Helion Energy to demonstrate net electricity production by 2024

[Skipjack]

Since that target Helion learned their machine needed to be larger in diameter & they had some logistics issues (I believe unspecified), so their schedule shifted to full assembly in 2024 & early 2025 for net electric. I still am in hope for early news. LOL

Yeah, supply chain issues since COVID have been a problem for everyone. Helion was unfortunately no exception. Building manufacturing lines and perfecting them takes time (see the "manufacturing hell" of Elon Musk and Tesla). And even when you build your capacitors (e.g.) in house, you still need supplies for those as well. I think that what essentially amounts to a few months delay for a first of a kind machine is not a big deal, all things considered and with the lessons learned and manufacturing lines built, they can now build future machines faster. So, it is not that easy to quantify the net loss of time. We will see how quickly they can ramp up Polaris operations. I would assume that they will need at least a couple of months to fine tune the machine. Assuming that they get the machine built by mid October (which I would assume is a NET date), then it is possible, but IMHO unlikely that they will be able to any net electricity shots this year (though maybe, just maybe there is some sort of Christmas miracle). Most realistically, I would put the first net electricity attempt into April of 2025.

The big question for me is: If/when they achieve net electricity, given their secrecy, when will the general public hear about it? I think the first indicator could be an influx of funding (the 1.7 billion already committed). But all of this is pure speculation on my part. So, take it with a huge grain of salt.

[mvanwink5]

Building manufacturing lines and perfecting them takes time... it is not that easy to quantify the net loss of time.

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.

[TallDave]

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 more optimistic about that before all the articles featuring uninformed tokamak PhDs disparaging the technology. Now I suspect any celebration of a net electric pulse is going to get a lot of public caveats ("it was only a few ms... it was only a small amount of electricity... it can't be pulsed fast enough to make a power plant.. they didn't publish enough data so we don't know if it's real"). Watch, I bet it gets less major media coverage than the NIF "breakthrough" that has no plausible path to commercial power (but employs lots of PhDs for decades).

Science journalism is a hot mess, particularly where it meets engineering. At this point I've given up much hope "the public" will broadly embrace Helion before it is actually producing electricity commercially (and even then I expect lots of "it shouldn't work and probably really doesn't" hemming and hawing in the press). It's just too difficult for laypeople to tell the difference between Helion and a thousand other failed schemes.

But then again, the longer Helion can keep the tech a secret, the richer they'll end up.

[usesbiggerwords]

Maybe, I was more optimistic about that before all the articles featuring uninformed tokamak PhDs disparaging the technology.

If I may put my tinfoil hat on for a moment, the media-research-government complex will take a huge black eye when Helion or some other "fringe" fusion technology beats the PhDs' precious tokamak (which, frankly, I don't think will ever work) to commercialization by decades, so it's not in their best interest to promote non-tokamak designs. Having your life's work shown to be fundamentally flawed and ultimately a waste of decades and billion$ would certainly take the wind out of your sails.

[mvanwink5]

TD, you are a bit more cynical than me, on the other hand, yes, I am too optimistic about public perception of fusion. LOL! Resurrecting the excitement about Fusion's future will be forced by the need to power AI server warehouses & the desire to avoid massive fossil expansion. Helion would seem to have an open field based on their early efforts to make manufacturing center of attention? Helion can't help but be well aware of the massive market expansion on their doorstep due to AI.

[charliem]

I don't understand this choosing of sides when talking fusion.

PhDs vs what, non PhDs? Tokamaks vs FRCs. ITER vs everyone else. Publicly funded research vs privately funded research.

Fusion research is not an spectator sport, where we only care about our side "winning".

In my opinion, Tokamaks and Stellators won't make economic sense for energy production, but that doesn't mean they are not helping. There's so much we still ignore regarding fusion, and every experiment contributes something.

And if money is the issue, the amounts we are investing on this (even ITER) are ridiculous when seen in context. For God's sake, just the US spends orders of magnitud more money per year on recreation, than it is invested on fusion research worldwide.

Rooting against some types of [serious] fusion research sounds to me like rooting against the James Webb telescope, or sending Opportunity to Mars, or building the LHC, or Ligo, or climate research, or cancer, etc. Most of these initiatives will not produce a single dollar for a long time, but that's no reason to cut them off. It is not for cutting funding on fusion research either.

I suspect that fusion will be the ultimate source of power for humanity for a long, long time. I think we are going to see it on Earth and in Space, driving electricity plants and ships, producing heat and power on Antarctica, desalinating water on the Sahara coast, helping produce steel, making space probes go faster, and probably a good number of other applications we have not even thought of yet.

Go fusion. Go fusion research.

Edits: grammar and spelling

[crowberry]

Well said charliem, I agree with what you wrote. In the end the important thing is that someone creates economically viable fusion. The problem with fusion is so hard that no stone should be left unturned trying to find a solution, so it makes sense to research all sensible concepts.

[mvanwink5]

Aug 27, 2024
Our team wrapped up the formation section testbed power bank upgrade and is now back to running plasma tests. This test bed enables our team to optimize how we form FRC plasmas in our systems and will provide early data to inform Polaris operations.

So, Helion has been commissioning Polaris in stages, they are not waiting to start test operation after the machine is fully constructed. Good news for an accelerated program.

[Skipjack]

The formation test machine is a separate machine from Polaris. From what I understand, it is slightly smaller than the formation test section of Polaris, but close enough to give them a head start.

[mvanwink5]

I had understood that the power supply in this test machine was what was smaller, that the latest improvements were increases in its power. Helion needed to add high voltage capacitors as they were manufactured and that was the power supply hold up. Perhaps there was more to it than just the power supply, then?

[TallDave]

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 unrelated fields. FRCs could have been funded at ITER levels and they still wouldn't have been viable until now. And investors pay scant attention to mass media anyway.

Ultimately it either makes money or it doesn't. After the tenth or so plant goes online and China is making three copies a day, the science media will generate some self-absolving retrospective "here's why we were right to doubt this" articles just like when a bioweapon escaped from containment in Wuhan and killed ten million people, and then forget about it.

It does help that large proportions of the global population have developed a superstitious fear of carbon-based energy sources, but in the long run it's really fission that is the main competitor since fossils are eventually going to start getting expensive despite all technological progress in extraction. And while there's no reason why AI would prefer fusion to fission, if Altman is the guy who gets fusion done, great.

[mvanwink5]

I remember all the ITER supporters doing everything they could to shut off funding to alt fusion projects, so don't be surprised at raw feelings.

I am with TD, as long as the fusion approach is practical that is what is important. A huge advantage with Helion is conversion efficiencies which translate to significantly lower heat rejection, heat rejection is possibly the biggest siting issue, thermal power plants (includes fission) know this.

Fusion opens up humanity's full expansion into space, solar does not. Fission fuel mining is fission's biggest issue.

[Munchausen]

Science Media stay aloof for a reason. How many can it be that understand field reversed configurations good enough to make predictions of any value at all?

How many of them has been enough hands on with the nuts and bolts of the Helion project to forecast its chances of success?

I tell you, even they had, they wouldn´t come up with an honest opinion anyway. If you are an academic of that magnitude you have deep connections within your community, you have befrended with your colleagues from all over the world and you weigh your words carefully not to step on someones toes.

This Helion undertaking certainly looks serious, we se photos of big buildings being erected, governors and senators visiting the site and key personnell attending to physics conferences, we hear of contracts of electricity delivery to the microsoft company.

But that is all secondary information.

Personally, I will feel neither surprised nor disappointed if I learn that they completed their machine and then it all falls into silence. And after a few years I will hear that it was all unrealistic, inflated predicitions.

However, what can be said is that the Helion company has painted itseld decisively into the corner and has to deliver on their promise: Net energy from fusion.This is now beyond lab coats and incomprehensible scientific articles.

[Skipjack]

I had understood that the power supply in this test machine was what was smaller, that the latest improvements were increases in its power. Helion needed to add high voltage capacitors as they were manufactured and that was the power supply hold up. Perhaps there was more to it than just the power supply, then?

To my understanding, Polaris' formation section is bigger still, even than the formation test section. From what I know, it has seen several upgrades since they started. It is essentially an "almost full scale" test bed to get a head start while Polaris is getting completed. Their techniques can still be further improved and they are still learning new things all the time. All that will hopefully shorten the time to get Polaris to full performance once it is completed.

If you check the abstracts for their upcoming sessions at APS, it is quite clear that the whole merging and compression sequence is not quite as straight forward as one might think. E.g. I never knew about the pre- compression stage.

[mvanwink5]

SJ, The formation section should be the largest diameter section, no? Further, it too needs to be a quartz tube & Helion only now is wrapping up their in house manufacturing of their quartz tubes, so what you say makes sense that their current formation tests are being run on a scaled down, intermediate sized device. It is hard to properly guess looking from the outside, I appreciate the bits you are able to reveal.

So, it looks like 2025 will be a big year for Helion, that late 2024 was an overly aggressive stretch goal.