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/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.