Talk-Polywell.org

$.01 per kwh at 50MW implies a machine cost below $5M per year if we assume opex is $1M and machine lifetime is 25 years, that's very roughly about $100M per reactor, installed. Of course for that time period we should really apply a discount rate, plus who knows what fuel costs would be (see above)...

Assuming things go as planned how many D-D burners would be needed to feed the D-He burners? I'm assuming the D-D burners would require more maintenance. ideally the existing natural gas stream would add an additional cryo distilliation step (it's just a few more degrees) and drop the cost of He3 b...

as we await Helion's transition from interesting temperatures to interesting yields, it occurs to me we don't really know what yields are necessary to generate net electricity Fig 15 is described as conservative, but how does the actual loss fraction compare to the graph? are they truly losing... ha...

sdg wrote: ↑

Thu Feb 19, 2026 10:55 pm

As an electrical engineer, the efficiency and elegance of this design is extraordinary:

I mean, each pulse even sweeps out the exhaust from the last one

sometimes I feel a bit like a Neolithic looking at a ball-point pen

the Chinese are quite nice generally, it is CCP that no one likes, particularly the Chinese themselves they're trying to copy Elon too, but rocket science and fusion are hard what's really fascinating is where Helion's tech could go with spin polarization if it is possible in their machines, we coul...

Lawson triple product generally assumes a continuous process. Helion's reactors are intended to produce discrete chunks of gain (around 5-10MJ for Orion). This is why Helion doesn't like discussions of Q. The closest comparison would be how much electricity they recovered vs how much they lost. We c...

This is all very exciting and nice reading as an evening pastime but perhabs you shouldn't get your cylinder head gasket blown over this recent announcement. Where is the Helion Company in the triple product chart compared to others? Lawson triple product is (mostly) irrelevant to their design. Thi...

https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/engineering-hardware-for-extreme-scales/ heedlessly inferring a) from the ">10KeV" that they are still doing D-D and b) they broke something we learn more from failure than success anyways at the rate they are churning out components if something did break it sh...

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...