Talk-Polywell.org

Yes! Size of plant & heat rejection criteria on siting & permitting cannot be overstated, this is a huge factor. Even for space stations, heat rejection is a major issue (after SpaceX's success we need to expand our use geography to space). Somewhat counterintuitively, heat rejection is actually ha...

They are planning for somewhere between 20 keV to 30 keV for their actual power plants. That seems like a reasonable guess pre-Polaris, but we've yet to see how the plasma reacts to significant fusion heating. I'm sure they have models but I wouldn't trust them without more data. China's very good ...

my summary: on track for testing before end of year, demonstrate electricity likely next year. Thanks, would love to see them break 10K eV before the end of the year. Then we'd start to learn just how much fuel ion heating by fusion products is actually possible. 20KeV? 50 KeV? Since this is pulsed...

I don't understand this choosing of sides when talking fusion. Competition for scarce resources, reputations. Honestly, I don't think it matters that much, though. As with SpaceX, a lot of what makes the tech commercially viable is a stack of fairly recent and obscure innovations across multiple un...

Time to commercial is the most important milestone in one sense, but time to net electric will change the public perception of fusion power. Another important milestone is meeting power contracts already signed by Helion. October for full assembly would be nice & worthy of celebration. Maybe, I was...

As for D-He3 vs D-T: So, at least for now, the 3.52 MeV alphas produced by D-T would be the main source of recoverable energy. That said, D-T should still produce more net electricity in Polaris than D-He3, but the disadvantages for materials in particular make it tough to do so economically in a p...

Still not sure just what the power output for D-T would be at the Te/Ti = .1 regime where Polaris operates though. Presumably it's better than D-D, but is it better than D-He3 at 20 keV? Couldn't say for sure. Well, unless some new weird phenomenon pop up in Polaris, power production from D-T at 20...

... but I think we can safely assume they hope to run D-He3 by the end of the year, since you can't convert D-T products to electricity via the virtual dynamo Let's say that a certain machine can generate 1 MW burning D-He3 (at 20 keV); from that, 0.92 MW would be in ions. Switching to D-T it'd gen...

1 MW/m² for Polaris, or for the prototype? I wonder how high of a peek it will be able to bear. there was a convo about wall loads upthread, they appear to be expecting the load to be concentrated at the divertors due to the shape of the plasma but now that you mention it I'm not sure how D-T looks...

It'd be interesting to see a Helion timeline for construction. from media reports it sounds like they will fire it up sometime around the end of the year there's a lot of "why aren't there peer-reviewed papers etc" skepticism from the lab coat community, but the patent filings make me wonder just h...

WaPo article out, it's mostly climate nonsense but... Microsoft hopes to supercharge that deployment through its partnership with fusion start-up Helion. The site being considered for the generator in Chelan County, Wash., is just a plot of sagebrush so far. It’s not certain the unit will be built. ...

thanks for the update mvan, had not seen that a lot of great work by the Helion team unfortunately it sounds like we won't get to see Polaris break Q>1 this year and of course it might fail for reasons as yet unknown by anyone remember how many Falcons crashed before one landed? and fusion is not ro...

I wonder whether their formation test section campaign is aiming to achieve just that. To my understanding the separation between Te and Ti happens during the formation, whereas the two temperatures want to return to equilibrium during the compression stage but again, the total pulse length is too ...

I had thought Helion said they had over all 95% efficiency fusion energy to electric believe they only said they had recaptured 95% of the compression energy in a smaller machine, which is entirely different from capturing 95% of the total energy of a fusion pulse (maybe someday!)... remains to be ...

Power transfer is not thermal; the plasma ions & electron motion produces a magnetic field which is coupled to the compression coils. The power transfer then behaves the same as a utility power transformer, only without the iron core hysteresis losses. The quartz tube will see neutron heating thoug...