Helion details

[dmm]

Their CEO wrote a more detailed post a few weeks ago on how their fusion scheme is expected to work:

www.helionenergy.com/articles/how-to-make-fusion-electricity-without-ignition/

Comments

[dmm]

What I knew before:

1) this is the "Altman's fusion startup" (Sam has a very good taste, so I tend to watch his companies)

2) they have this cool "pulsed design" which eliminates the need to maintain excessively long persistence of fusion and eliminates the stupidity of using nuclear energy to heat water first

3) they did this strange "semi-real thing/semi-marketing gimmick" by signing an agreement with Microsoft in 2023 to deliver fusion energy to them in 2028 without having a working prototype back then

4) and more recently, they started to build the 50Mw fusion power plant for that Microsoft contract, still without having a fully working prototype (although, of course, the plant is as good a place to use as a research lab as any other place anywhere else as long as their design is not over-constraining; https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/starting-to-build-the-worlds-first-fusion-power-plant-in-malaga-wa/)

but what I did not understand is that they don't need "ignition", and they even don't need "self-heating", because they recover almost all energy they put in; this makes it a much more realistic target to hit

it's a very elegant design; shooting for actually getting energy from the overall setup without trying to achieve all those difficult things which were always thought to be necessary (and still perhaps not sufficient) preconditions for actually getting practical fusion energy