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- Manlobbi
Halls of Shrewd'm / US Policy❤
No. of Recommendations: 2
Has the problem of nuclear fusion been solved and I missed it? This guy's company seems to think so.
Aug 21, 2025
The world's first nuclear fusion power plant is set to be built in central Washington, with construction already underway in the town of Malaga, Chelan County.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8VZsksGXcYThis strikes me as putting the cart before the horse, or "build it and they will come" wishful thinking.
What's the big breakthrough here?
https://www.helionenergy.com
No. of Recommendations: 1
What's the big breakthrough here?
New and improved vaporware?
No. of Recommendations: 1
No, you haven't missed anything. They barely managed to get positive energy output (i.e. more energy out then you put in), though some even question that if accounting for inputs the scientists didn't include in their calculation. That was about 2022, IIRC. Nothing much since.
If you don't have a process to produce fusion, I'm not sure how you will build a plant. What equipment is necessary? How big? Lots of questions. Even if they just build a shell, and "we'll figure the rest out later", there's no way to know if that shell would be suitable if/when they actually get a working system.
As the other poster said, seems to be vaporware.
No. of Recommendations: 1
Have you watched any of their videos? The short one below sure sounds convincing to a novice, but it might also be featured in a Star Trek TNG episode for added realism!
There are other longer videos by PhDs with lots more math that sound even more convincing. One compares the pulsed process to a diesel engine!
Short overview:
https://youtu.be/HlNfP3iywvI?si=rza_MY9olW7onALD
No. of Recommendations: 1
No, I haven't watched the videos. I keep up to date (for a non-professional) via publications. There are lots of theories, but only one group has claimed a net positive output from fusion (Lawrence Livermore).
Though I did miss this one. There were the first two in 2022 and 2023, but they are claiming one this year.
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/us-laser...Still a long way from designing, much less building, a working reactor. BTW, "NIF" is part of Lawrence Livermore National Labs.
This is a report about Lawrence Livermore back in 2022.
https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-national-labor...
No. of Recommendations: 0
There are lots of theories, but only one group has claimed a net positive output from fusion (Lawrence Livermore).
Though I did miss this one. There were the first two in 2022 and 2023, but they are claiming one this year.
Ok, thanks. I'll have to look for any net positive energy claims from Helion.
No. of Recommendations: 1
Ah, here's some more about Helion from
https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/29/helion_fund...Fusion energy startup Helion has yet to prove it can generate electricity, but that hasn't stopped investors from dumping another $425 million into the venture.
Helion, whose board is chaired by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, announced an "oversubscribed and upsized" Series F funding round yesterday. With the addition of $425 million to its coffers, the startup claims it's now worth $5.4 billion - despite failing to produce net-positive energy after more than a decade.
This latest round included more cash from Altman, Peter Thiel-founded Mithril Capital and others, also brought in new investors like the SoftBank Vision Fund, Silicon Valley funding giant Lightspeed Venture Partners, an unnamed "major university endowment" and more.
"We are on the brink of delivering a transformative energy solution that can meet the world's increasing electricity demands while preserving U.S. energy leadership," Helion cofounder and CEO David Kirtley said.
Helion acquired its first customer in Microsoft in 2023, with Redmond agreeing to host a 50MW fusion power plant at one of its datacenters in Washington State by 2028. Never mind the fact that some of Microsoft's current and planned datacenters likely consume more energy than that - Helion is still nowhere near that point, and it's questionable whether it'll get there in the next three years.
The fusion energy that Microsoft has agreed to purchase from Helion relies on a fundamentally different approach than the fusion experiment conducted by scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in 2022, which briefly achieved net energy gain.
In that case, LLNL boffins at the National Ignition Facility managed to accomplish an energy output of 3.15 megajoules after bombarding a fuel pellet with lasers outputting 2.05 megajoules of energy. While this marked a net energy gain at the fusion reaction level, it did not account for the total energy input, including the 322 megajoules required to power the laser system.
Helion, on the other hand, wants to generate electricity from fusion reactions using electromagnetic fields that accelerate plasma generated from deuterium hydrogen and helium-3 gases to speeds so fast they exceed 100 million degrees Celsius. By colliding two plasma blobs in the center of a field-reversed configuration (FRC) reactor, energy is supposed to be released; magnetic fields are generated. Theoretically, this allows Helion to extract power via induction.
