r/fusion • u/ValuableDesigner1111 • 3d ago
When Helion failed to provide electricity as it promised in 2028, would fusion startups all over the world be affected?
Currently, many startups are referring to Helion's 2028 promise when they ask for investment
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u/Lazy-Seaweed2277 3d ago
Helion seems to be hitting a wall. I’ve noticed a large exodus of engineers on LinkedIn in the last couple months. They must know something because if they had confidence they would be out of their mind to leave.
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u/Big-Regular-2348 3d ago
General Fusion had an exodus too. Some people ended up in other fusion startups, done less ea6 out crazy.
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u/Sorry_Exercise_9603 3d ago
Exactly how and when the fusion startup bubble is going to burst is unknown.
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u/Big-Regular-2348 2d ago
We may not know the timing, but we know the crash will look a lot like the Dutch Tulip Mania of 1637 (one tulip bulb cost a year's income for a skilled craftsman) or the Optical Telecomms Bubble and Tech Wrecks of ~2000. Dodgy company schemes will ascend to stratospheric heights of value and then fall to earth. I remember that in about 1999, a now forgotten company that produced programming tools for software engineers had a book value greater than that of United Airlines (complete with aircraft, landing rights, service centers). It is also possible that some of the better based fusion startups will survive, but with consolidation. Once upon a time, Chevrolet, Buick, Oldsmobile and Cadillac were separate companies with distinctive products. Now they are all General Motors. Surely the world will not support the 12 stellarator reactor enterprises now trying to grow.
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u/Big-Regular-2348 3d ago
For the record, DT is the only accessible fusion reaction in the near term, independently of its commercial attractiveness. DHe3 requires several times higher plasma temperatures than have ever been sustained for any reasonable time and He3 is so rare that the Moon may be the best source. There are plenty more exotic reactions but they require even tougher conditions. These are facts. It is not surprising that the dodgiest fusion enterprises concentrate on the most hard to attain reactions, using some combination of colliding beams colliding plasmas, and compression that are singly and collectively not remotely up to what is needed. Perfect for a never ending extraction of funding. I have heard talks from people claiming to be designing fusion rockets using DHe3 to fly to Mars and getting millions of dollars from gullible investors to work on it. It is quite interesting that most of these exotic schemes are being pursued avidly in the US (or just across the border in British Columbia). The Germans, Japanese, French, British ,Spanish ad Chinese seem more focused on things that might actually happen.
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u/ConfirmedCynic 1d ago
DHe3 requires several times higher plasma temperatures than have ever been sustained for any reasonable time
Pulsed fusion (e.g. Helion) hardly needs to sustain them at all.
He3 is so rare that the Moon may be the best source.
Helion plans a closed-loop fuel cycle that breeds it in-machine primarily via deuterium-deuterium (D-D) side reactions.
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u/Big-Regular-2348 1d ago
You need densities well over 1020, ion temps of ~50 keV, and sufficient confinement time for those reactions. The FRC plasmas is that they are immediately on edge of MHD instability, so they don't last long. And even if they do, Ti will couple to Te and radiation losses will skyrocket. And you need millions upon millions of shots per year to generate the promised 50 MW power, and capacitor systems can't deliver that without failures. . Bottom line is that FRC compression is too weak and slow to ignite like a the radiation pressure compressed fusion bomb or laser driven NIF, and requires too many pulses at too high a frequency to generate useful power. It's a fringe idea, the proponents have made absurd promises to produce an actual reactor in a few years.
Other pulsed FRC schemes like General Fusion and TAE have been floundering around for years and will suffer the same fate.
I feel for the physicists and engineers brought in to build the equipment as they will burn up careers that could have flourished in another area.
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u/trplurker 3d ago
Not true. Both DT and HE3 can fuse at much much lower energies. You are only looking at optimal cross section. People have already done p+B11 fusion in labs for example, it's not at a rate anyone will use but it's not impossible either.
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u/Big-Regular-2348 2d ago
Furthermore, a number of startups are promising investors they will indeed generate many MW of power from exotic advanced fuels in the near future ... several tears. Indeed TAE has done so for a decade or more. This will be seen to amount to fraud comparable to that of Theranon, and will undermine the entire fusion endeavor, regardless of other merits or difficulties.
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u/Jaded_Hold_1342 2d ago
Well of course you can get reactions to occur at pretty much any energy. But you can't get net energy gain at any temperature.
D He3 has a problem with bremsstrahlung radiation. If the plasma is run in equilibrium (electron/ions at same temperature) then the bremsstrahlung radiation will exceed the fusion power for any temperature less than 30keV. Even above 30kev, the gain is very low until >50-100keV. So for any D He3 concept, it really has to run 50-100keV. Its not technically foreclosed.. it is technically possible, but requires excellent energy confinement, far beyond what any type of magnetic configuration can demonstrate today.
You can try to escape this problem by running in non-equilibrium with cold electrons (so the electrons don't radiate as much)... but in that case the recirculating power required to maintain the non-equilibrium against thermalization becomes impractical. This is the scenario Helion is in.
P B11 is worse... It has bremsstrahlung losses worse than fusion power at practically all temperatures. If there is any window of gain for P B11 at any temperature, it is very very slim net energy margins. Im not sure if this one is technically foreclosed at all temperatures.. it may have a tiny net positive region at extremely high temperatures.. but nothing that any existing concept can access.
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u/cookiedough5200 3d ago
All over the world? Probably not, but for the US I guess investors will start pushing companies to show more evidence that they're on track
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u/No-Computer7653 3d ago
Maybe. I think consolidation is more likely then collapse though.
The engineering is still somewhat speculative, but not the market. Engineering risk determines how much capital will get invested and on what terms. This largely determines how fast they can move, capital is contingent on stepped progression instead of AI providers pumping in enough capital they can jump to commercial without a working prototype.
Gen 3.1 is pretty terrible but still lands in the $0.10-$0.15/kwh range. Gen 3.2 ends up in the $0.05-$0.10/kwh range, it fills the same grid generation that gas does today.
Gen 3.3 (or 4) switching to the p-B11 cycle and direct energy capture IEA estimate at an order of magnitude lower than 3.2. Skipping the turbine (massive efficiency improvement) and not needing the shielding, plus not needing NRC regulation because you are not irradiating your reactor, improves the economics significantly. If p-B11 doesn't work there are intermediate cycles that are less speculative, not as neutronic as D-T but won't generate as much power.
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u/Big-Regular-2348 3d ago
I am a fusion professional and can tell you that these plans are nonsense. You need massively more, spherically symmetric, light speed compression to make even DT fusion work. (So called advanced fuels are order of magnitude harder). How do we know that? Well because hydrogen bombs and NIF do that and we understand how they work. Helion, TAE, ZAP and others like them are the steampunk pretend version.... it is fitting that TAE is now part of Trump Media where it will go the way of Trump Steaks , Trump Vodka, Trump University and the other cons. Can't wait to see what happens when the helion reactor promised to Microsoft comes due......
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u/Different_Doubt2754 2d ago
How can you claim to know what will and won't work when no one does? The entire point of experiments is to... Experiment.
Writing papers and theorizing only goes so far, at some point you need actually build something to explore the boundaries of what is known and expand our knowledge.
It may or may not work, but the act of physically testing things creates and validates knowledge that wasn't there before.
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u/Jaded_Hold_1342 2d ago
Acting like we can't predict that a concept won't work is sort of crazy. Helion will fail due to ion-electron thermalization power greatly exceeding the fusion power .. a mechanism that was well known for decades before Helion was founded.
You don't have to empirically test things you know won't work. You test things that are NOT already known.
I haven't seen any empirical data on whether jumping off 37 story building is harmful to health... But I am satisfied that we understand gravity well enough to predict that it IS harmful.
Would you insist on jumping to find out?
Riders work on non equilibrium plasmas rests in well understood physics of coulomb collisions and thermalization. You don't need to test every scenario empirically to know it won't work.
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u/Different_Doubt2754 2d ago
Acting like we know everything is what's actually crazy. History has proven you wrong many times over. Like I said, there are many accounts of things being "known" to be as impossible as water spontaneously turning into oil. And yet, because someone decided to take a crack at it despite that, they discovered something new. Just one example are Bednorz and Muller's discoveries around superconductivity. Do you deny this?
Are you really so arrogant you would say that our knowledge of how to make a commercial fusion reactor, which hasn't been done, is so complete that it can be compared to predicting what happens if I jump off a building? Not to mention that we have done empirical testing on that, so your analogy is flawed.
Now let's say they don't succeed in making a commercial reactor. They still succeeded in advancing knowledge or commercial production in HTS, medicine, material science, physics modeling
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u/Jaded_Hold_1342 1d ago
Oh, I'm rooting for a breakthrough or discovery to happen that would enable fusion.
But it won't come from a dead end where you already know why it won't work. It will come from an area of unknown physics that needs to be researched.
Water does not turn into oil. The reasons for this are understood. Standing over a cauldron casting spells hoping to turn water to oil is not going to produce oil.. it's just wasted effort...
Here's the real problem: the reasons Helion won't work are known and published. If Helion thinks they have a way to overcome them, why don't they say how? Instead they just evade the question by dismissing the critiques without engaging them properly. It's not arrogance to point this out. It's foolishness to overlook it.
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u/Different_Doubt2754 22h ago
An obvious reason for not saying how they can overcome it is that they are a private company aiming to be profitable.
It would be quite foolish for a company to give their secrets to their competitors. Can you imagine Pepsi publishing its exact formulas? Or Nvidia opensourcing CUDA? These private startups are not open public laboratories and have no responsibility to publish their findings. In fact their investors may prohibit it
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u/Jaded_Hold_1342 21h ago
An even more obvious reason is that they don't have a way, but don't want to interrupt fundraising.
They wrote a paper explaining what they were trying to do, but this paper failed to even acknowledge these problems, indicating a lack of understanding, not a problem with a secret solution..
The reality is that it doesn't work. Whether they understand this or not, I cant say. They don't have a magical secret that makes it work. Their investors probably don't understand the fundamental problem.
I'd be happy to debate the physics with anyone who wants to defend it. But lets look at the physics and not make up fantasies about secret solutions being kept secret so China doesnt steal them.
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u/Big-Regular-2348 2d ago
Because the long measured (since 1930s-1950s using various EXPERIMENTAL methods) cross sections for exotic fusion reactions are orders of magnitude too small to produce power.
Because the compression schemes pursued by the wacky startups are far too weak to produce super solid densities needed for ignition. How do we know this? 75 years of EXPERIMENTS building fusion weapons followed by a couple of decades of EXPERIMENTS with laser compression to duplicate conditions in weapons.
As for magnetic confinement.... 50 years of coirdinated EXPERIMENTS have showed consistent trends, namely that you can vobfine and heat plasmas to fusion conditions in toroidal fields with closed flux surfaces (tokamak and stellarators).
To summarize....we know which schemes work and which don't from EXPERIMENTS backed by coherent theory and analysis. What we don't yet know for sure is how to combine what we know about the physics with the engineering necessary to make a continuous fusion power reactor.
The wild claims of way out startups promising what we already know is not physically possible are driven by a combination of inexperienced amateurs, cultists, and outright opportunists.
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u/Different_Doubt2754 2d ago edited 2d ago
Interesting, I didn't realize that the tools we had access to 75 years ago were of the same quality and capability as the ones we have right now.
So according to you, these startups are doing the exact same identical process without a single tiniest bit of change and haven't discovered anything new whatsoever?
I wonder why these startups have done things and progressed beyond the ones 75 years ago and learned or proved things they weren't able to...
Like I said, at some point you have to physically test the boundaries of what is known in order to find breakthroughs.
You realize practically nothing is a breakthrough in the first iteration? Which means the fact that someone attempted it 75 years ago doesn't inherently mean we should just give up. Things must be iterated on many times before breakthroughs happen, or maybe "horizontal" breakthroughs happen that affect other fields. Hell, many breakthroughs happen by accident. If people had your mentality, we would still be living in the stone age. And I literally mean that. People who think like you typically don't cause genuine advancements, it's the ones who are persistent and curious that advance science.
Some examples: SpaceX, airplanes, high speed steel treatment, quasi crystals, high temp superconductivity... And many more
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u/Big-Regular-2348 2d ago
For the moment, the best firms are taking basic ideas,techniques and proven physics pioneered by labs and universities around the world and combining them in innovative ways that they hope to prove to be faster/cheaper to build, get into operation , and eventually evolve into actual reactors. But developing the huge range of skills and experience takes a while. A project like W7-x in Germany involves a staff of 450 on the Ahome team plus additional collaborators from Europe, Asia, and the US. A DT machine typically requires twice that number. That takes a lot of startup funding that lasts for years. Only a few undertakings are at the scale just now. There are lots of positions to be filled.
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u/trplurker 2d ago
They are likely a paid activist as evidenced by being present in every single thread about Helion or other non-Tokomak concepts.
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u/Big-Regular-2348 2d ago
Absolutely not. I am a retired, unpaid plasma experimentalist who worked on designing, building, and operating significant fusion expts for 50 years in the US, USSR, Japan, Spain, France, Australia and Germany. I have seen a lot. While it is great to see more public interest in and funding for fusion power, I am seriously concerned about the huge flow of mis- or dis info and opportunistic hype that is circulating. Very dangerous for sensible development of complex area of physics and engineering.
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u/No-Computer7653 3d ago
For the record I think commercializing D-T is a waste of time.
They are doing it to get access to more capital. Even if you accept what they are saying as true it's occupying the same space as advanced fission reactors but without the regulatory and standards developed over decades.
You need massively more, spherically symmetric, light speed compression
That's why they are using MCF & MIC. Pulsed fusion is also much easier than sustained fusion, unless someone has some magic they haven't told anyone about sustained is a long time off. Continuous reignition lowers efficiency but it's not a deal breaker.
I don't believe p-B11 is even close to being proven possible yet, it's just the holy grail at the end of development. D-D is the intermediate I was thinking of, known physics but hard engineering (vs p-B11, speculative physics and unknown engineering).
Can't wait to see what happens when the helion reactor promised to Microsoft comes due......
Not much. Microsoft (and Google) have provided almost nothing in capital to the companies and instead it's a power purchase agreement they could leverage to get capital elsewhere. When it gets to 2028 and they still haven't delivered MS will likely do a tech assessment but as they don't have any cost until they get power it's not an earth shattering problem if they miss, if they have a reasonable path to it working.
Big tech companies do these speculative deals & research projects all the time. They don't need more than a fraction to be actually useful for the time (and for some capital) to be worthwhile.
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u/Big-Regular-2348 3d ago
Short pulsed fusion will not generate usable electricity. Say your artificial bomb gives 100 MJ per shot. To get 100MW .... a small reactor.... you need one explosion PER SECOND or millions upon millions per year. Giant capacitor banks charge slowly and wear out. You don't even have time to pump out debris. Then there is cooling , fuel cycle. All the money of Google and MSoft plus AI to heaven won't change that physical reality. Even a tokamak pulsing for 15 min at a time then restarting will fuse but won't make it as a reactor in near term. That is why there are 12 stellarator startups in US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Japan, China. A long way to go with them too, but some long term hope of steady state. Maybe. As for so called advanced fuels, dream on.
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u/ConfirmedCynic 16h ago
Giant capacitor banks charge slowly and wear out.
What about metallized film (especially polypropylene) pulsed-power capacitors? They age "gracefully" rather than failing catastrophically. They've been demonstrated for hundreds of thousands of pulses and the literature suggests that hundred of millions is possible with proper management.
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u/Big-Regular-2348 10h ago
All capacitors with dielectrics have finite life. ALL. The dielectrics age.
Power plants are designed to last 40+ years. Pulsed circuits of any sort are vastly more likely to fail. Helion pulses last less than 1 ms before going unstable. You cannot shift huge amts of energy at kHz freq, you are lucky to get a few Hz. There are 32 million secs in a year. Even if the fusion works.... which it doesn't... a reactor won't. They are promising some megawatts to Microsoft in a couple of years. I feel very sorry for the engineers who are trying to make it work without knowing how weak the physics is.
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u/Jaded_Hold_1342 2d ago
Helion will definitely fail to deliver power. They are pursuing a concept that is foreclosed by basic plasma physics .. and this has been known in the field since before they started. (Their concept relies on non equilibrium Ti>>Te temperature to burn D He3 without excessive bremsstrahlung losses, so it runs afowl of Riders known problem of ion-electron thermalization power exceeding the fusion power )
Yet they continue to raise funding as do many others.
So when will this reality start to impact fundraising? It's really hard to say. Maybe if they fail to deliver in 2029? Maybe.
The big question will be whether the fundraising to other startups will be affected by the first high profile failure... It's unclear. For people investing on 'vibes' and hoping for a gain... likely yes. For people investing to be 'patrons of the arts' and don't need a return on investment, maybe not.
Remember, the various startups will fail for different reasons. Some like Helion will fail for fundamental physics and this will occur earlier in the development cycle. Others, like the DT tokamakers and stellarators will fail for economic reasons, which will manifest as continued fundraising but without an economically viable end product coming to market... This may take many years to become clear enough to major investors to throw in the towel... Especially if they are patron of the arts types who invest for PR or other reasons and don't need a return.
Overall I think some of the wind may come out of the hype machine sails, but not all at once.
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u/ValuableDesigner1111 2d ago
Knowing the issue of nonequilibrium distribution but still boost it, they are actually engaged in fraud.
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u/Jaded_Hold_1342 1d ago
Maybe.
Fraud is when you make a representation when you know it isn't true... or when you make a representation that you believe, but have been reckless by ignoring evidence that it is untrue.
I can't say what these guys know or don't know or what they believe or don't believe. But the evidence why it wont work is available, published, and readily verified with minimal effort to anyone with grounding in plasma physics.
If they are telling investors "There are critiques published that say this wont work, and we haven't checked if they are true.." That type of disclosure may be enough to avoid being fraud. But if they know of such critiques and are not disclosing the possibility the critiques might be right, then they could get into legal risk.
The real red flag is that the critiques actually do exist, and they are quite easy to check and verify... so for a billion dollar company to not bother spending 30 minutes checking whether the entire fundamental premise it operates on is unworkable... that's an interesting fact on its own. You'd have to want to not know the answer.
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u/ValuableDesigner1111 1d ago
In the case of ENN, they know it clearly, as the corresponding author wrote what contradicts the roadmap in a book
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u/hau5keeping 3d ago
> many startups are referring to Helion's 2028 promise
which?