Comment by gpm
5 days ago
The more plausible looking modern fusion companies tend to be designing very small reactors compared to those projects. Vogtle is 5000 MWs. Olkioluoto is 1600. Helion is promising reactors that are 50 and can be shipped via trains by 2028 (or 2030 depending on how you read some statements/interpret what I just said). They still need some neutron shielding to actually operate them safely (boronated concrete, probably not shipped by train), but nothing on the scale of what you need for a fission plant.
(and other than that I echo elcritch's comments)
Helion also promised 50MW prototypes by 2021. It's 2025 and they have no 50MW prototype still. Fusion power roadmaps are generally exercises in wishful thinking, while fusion power startup roadmaps are basically gaslighting-as-a-serivce.
I still think its worth researching and we'll get there at some point, but I'm not holding my breath-- the whole industry has overpromised in the past, continues to overpromise now and will be probably be irrelevant for de-carbonizing the grid by the time the technology is actually ready at an industrial scale.
Mass media reporting on the whole sector is admittedly even worse; especially for uninformed readers without an engineering background.
I believe the promise you are referring to was contingent upon Helion getting funding that they did not get. It's not gaslighting to publish an amibitious timeline for a startup and be wrong, but that's not even what happened here. They said "if X (funding), then Y". X didn't happen.
I believe the current timetable is no longer contingent upon funding (since they've got the funding they think they need). It's no doubt still an optimistic startup timeline, a target, that they might well fail to achieve (even without the startup failing, just being late).
Meh. They promised 50MW by 2021 in 2018. In 2021, they got half a billion $, but the 50MW plant is still not running. But the bigger problem is that those are all just pretty prototypes; according to a 2018 ARPA report, magnetic field compression in the 40T range is needed for commercial viability. The various prototyes have pushed this from 4T to 10T (and presumably soonish 15T) since 2014. Extrapolating that trend is much less promising than Helions roadmaps, and doing linear extrapolation there is probably doing them a favor...
It's a cool concept, but probably not gonna be viable anytime soon (if ever!).
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