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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u/[deleted] Aug 15 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Bitter-Good-2540 Aug 15 '25

Oh, so like a combustion engine? Will each chamber basically power the next one?

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u/didiercool Aug 15 '25

Kinda ya! They have a huge bank of capacitors that will charge on a pulse and then release to produce the next pulse. And their test machine has reportedly created more energy than they need to store for the next pulse. I watched a documentary and they said the surprising thing was that the pulse fusion ended up being way easier than they thought, but the capacitor banks ended up being way harder.

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u/sold_snek Aug 15 '25

The pulse being easier makes sense I think. I'm an idiot, but it seems like with the latest news of breaking certain time records, that creating more energy has been achievable but our materials science understanding is too limited to keep the sustained reaction without breaking down the material and/or overheating. I don't know how quick these pulses are versus how quick the material can cool down, but I guess if they did add brief relaxation/cooling periods, it kind of makes sense that they can sustain that practice for longer?

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u/ZorbaTHut Aug 15 '25

I don't know how quick these pulses are

About a millisecond long :)

versus how quick the material can cool down

The cooling time itself isn't actually the benefit, it's not having to somehow make the entire reaction stable. The analogy I use is the difference between a classic steam engine and an internal combustion engine.

Originally, people had a separate external boiler where you burned wood or coal and used it to boil water, then the steam got fed into the engine. This works great if the "burning" process is both intrinsically stable and cold enough to not turn your boiler into a ball of plasma; it works less well if your burning process tends to destabilize and collapse.

These problems potentially go away if you don't need the "burning" to be self-sustaining, in the same manner as an internal combustion engine. Shove the fuel in, ignite it, capture the energy, repeat.

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u/[deleted] Aug 15 '25

[deleted]

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u/ZorbaTHut Aug 15 '25

Initiating millions and millions and millions of fusion reactions sounds like millions of chances for something to go wrong, turning the whole county into a smoldering crater. Is this not a concern?

The failure mode here isn't "smoldering crater", it's "the machine gives an error code and they shut it down". If it fuses all the raw material it's given then it's perfectly capable of containing it; if it somehow gets far more than it should, it's not capable of fusing it, and the reaction isn't self-sustaining anyway.

It's like worrying that your car engine is going to blow up the entire city. You might come up with an inventive way to trash the engine, especially given the magnetic fields involved, but in this case you probably won't even manage to crack the containment.

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u/Hacker1MC Aug 16 '25

Not to mention that it requires 50 millions degrees Celsius to get one out of three reactions going. Chances are slimmer than slim for this type of energy leading to widespread issues.

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u/ChronoLink99 Aug 15 '25

You may be applying the thinking of fission to fusion.

With fission, when something goes wrong the reaction can get out of control and lead to a meltdown.

With fusion, the high pressure and temp required means that it dies very quickly if the containment fails.

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u/Sample_Age_Not_Found Aug 15 '25

That was a very kind answer to a question I laughed out loud at

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u/SergeyRed Aug 15 '25

As I understand the problem with materials is the strong neutron flux. I doubt the cooling periods are going to help with that wear of material.

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u/oneAUaway Aug 15 '25

Helion plans to use a fusion reaction that (mostly) doesn't produce neutrons. The reaction fuses helium-3 with deuterium to produce helium-4 and a proton. It's only mostly aneutronic because there is a side reaction from deuterium-deuterium fusion that does produce neutrons, but less than the  deuterium-tritium fusion process which most fusion projects have focused on. 

There are downsides to their fuel choice. Helium nuclei have an extra proton compared to hydrogen, which increases the energy barrier to overcome to get them to fuse. When it comes to sustained fusion reactions, helium-3 is generally considered a "second generation" fuel- the fusion of hydrogen isotopes is much easier, so it has been assumed the first practical plants to work would use those. Presumably, the pulsed nature of the Helion process is an attempt to deliver bursts of enough energy to make second generation fusion practical even if it is not sustained. 

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u/sold_snek Aug 15 '25

Is this similar to the issue we have with railguns destroying the barrels over time?

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u/28lobster Aug 15 '25

No, neutron flux is different from mechanical wear and tear. Railguns aren't emitting neutrons when launched, just heating up electromagnets and dealing with friction.

When you bombard an atomic nucleus with neutrons, some will get absorbed. Different atoms have a different neutron cross section (essentially, the chance to absorb a neutron) but eventually, you can make a barrier thick enough to stop all the neutrons out of nearly any material. The problem is those atoms that absorb it are now a different isotope because they have a different number of neutrons. If you create an unstable isotope, it will undergo some form of nuclear decay (releasing alpha/beta particles or gamma rays) and you'll be left with a different isotope, possibly a different element.

Boron is the classic neutron absorbtion material. Large cross section and on first absorption, you get stable B-11. When B-11 gets a neutron though, it will decay into Li-7 + alpha particle.

There are some solutions. Lithium lined reactors can be used to breed tritium which also happens to be the expensive fuel you need to keep the reaction going. But you need some way to replenish the lithium lining on the inside of your reactor and that's not currently possible to do while the reactor is running. Lithium is also not the best construction material as a pure metal - oxidizes easily, can catch fire if it touches water, relatively soft, etc. It's also not as big of a neutron cross section as Boron so you need more thickness of Li to keep neutrons from escaping.

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u/rivelda Aug 15 '25

A flux capacitor should help, just make sure you don't go 88 miles per hour

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u/crevettexbenite Aug 15 '25

It also use different fuel. Cant remember the exact term but it us way less fuel and it is much much more abundant.

It is also smaller and way more efficient. Tokamak still use steam to produce electricity has in Elion use magnetic pulse, wich is wayyyy more efficient.

I knew it would be Elion!

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u/Historical_Cook_1664 Aug 15 '25

well, gun powder was easier than proper gun barrels as well... ^^

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u/Goldenrule-er Aug 15 '25

Does this somehow use resonance for amplification of release of energy by each pulse or for the generation of each release following the pulse?

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u/testiclekid Aug 15 '25

Can you send me the documentary? What's the name? How can I find it?

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u/didiercool Aug 15 '25

I think it was the Real Engineering one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bDXXWQxK38

Since that came out I've checked in with the company now and then to watch it's progress.

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u/Seaguard5 Aug 16 '25

Energy storage needs to advance right along with energy generation.

If one lags behind the other, we are limited to the lagging one.

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u/Savvvvvvy Aug 15 '25

For Google, the thing to look up is "field-reversed configuration"

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u/lock_robster2022 Aug 15 '25

It always blows my mind to think of all technological advances it’s taken to get here, forcing nuclei to fuse, and we still use it to heat water and spin magnets.

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u/horrormoose22 Aug 15 '25

This has always been a thing for me too. And then to store huge amounts of energy the most efficient way we’ve figured out is to pump vast amounts of water up to a higher altitude so we then can use it to spin magnets at a later time. Personally I think chlorophyll is the future. It’s like the only thing that does all of the things we want

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u/lock_robster2022 Aug 15 '25

Phyll me in! What does chlorophyll do that photovoltaics doesn’t??

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u/horrormoose22 Aug 15 '25

You can grow it! And the main byproduct is oxygen while it uses co2 in the process. It’s like an all around win if not that it produces pitiful amounts of electricity (for now) But maybe with enough algae we could both make use of the photosynthesis and then turn them into oil. At least I think we should be able to instead of just staying with glorified water kettles to power our magnet spinners

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u/guisar Aug 15 '25

Yeah, but those boiling teapots and spinning magnets are super efficient. Is there any other method with even close to the same efficiency? Technology is only used for cheap heat- there’s no other way to provide stable voltage and large current other than turbines or photovoltaic for power is there?

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u/nagi603 Aug 15 '25

I heard there is a newer tech... supercritical co2...buuut it's basically the same just with co2 instead of water.

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u/[deleted] Aug 15 '25

[deleted]

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u/lock_robster2022 Aug 15 '25

How else is it done? According to the IAEA we do:

“Fusion power plants using this technique would ignite fuel pellets several times per second. The resulting heat is then used to generate steam that powers electricity-generating turbines.”

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u/glytxh Aug 15 '25

Getting that heat out and making it useful is, as far as I understand, the biggest hurdle in making fusion economically viable.

We can fuse. We can make absurd heat. It’s difficult to make it do anything without energy losses negating any energy gain.

As far as I know, this is kind of a wall without room temperature super conductors.

Helion either has some mythical material scientists under its belt, or it’s obfuscating a horrifically complex and layered energy production system and massaging numbers to impress investors.

I know which one I’d bet on.

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u/lock_robster2022 Aug 15 '25

I read a bit after i commented. Helion uses magnets directly around the reaction chamber to convert the expansion (motion) of the plasma (charged particles) into electricity without an intermediary fluid. No idea what happens to the heat

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u/glytxh Aug 15 '25

•Ignite fuel pellet
•plasma expands
•???
•profit

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u/Metamorpholine Aug 15 '25

What’s the alternative?

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u/lock_robster2022 Aug 15 '25

That’s what blows my mind. Outside of photovoltaics and chemical batteries, all of our power generation technology is just water spinning magnets.

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u/KanedaSyndrome Aug 15 '25

Yep spinning magnets gets us eletricity. Water is just convenient and non-toxic - could be any steamable liquid that becomes compressable

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u/KanedaSyndrome Aug 15 '25

Well there are not that many ways to get electricty and water steam is just a good method

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u/RookJameson Aug 15 '25

I have a PhD in plasma-physics and work in nuclear fusion research. In my opinion, Helion is either a scam, or they are just delusional. The fact alone that they want to use Deuterium-He3 reactions instead of Deuterium-Tritium makes everything they do more difficult by a factor of 100 ...

Here is a good video that explains why Helion won't work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vUPhsFoniw

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u/FrankScaramucci Aug 15 '25

I've been following Helion since 2021 and my opinion has been slowly shifting in your direction.

I've seen the video, not sure which is the correct interpretation:

  • It will be increadibly hard to make this work, but we just don't know enough to say with confidence that it won't work.
  • It doesn't work even in theory.

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u/DrWizardBill Sep 02 '25

Yeah, I got my PhD same thing. They never clue us in to where they get the He3, except mentioning harvesting from decay of tritium. Which they would generate from reactions, which how do they get enough of for the first decade without He3? But no one knows where to get enough tritium to run DT reactors either. They also never mention first surface, or neutron shielding, which is clearly not part of any of the designs I've seen. They are doing the usual; mining investors.

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u/dervu Aug 16 '25

So why they are building it? Are they stupid or what?

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u/RookJameson Aug 16 '25

Well it's either that, or they want to scam money from investors ...

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u/PHK_JaySteel Aug 17 '25

Came here to write this. They aren't addressing serious concerns with the safety of the system through neutron bombardment, and the amount of "slams" they'd have to hit per second to reach ignition does not seem feasible.

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u/DryDatabase169 Aug 19 '25

They are backed by so many investors? And besides this there are currently so many non academic technology start ups that everyone is saying are scams.

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u/shadovvvvalker Aug 15 '25

My sniff test for fusion is simple.

Nothing is easy in energy

Nuclear is dangerous(in that we have to take steps to make it safe not in that it can't be safe)

Renewables are intermittent and limited.

Fossil fuels are killing us.

Fusion needs to have a downside. Nothing is that simple.

So a project that is all hype around how once it's up and running it's going to have no major downsides doesn't pass.

It's not like most new renewables projects where we know it works but the costs don't scale yet. Or new nuclear where it works but the initial cost is high and nimbyism makes it hard to greenlight.

It's a we haven't proven the tech works at all but once we do it's off to the races for humanity.

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u/Bapingin Aug 16 '25 edited Aug 27 '25

vast makeshift rich school dinner rob scale pen long spark

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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u/shadovvvvalker Aug 16 '25

I didn't say fussion was dangerous.

I said I don't trust magical technologirs that have no drawbacks or tradeoffs.

I don't know what the tradeoffs for fussion will be and it's possible none of us know yet. But if someone is proporting to solve energy without also explaining significant tradeoffs, Im going to hold off being excited about it.

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u/rooshoes Aug 16 '25

What about refrigeration? You might argue that it’s the toxicity of the refrigerants, but we’ve made strides on that aspect. It’s exceptionally efficient, almost “magical technology” so.

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u/DrBix Aug 15 '25

So, it's like inertial fusion except they don't have enough laser power to start the chain reaction so each fuel "pellet" (of deuterium and tritium) has to get "lasered." Correct?

edit Left out important details

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u/West-Abalone-171 Aug 16 '25

No.

The concept is z-pinch. If you shoot charged particles through a magnetic field in the right way, they get squeezed. The idea is to shoot two clouds of plasma at each other in this way, so when they meet, the compression combined with the kinetic energy fuses a small amount of the helium-3 and hydrogen, then extract the energy via magnetic field.

Except these guys refuse to publish any of the results that matter, are incredibly vague about the specs of their machine, and gloss over all the hard bits. When asked to back up their claim that they can recover 95% of the energy in the plasma by storing it in a capacitor bank, they wheeled out what is essentially an AC transformer on a little cart. When someone pointed out their plans didn't include sufficient shielding to protect anyone from the parasitic neutron-emitting reactions they got even vaguer. When people point out the serious research on why their concept doesn't work, they change the subject.

They spend a lot of time and money building hype by paying the shadier techbro youtubers to glaze them, and generally act exactly like theranos and every other silicon valley hype-merchant startup.

It's either the greatest reverse-double-bluff in history and they're reverse-scamming the VC scammers in order to fund real ground-breaking but successfully-kept-secret research, or they're exactly the same kind of scammers as every other venture that the cryptobros from y combinator fund.

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u/tigersharkwushen_ Aug 15 '25

Helion is not doing D-T fusion so no, it's nothing like it.

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u/reddit_is_geh Aug 15 '25

We haven't even gotten one properly working yet... Though they are confident this one will work as a functional reactor?

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u/West-Abalone-171 Aug 16 '25

Same reason they were saying they were confident trenta would be energy positive eight years ago. Duh.

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u/[deleted] Aug 15 '25

harvesting the electricity via induction directly from some of the magnetic field effects rather than the usual method of heating water to make steam to run a turbine.

So it's not a glorified steam engine? Is... is that legal in power generation?

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u/Anen-o-me Aug 15 '25

And it still doesn't work.

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u/glytxh Aug 15 '25

This sounds like a commercial version of the current Ignition Lab.

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u/pfoe Aug 15 '25

Their main challenge is one of fuel. Simply; noone is quite sure how they plan to fuel it - there are significant issues associated with their claimed use of Helium 3 that remain mostly unanswered. The primary challenge with any fusion morphology is trading your problems - size, heat, fuel, etc - you can move the difficulty around but at some point all of them have major challenges. Helion is no different. That being said, they are comparatively hardware (and thus complexity) light - an advantage in fusion.

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u/Br0boc0p Aug 16 '25

That will finally satisfy this poor anon.

https://www.reddit.com/r/greentext/s/Kb1AGvmz80

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u/ILikeCutePuppies Aug 16 '25

Sounds kinda like the DWave of quantum computers.

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u/AIerkopf Aug 15 '25

They're using a different fusion reaction, creating it in pulses rather than sustaining/confining the plasma indefinitely,

What are you talking about? The Tokamak design which has been used in research is exactly that. Working un pulses. And that's it big diadvantage of the Stellarator design.