Helion Energy has recently announced that their most recent fusion generator prototype has been running for 16 months at 100 million degrees with 10,000 operational cycles, with “upwards of 95%” energy harvesting and reclamation efficiency. This is an unusual setup because it recovers most of the energy used to compress the plasma, which means that the break-even point for net energy gain (aka.QE> 1) is much lower. Some people on r/fusion have estimatedQEfactors of around 4, given public information, but, and here’s the catch, Helion have not given any Q value for the machine, nor said whether it breaks even.
If these commenters are right—and I’m not going to dismiss that possibility outright, given a lot of the subreddit members are professionals in the field—this would represent perhaps the weirdest possible timeline for fusion development I can imagine: that a public startup had achieved QE > 1 while people are still mocking fusion as forever decades out, and for well over a year they’ve just… chosen not to tell anybody.
Of course, it could just be that QE is less than 1, and this is merely a very exciting prelude.
this would represent perhaps the weirdest possible timeline for fusion development I can imagine: that a public startup had achieved QE > 1 while people are still mocking fusion as forever decades out, and for well over a year they’ve just… chosen not to tell anybody.
I mean, it’s a really weird timeline if they saved this announcement up because it’d make a bigger splash post-covid.
Helion Energy has recently announced that their most recent fusion generator prototype has been running for 16 months at 100 million degrees with 10,000 operational cycles, with “upwards of 95%” energy harvesting and reclamation efficiency. This is an unusual setup because it recovers most of the energy used to compress the plasma, which means that the break-even point for net energy gain (aka. QE > 1) is much lower. Some people on r/fusion have estimated QE factors of around 4, given public information, but, and here’s the catch, Helion have not given any Q value for the machine, nor said whether it breaks even.
If these commenters are right—and I’m not going to dismiss that possibility outright, given a lot of the subreddit members are professionals in the field—this would represent perhaps the weirdest possible timeline for fusion development I can imagine: that a public startup had achieved QE > 1 while people are still mocking fusion as forever decades out, and for well over a year they’ve just… chosen not to tell anybody.
Of course, it could just be that QE is less than 1, and this is merely a very exciting prelude.
Helion has now raised $500 million for a net-positive reactor with a target date of 2024.
I mean, it’s a really weird timeline if they saved this announcement up because it’d make a bigger splash post-covid.