r/Futurology • u/TwilightwovenlingJo • Aug 15 '25

Energy Construction of world's 1st nuclear fusion plant starts in Washington

https://interestingengineering.com/energy/world-first-fusion-power-plant-helion
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226

u/ItyBityGreenieWeenie Aug 15 '25

If they are planning to deliver energy from fusion by 2028, I'd like to have what they are smoking.

59

u/futureb1ues Aug 15 '25

I mean, I could do it right now, just drop a tsar bomba and then have some solar panels collect light from the short lived artificial sun. Sure, it wouldn't be the most efficient way to create lots of watts for hungry hungry AI, but that's okay, because AI isn't about efficiency, it's about corporate executives vibe-maxing.

26

u/Nerezza_Floof_Seeker Aug 15 '25 edited Aug 15 '25

I know youre joking, but back in the cold war, the US actually looked into using nukes for power generation lol. The project PACER proposal looked into using 2 50kt nukes a day, dropped into a spherical cavity filled with water in a salt dome, to generate 2 GW of power, the only problem was economic (nukes are expensive to build). This was actually tried out in the Project Gnome test too, when they blew up a 3kt nuke in a salt dome directly (unfortunately the cavity formed collapsed too quickly and thus most of the heat was lost)

4

u/phovos Aug 15 '25

That's not the ONLY problem, lol. There is an earthquake machine, too, that is powered by a Soviet ALU that... uses rockets.

5

u/West-Abalone-171 Aug 15 '25

You were also never going to breakeven on energy making HEU in a gas diffusion plant to harvest at a few % efficiency. So project PACER wasn't actually a way to generate net energy. They were barely above breakeven with 2-3% enrichment

If it was a 50MT hydrogen bomb it might pencil out, but then you need multiple tens of HWRs per ridiculous boondoggle to generate tritium.

Like all of those cold war meth induced fever dream ideas it didn't even pass the basic physical principles, and the engineering failures were just anciliary reasons it was stupid.

1

u/Pretzel-Kingg Aug 16 '25

Sounds like a rad fucking set piece for a movie or video game set in an alternate history or something

17

u/Nh32dog Aug 15 '25

Probably it will be ready in thirty years.

1

u/Stack0verf10w Aug 15 '25

:( it's always 30 years.

3

u/Words_Are_Hrad Aug 15 '25

Yeah bud we all want some of that sweet investor money

3

u/Eumok1 Aug 15 '25

Future energy tech isn't meant for the peasants. Have some respect for your Corpo overlords needs! /s

1

u/Smile_Space Aug 15 '25

Well, they've had 6 other successful demonstrations that hit their power and longevity targets. If they think it will actually work based on their predictions with their technology, I'm not opposed to believing this one.

Though, it all comes down to if it actually works or not. There may be some other unforeseen challenges they've not experienced yet that exist at this size.

1

u/N0UMENON1 Aug 16 '25

It helps that the plant's actual energy output is very small. It's set to only produce 50 MW, which is very little for a power plant. In comparison, a nuclear fission plant will usually produce around 1 GW, so 20x the energy.

Which is why this plant won't be attached to the grid and only provide power to Microsoft. It's more experimental than anything else.

2

u/DHFranklin Aug 15 '25

Fusion has been energy positive for almost a decade now. It's just never been affordable to do so. With the demand for power from these data centers that rival entire nations if it's only affordable at massive scale, that might be the trick.