Talk-Polywell.org

The D-D reactions will yield both T and He3. Can the device be operated so they get both D-T and D-He3 reactions at the same rate, so they need not separate the two gases? Though I suppose they plan to separate the gasses so they can sell the T to someone else, and minimize the amount of D-T fusion ...

I see the fusion cross sections for D-T and D-3He peak at about 60 and 250 keV. Have they said what temperatures their demo and power production reactors will reach?

$60/MWh would be $.06/kWh, which sounds good. However, that estimate was in 2014. Have they revised it since then?

Helion has private funding, and little incentive to share their data with the competition, so Grok doesn't have much to work with. I think they'll succeed, though I am not willing to bet on the timescale. My worries: - It will take a lot of tuning. And each successive device will take a lot of tunin...

Or: The concept in "Nuclear propulsion through direct conversion of fusion energy: The fusion driven rocket" by Slough, Pancotti, Kirtley, Pihl, and Pfaff https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20160010608/downloads/20160010608.pdf uses a pulsed fusion machine more similar to Helion's machine but with ...

For fusion propulsion, you might look at the report "Fusion-Enabled Pluto Orbiter and Lander" https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/niac_2016_phasei_thomas_fusiontopluto_tagged.pdf by Stephanie Thomas. She estimated "2.5 to 5 N of thrust for each megawatt of fusion power, reaching a specif...

Much of the show was background information. My notes from latter part of the interview: 1:41 With FRC, one can recover the input energy at 90 or 95%, and the fusion energy at 80% 1:43 D-T fusion requires about 100 million degrees. D-3He requires a higher temperature (200 or 300 million degrees), wh...

I can't imagine a flywheel being practical, at the very least because it would require a very high power motor/generator. The twin assembly sounds more interesting. I would require slowing down the "expansion" phase of one machine so it could supply power for the FRC formation, acceleration, and com...

They're emphasising their efficiency, which as a physicist agree is important, but I can't help thinking that it's much more important to eliminate the cost and delay of obtaining and installing all those heat exchangers, turbines, and generators. Speaking of supply chains, has anyone at Helion spec...

That would be H. R. 5441 https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/5441/text/ih . Some of those "fusion energy components" sound pretty generic: “(vii) A high-voltage capacitor. “(x) High-power switches. “(xii) High-voltage conductors and insulators. “(xvii) Cooling system components. ...

John Slough has written an article "A compact fusion reactor based on the staged compression of an FRC". He describes an approach to forming and heating an FRC that "is expected to achieve fusion gain as large as 10" with D-T fusion. He describes a number of constraints on device parameters to ensur...

Suppose that, on each pulse, a fraction s of the He3 does not fuse. So a fraction s^2 survives two pulses, a fraction s^3 survives three pulses, etc., and a given He3 survives n=s/(1-s) pulses on average. Now let c = the energy per pulse per He3 to heat and compress the plasma, y = energy yield when...

With He3 selling for $20,000/g and tritium for $30,000/g, I wonder if they can make a profit running on D-D without generating net electricity. At least until the markets for those gasses crash.

There's a new paper entitled "Polywell revisited" at https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06761 by Jaeyoung Park, Nicholas A. Krall, Giovanni Lapenta, and Masayuki Ono Here's the abstract: The Polywell fusion concept, originally proposed by Robert W. Bussard in 1985, has been investigated for over four decade...

Hmm. So I guess the strategy is to use D-D to tune the device for the right plasma conditions (e.g. triple product), then D-He3 and further tuning to maximize the fusion, then yet more tuning to maximize the direct energy out. Hopefully that will demonstrate net electricity production. It seems to m...