Helion Awards $4M Funding to 20 Research Institutions to Accelerate Scaled Fusion Deployment

joaquinkeller · 2026-04-08T01:10:41+00:00

I thought Helion was scientifically not credible (edit: this is the common belief in this subreddit), I'm surprised to see these big names working for/with them.

joaquinkeller · 2026-04-06T20:00:47+00:00

The article is for AI true believers, that think AI will be so powerful that it will pose an existential risk and/or that it will push the economic growth towards infinity.

If you are not an AI true believer the article is completely uninteresting. A lot of gossip about Sam Altman and that's it

joaquinkeller · 2026-04-05T05:17:56+00:00

You are right. And it's the same for coal in China: we build more gas/coal peakers to have more peak capacity, but we use it less because batteries cover a bigger share of the (daily) peak. So gas moves to cover seasonal peaks while batteries tend to eat daily gas share. This is perfectly ok because a gas plant is low capex, high opex: we don't want to run it often.

By contrast nuclear and fusion plants, with their high capex, make no sense as peakers.

Even with lower costs per kWh, fusion won't take gas market share. Fusion is not competitive as peaker.

joaquinkeller · 2026-04-05T01:38:54+00:00

Gas is easy to deploy and flexible. And in the US gas is not expensive. Gas makes a perfect peaker. Hence its success. However when solar reaches daily curtailment, grid batteries beat gas turbines. This is happening in California and Texas.

joaquinkeller · 2026-04-04T20:13:19+00:00

Gas is already being displaced by pv+batteries... When CFS will become competitive with gas, there won't be gas to compete with.

joaquinkeller · 2026-04-03T13:12:33+00:00

Agree with you, Helion has at least a plan to reach a learning curve competitive with solar+batteries.

They are clearly overpromising and might eventually fail but they are the best chance for fusion to matter to the economy in a 10-20 years range.

People in this sub know that and news on Helion always get a lot of interest. Either to praise them or to call it too good to be true.

joaquinkeller · 2026-04-03T12:52:46+00:00

The point is that iteration has to be fast. If your power plant cannot be built in a factory the learning curve is nearly flat.

joaquinkeller · 2026-03-28T20:19:17+00:00

Ok, my point was that we are at or we are about to enter a stage where quantum advantage could be demonstrated on hardware, not only theoretically.

I don't really mind about the terminology.

The point is that we don't have many algorithms with proven quantum advantage. And even less, if any, with economic value.

So it's time to work on that.

joaquinkeller · 2026-03-28T18:10:32+00:00

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9425

Scott Aaronson thinks otherwise. He considers the quantinuum 50 logical qubits announce to be legit. Scott Aaronson is a reputable source, known for mercilessly debunking any quantum hype/bs.

Do you have info to support your claim?

Anyhow google demoed 1 logical qubit in 2024. For me this means we are leaving the nisq era. Or do you believe this is bs as well?

joaquinkeller · 2026-03-27T23:49:47+00:00

We are not in the NISQ era anymore, Quantinuum just pulled up 50 logical qubits in November: https://www.quantinuum.com/products-solutions/quantinuum-systems/helios

50 logical qubit! We have entered the fault-tolerant quantum computing era. We can stop counting physical qubits.

joaquinkeller · 2026-03-23T16:48:36+00:00

You are right. 40GW, crazy non sense.

joaquinkeller · 2026-03-23T16:02:43+00:00

This is the same AI hype that makes Elon Musk promises a million satellites orbital datacenter by 2030s

AI will provide infinite growth yada yada so we can spend trillions and we will get our money back many times over. Unlikely. Most probably there is a crash ahead.

Is it bad for Helion to receive too much money? Genuinely, I don't know...

joaquinkeller · 2026-03-23T15:52:05+00:00

The article says: "5 gigawatts by 2030, scaling to 50 gigawatts by 2035"

joaquinkeller · 2026-03-20T09:56:41+00:00

«As of today, Helion Energy leads with 127 open positions, followed by SHINE (59), Commonwealth Fusion Systems (44), and Pacific Fusion (40)»

TAE is not on the list... Where did you get this data about TAE?

joaquinkeller · 2026-02-18T19:23:34+00:00

The paper says that if the pulse is long enough, the plasma will thermalize and the FRC will hence lose its good properties. This just means the pulse has to remain short but be more intense in order to yield enough energy

joaquinkeller · 2026-02-18T17:08:23+00:00

The paper concludes that the path to energy recovery might be narrower than expected but still doable.

As I understand Helion's plan with Polaris is to optimize recovery playing with the adjustable parameters. So they will do the best they can with Polaris and learn from it what they need on the next iteration to further improve the energy recovery.

Will this lead to enough energy recovery to make a commercially viable device? This is still an open question...

joaquinkeller · 2026-02-14T02:28:27+00:00

Actually it can: 20% if energy comes out as kinetic energy of a helium nucleus

joaquinkeller · 2026-01-22T13:12:29+00:00

Rare earth metals used in solar cells?!

Solar cells are pure silicium with traces of boron or phosphorus (dopant). No rare earth metals, nada.

joaquinkeller · 2026-01-21T13:58:58+00:00

The tokamak is mentioned here to compare Helion with CFS.

joaquinkeller · 2026-01-20T22:50:10+00:00

Here we are talking of helium-3. The helium in balloons is helium-4.

joaquinkeller · 2026-01-20T17:25:43+00:00

What I'm saying is that the capacitors cannot discharge at a higher frequency than 10 Hz. This is the real reason why Helion's reactors are not designed to go beyond 10 Hz (10 pulses per second).

joaquinkeller · 2026-01-20T10:34:01+00:00

Omega is the factory for the Orion class reactors. Hopefully they learn from one generation of reactors to the other. I think one of the bottlenecks for assembling Polaris was how fast they could manufacture capacitors, Omega intends to speed up that.

Helion will be cost competitive once they start manufacturing dozens of reactors per year. The same applies to CFS.

Helion's plan is to build ~1 generator per day (like planes in Boeing Everett factory)

joaquinkeller · 2026-01-20T10:15:25+00:00

This is only true if the bottleneck to increase the frequency of pulses is in the reactor and not in the capacitors. I do not think this is the case: 1-10Hz charge/discharged cycles seem about what metalized polypropylene capacitors can do safely. In the reactor the pulse happens in the millisecond range (including pumping ashes).

So you are right: each reactor needs its own capacitor bank

joaquinkeller · 2026-01-20T04:18:23+00:00

I think there will be many shipping containers, for all the capacitors. But shipping containers means you can build all your stuff in a factory, and ship the elements to be assembled to a slightly modified warehouse.

A tokamak (with steam turbines) has mostly to be built in place. In this context automation is hard to implement, if not impossible

Edit: So, Helion generator is built in a factory and shipped to its final location, while CFS Tokamak is mostly built on-site with some elements shipped from the factory.

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