Fusion is infinitely harder for this than fission. No company has demonstrated stable fusion with a positive net energy gain. Most of these startups are borderline scams for milking gullible VCs. Helion in particular has been around for more than a decade and was supposed to reach break even in 2023. They haven't even achieved a fully stable D-D reaction so far. The biggest thing it has achieved is siphoning tons of money from OpenAI's investors because of some questionable actions by Sam Altman.
All of those experiments say they are "on schedule" for whatever schedule they made up for this year. If you have been following this for as long as I have, you'll know that these statements are worth nothing.
You're the one who referenced their earlier published schedule, which said they were "supposed to reach break even in 2023." They had a couple years of delay in funding after making that statement.
I think in a Deutritium-Tritium fusion reaction a lot the energy is in the neutron. And since neutrons are neutral you can't really directly convert that into electrical energy.
Yep, for D-T 80% of the energy is in neutrons. Helion is using D-D/D-He3, and for that it's about 5% in neutrons, and most of the rest in fast-moving charged particles.
So they have a simple way to extract electricity directly. They squeeze the plasma with a magnetic field from a copper coil, then there's an explosion of charged particles, which pushes back against the magnetic field and causes electricity to flow in the coil.
As I said, the combined reaction generates 5% of its energy as neutron radiation. The reason it's only 5% is that D-He3 is a much more energetic reaction.
The main issue with D-He3 is that it's more difficult.
I have seen this whole scheme play out more than once by now. Helion is not the first fusion startup. Not by a long shot. It's just one of those who gathered media attention (and even that was not due to their science but to OpenAI's business practices). If you're an investor, you're welcome to hire me as an adviser and I'll tell you exactly where and how they are being delusional or outright dishonest. But most investors get hitched on nice pitch decks and certain keywords or names.
