results from the initial tests.

A major push for us this year was on our pulsed power circuit design and testing. Early in the year, we showed that we could run our pulsed power and energy recovery system at full power and high efficiency at 1 Hz for over 144,000 pulses. Presently, we're testing the fully integrated circuit and controls that simulate the full expected loads faced in Polaris. These tests, prior to Polaris integration, will help us move quickly once Polaris is up and operating.

As we are testing components throughout the Polaris system, we have also started to build out our manufacturing capabilities, including capacitor and coil manufacturing. Our capacitor manufacturing team has delivered our first in-house orders for Polaris and continues to accelerate their efforts producing more capacitors per day than ever before. Additionally, our team has been machining, manufacturing, and assembling Polaris electromagnetic coils in-house.

All of the above are now starting to come together, along with full machine sections, as we move toward Polaris system integration. Both Polaris Formation sections are complete, our acceleration coils are being assembled, and our compression section is well underway. As we look into the first half of next year, this will be our major area of focus: bringing Polaris together.

Looks like Polaris assembly might have slipped to the right by a few months. That is OK. They still have a chance to meet net electricity before the end of 2024, though it is IMHO likely that their target dates are moving to the right by a few months (everyone's always do)...
Still, even if they take a few months longer, it would still be an incredible achievement. Polaris would still be completed in less than 3 years from a pile of dirt on an empty lot with many components built in- house (and with those manufacturing streets also built from scratch).

[TallDave]

thanks Skip, much appreciated

been looking over Kirtley's paper, this seems to be the crux



so if that's accurate they expect usable power to be about 3x combined losses/non-usable power over the area where the major losses meet

but the losses have to come from the pulse energy, so looks like (summing the brem and transport) max Q would be 5, with losses and D-D output incidental hazards to be handled however (as opposed to toks where losses would be barriers to ignition, here they are only barriers to getting back enough energy to make the pulse useful)

they say the Polaris bank is 50MJ (10MW over some time?) but I'm not sure how that relates to the expected fusion power output (what raw Q they actually expect) but they've already been to 9KeV and seem to expect Polaris to reach 20KeV or perhaps higher

so if we postulate a raw Q=2 at 20KeV (ignoring D-D output) we get a 20MW usable output power pulse over (say) 1ms to run through the plasma turbine, so at 90% recovery (95% still sounds crazy to me) they have 18MW back into the capacitor (or 90MJ)

also not sure if the 50MJ bank number is sized for the input or the output (i.e. maybe they expect to send out 40 and get back 50)

of course even a raw Q of 1.2 (including the D-D output) would be absolutely world-shattering in a device this relatively cheap and quick to assemble

[Skipjack]

thanks Skip, much appreciated

been looking over Kirtley's paper, this seems to be the crux



so if that's accurate they expect usable power to be about 3x combined losses/non-usable power over the area where the major losses meet

but the losses have to come from the pulse energy, so looks like (summing the brem and transport) max Q would be 5, with losses and D-D output incidental hazards to be handled however (as opposed to toks where losses would be barriers to ignition, here they are only barriers to getting back enough energy to make the pulse useful)

they say the Polaris bank is 50MJ (10MW over some time?) but I'm not sure how that relates to the expected fusion power output (what raw Q they actually expect) but they've already been to 9KeV and seem to expect Polaris to reach 20KeV or perhaps higher

so if we postulate a raw Q=2 at 20KeV (ignoring D-D output) we get a 20MW usable output power pulse over (say) 1ms to run through the plasma turbine, so at 90% recovery (95% still sounds crazy to me) they have 18MW back into the capacitor (or 90MJ)

also not sure if the 50MJ bank number is sized for the input or the output (i.e. maybe they expect to send out 40 and get back 50)

of course even a raw Q of 1.2 (including the D-D output) would be absolutely world-shattering in a device this relatively cheap and quick to assemble

You are somehow mixing energy and power here, which makes this a bit confusing to read.
Yes, the capacitor bank has to handle the input and the output energy (and power). The power part is pretty important too. It has to be able to deliver a certain amount of power in a relatively short time. It might drive the bank to be oversized for the actual energy content. Though that is pure speculation on my part.
The Q they are aiming for with their power plants is relatively low (about 2). I believe this that this is Qeng. Though at ~90% recovery efficiency (depending on the amount of D-D reactions vs D-He3 reactions they want/need to achieve), Qeng and Qsci are close enough together for it to probably not matter anyway.

It is also worth noting that David Kirtley has repeatedly mentioned that (paraphrasing from memory) "in a pulsed system, assuming that all of those losses are actually losses is not a good assumption to make".

I think that this year is going to be interesting for sure. Fingers crossed that all of Helion's predictions come true.

[TallDave]

yes, instantaneous conversions are confusing... you have to mix energy (joules sitting in the capacitors pre-pulse) with power (watts flowing into the Polaris system to do various pulse-related things such as compress or accelerate the plasma (essentially transferring the energy), then flowing back out into the capacitors to become joules again)

typically capacitance seems to be measured in terms of the length of time they can reliably deliver a certain amperage at a specific voltage, but Helion's setup is obviously not a typical use case... they gave us capacitance in joules which probably makes more sense in this context (where we ultimately care a lot more about total energy in vs out)

although I think my J/W conversion in the prior post was for 1 second of wattage which is certainly way longer than the pulse, so maybe up those by a factor of 100 - 1000

we don't know (or at least I don't) the precise planned length and wattage of the Polaris pulse, except that it must be less than 100ms since their planned frequency is 10/sec, so my guess was a plasma lifetime of about 1 ms, so if they used the whole bank of 50MJ over .001 seconds we'd get 50GW for the pulse cost I think, and 250GW as the max resulting power

that's a hot tamale!

fwiw Tri-Alpha claims to have gotten FRC plasma lifetimes as long as 1ms, although obviously their setup is quite different

https://nucleus.iaea.org/sites/fusionpo ... nt0644.pdf

there are apparently some schemes for recapturing brem (and I can't rule out significant recapture of the compression energy by intrinsic (non-fusion-related) plasma pushback) but to Kirtley's point, Helion isn't relying on fusion outputs to continuously heat the plasma so losses have a very different context

of course for Polaris the big question seems to be whether they can reach >20KeV plasma temps, where Q is plentiful by any definition of losses

[mvanwink5]

Dave, the speed of the plasma as I remember is accelerated to 1 million mph, so the pulse length is very short, so curent flow is huge (look at the conductors to the coils). You might recall that the power electronics capability is only recent if that gives you some reference. To calculate the time then you would need the acceleration profile (exponential?)