Comment by myrmidon
4 months ago
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!).
With regards to scaling, I think there are two components:
Does the physics change as they scale up the field strength? No one is really going to know until they try (unless we get a lot better at simulating plasma real fast). If not, they lost a bet, but they lost it honestly and as far as I can tell (not a physicist) it was a reasonably good bet to make.
Can they physically build the bigger magnets they need fast enough to meet their timelines (and everything else. I understand they are currently bottlenecked on capacitors)? Apart from normal "startups are overly optimistic" issues I don't see any reason to think that they shouldn't be able to reliably predict how fast they can scale magnet size, or be limited to a linear rate. While they are big magnets, it's not exactly new physics.
I'm not sure I'd say they are "probably going to be viable" anytime soon either. I think they have a good chance, but "probably" as in ">50%" is probably pushing it. (Also depends on where you put the goalposts of course)
FWIW I believe that 2018 report was for a high gain low pulse rate plan that Helion rejected, and they are aiming for substantially lower strength magnets as a result. I can't find anything more than rumors to confirm that though.
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