Comment by myrmidon
4 months ago
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.
Just to be clear: I'm not accusing Helion of being dishonest or even fraudulent.
It's just that from everything I know about the project, they still have a long way to go, and there are a lot of milestones to hit that are just pipe dreams for now (actually fusing He3, breeding it, net-gain energy extraction, ...).
I would expect progress to slow down significantly as the scale of prototypes and their complexity increases (like what happens for basically every engineering project ever)-- but progress is already slow/behind schedule to begin with...