Talk-Polywell.org

I think the problem is more the total amounts of He3 available in some extractable form or another. if they want to operate thousands of power plants, they will need tonnes of that stuff annually. nah vast volumes of He3 are currently thrown away with the He4, because to this point no one has wante...

also while I agree they don't need a dedicated D-D, note that without dedicated D-D or an He3 source, they cannot run dedicated D-He3, which has consequences

would guess they are still doing D-D at the moment, probably so they can produce enough He3 for the whole D-He3 testing cycle

guessing 20T would probably achieve something around 30KeV for D-He3, but again a lot depends on that proton production rate and the fine details of the PIC simulations They actually do NOT want too much proton heating. Generally, they do not want to get anywhere near ignition territory. I do not f...

They are going for 20 to 30 keV because they need 2/3 of the reactions to be D-D which favors lower temps and higher density. They can scale pretty much linearly between the two. So they can balance it to get the optimal power to breeding ratio. IIRC, the graphs were made for 20 Tesla magnetic fiel...

you want our dear old friend Fig. 15 https://media.springernature.com/lw685/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1007%2Fs10894-023-00367-7/MediaObjects/10894_2023_367_Fig15_HTML.png Secondly, by decreasing the electron to ion temperature ratio as shown in Fig. 15 (which has been demonstrated routinely in ...

400 SF is the size of a standard shipping container, which was their original goal. (Actually, 40x8 or 320 SF, but I was being generous.) I don't think it is still practical, but I was trying to pin down Skipjack to quantify what he meant by "They will get a lot simpler and cheaper to build over ti...

Why does it have to be 400 sf? To reach their price point of <$6/MWh, unless you've heard differently. your link says 60, not 6 also 400 SF would be smaller than my bedroom, don't think anyone needs a 50MWe fusion reactor quite that tiny:) maybe for HEO you could get close to that, given that you o...

if they all work, I can't see how Zap or TAE could compete with Helion economically in the long run, but at least they'd be much closer than ARC of course any of them may not work :) TAE does not use massive power pulses to produce B field pulses like Helion as their machine is steady state operatio...

yeah, that makes sense I guesstimate D-He3 breakeven around 12T given Kirtley's stated B^3.77 scaling I did ask if they could drop a power emoji when it happens (I don't need details and will take them entirely at their word) but again, if it was my billions on the line I'd delay that announcement a...

But I think that the market will be big enough to support not just one, but several fusion companies, all with their own strengths. I think that the next 3 years will see fusion booming in a way that few people (maybe the most optimistic ones here) would have predicted. The dot com boom will be a m...

Just as a conversation starter, what does 50 MWe buy you in space? Science-fiction style high thrust ion/Hall thrusters? Mars in weeks instead of months? believe it depends on how much reaction mass you're willing to add in exchange for ISP iirc at max ISP, a stream of 50MWe directed MeV fusion out...

2:25 Spacecraft near Earth use solar power, but in deep space that gets impractical. Nuclear power uses fuel with high energy density. However, nuclear generators using a steam cycle are hard to cool. Siting is one of the biggest issues for all electric generation plants, not just space. Of the man...

jrvz wrote: ↑

Fri Dec 05, 2025 3:03 pm

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%

that's funny, 80% was actually my BOE/WAG a year or so ago... don't think they've given out a number before

New blog post by Helion: Measuring electricity production from fusion: Electrical diagnostics https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/measuring-electricity-production-from-fusion-electrical-diagnostics/ Thanks for alerting us to that new post, SJ. Not very informative, since they don't provide any ac...

it may be an act of unmitigated chutzpah, even hubris, but all indications are it's an honest (albeit audacious) business venture I don't know if you've been keeping up with the news, but it's to keep the OpenAI bubble from popping. that's a bit silly, Helion is worth $5B, OpenAI is more like $750B...