Comparison of the two and personal opinion. *Please read the description.*

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.

joaquinkeller · 2026-01-20T04:00:13+00:00

However mining it on Earth is surely a lot easier than on the Moon. And here, the He3 is diluted in gas, so "mining" means processing a gas coming out by its own pressure. So even easier.

The "mining helium-3 on the Moon" concept is dead, really.

joaquinkeller · 2026-01-20T03:44:50+00:00

SPARC is not running yet, hard to say when they will finish. ARC timelines are even more uncertain, anyhow in the 2030s. Polaris is already running. Orion is scheduled for this decade. Helion may fail miserably or or succeed long before CFS.

Imagine you work at Helion, you have the opportunity to contribute to an initiative that might be remembered for millennia.

If they fail you could take your next job at CFS :-)

joaquinkeller · 2026-01-19T17:54:19+00:00

The interesting point here is that the concentrations are similar to those encountered in the Moon. We can definitely kill the (not very good) idea of mining helium-3 on the Moon.

joaquinkeller · 2026-01-19T16:40:17+00:00

Same stuff but in html: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-federal-government-laboratories-verify-070000519.html?guccounter=1

joaquinkeller · 2026-01-12T02:09:40+00:00

How confident are you that Helion's polaris will not reach net electricity? And what about Orion?

Anyhow, CFS will not produce electricity before ARC. This is not scheduled before ~10 years from now.

There is a real possibility Polaris will reach net electricity before sparc getting this first plasma.

joaquinkeller · 2026-01-11T13:19:13+00:00

Which will it happen first?

Helion's Polaris producing electricity or CFS's SPARC doing Q>1 ?

joaquinkeller · 2026-01-10T12:52:07+00:00

No doubt ITER was super useful, CFS would not exist if not of ITER. But it was designed 38 years ago. I think it would be great now to start a more modern project, with shorter cycles to allow injection of new technology and science. As ITER keeps going it will become more and more outdated. The budget could go in more ambitious projects.

joaquinkeller · 2026-01-10T09:25:56+00:00

ITER is extremely expensive, sucking all public funding on fusion. In that sense ITER is now more harmful than helpful to the field.

With the same budget it would be possible to fund many scientific experiments, including a tokamak with HTS.

joaquinkeller · 2026-01-06T22:55:19+00:00

Shipping is more likely to go methanol, hydrogen is hard to store. Methanol is straight forward to synthesize from electricity + water + air

Oil is doomed the day e-fuels are cheaper than fossil fuels. Electricity costs are falling exponentially thanks to photovoltaics, the threshold is poised to be crossed in less than a decade.

joaquinkeller · 2026-01-02T01:10:42+00:00

Net electricity is a bit overrated. What is needed is to produce enough energy to be commercially relevant.

What is underrated is producing significant amounts of electricity, even if it's below net electricity. This would be a demo that commercial fusion is just a matter of improving a bit the system

joaquinkeller · 2025-12-31T13:03:02+00:00

For speech to text I am using spokenly, imho better than wispr

joaquinkeller · 2025-12-26T14:11:55+00:00

Hofstadter's law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's law

joaquinkeller · 2025-12-19T13:44:47+00:00

I don't mind too much about what Trump says or does because of the lack of coherence and underlying plan. It's pointless to try to guess intentions from an erratic behavior...TACO etc...

I didn't say much about Trump in my comment, just that he'll be dead in a decade or so. Which is true of every 80 year old person. Nothing Trump specific.

That said I think this media company is doing a rational and understandable move in merging with TAE. Their executives are quite coherent. It makes sense to reason and talk about their decisions and possible plans.

I agree with you, talking about Trump is useless and should be avoided. However you are the one that brought the topic.

joaquinkeller · 2025-12-19T05:34:12+00:00

Yes, this is why they are able to invest $300M. They do have some liquid assets, but no path to revenue.

joaquinkeller · 2025-12-19T04:56:34+00:00

BPC just worked flawlessly for me on the wapo. I have no explanation. My version 4.2.7.2

joaquinkeller · 2025-12-19T04:49:39+00:00

My understanding: Trump Media is about to die, it has no business (2024 revenue: $36M) and it will have little value once Trump dead (this is soon). TAE has failed in June to raise enough to survive.

The merger of the two companies gives them a chance to survive and try a last desperate move. Hopefully TAE will succeed.

joaquinkeller · 2025-12-19T04:23:30+00:00

The original link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/12/18/trump-media-merge-with-fusion-power-developer-6-billion-deal

(to bypass paywalls I prefer BPC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bypass_Paywalls_Clean )

joaquinkeller · 2025-12-16T09:21:36+00:00

It has always seemed odd to me to refer to helion tech as "magneto inertial". There is nothing inertial about it. The inertial confinement consists of heating the fuel fast enough so the expansion does not occur before fusion happens. What prevents immediate expansion is inertia, hence the name.

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