[HN Gopher] Helion begins work on Washington nuclear fusion plant
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Helion begins work on Washington nuclear fusion plant
https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/helion-secures-land-an...
Author : mpweiher
Score : 60 points
Date : 2025-07-31 12:41 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nucnet.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nucnet.org)
| captain_coffee wrote:
| Do they even have the design of an actually working fusion
| reactor? This seems like a crucial detail that is suspiciously
| ommitted. "but said it remains on track to deliver power by 2028"
| - so casually written! I _HIGHLY_ doubt this.
| AIPedant wrote:
| No, of course they don't. This is Sam Altman's fusion company,
| backed by Microsoft in 2023 with a signed power purchase
| agreement: either Altman has some serious dirt on Satya
| Nadella, or (more likely!) Satya Nadella is a gullible idiot
| who thought "Sam Altman is the Boy Genius Who Invented AI, so
| he can solve fusion too!"
|
| (Remember this is same same Satya Nadella who offered Altman an
| unspecified CEO-level position after he got fired... while
| publicly admitting he didn't know why Altman was fired! If I
| was a MSFT investor I would be pretty upset about this.)
|
| Presumably 2025 MSFT is more sober-minded about Altman. I
| wonder if they're gonna try to wiggle their way out of the PPA.
| Otherwise I am truly baffled.
| trhway wrote:
| >Presumably 2025 MSFT is more sober-minded about Altman.
|
| If nothing else, that, after all the good they had done to
| him, should do it:
|
| "OpenAi v. Microsoft: Altman ready to sue for unfair
| competition
|
| ...
|
| OpenAI has put a potentially devastating weapon on the table:
| accusing Microsoft of anti-competitive practices and raising
| the attention of the Federal Trade Commission. It would be a
| low blow... "
|
| https://en.ilsole24ore.com/art/openai-v-microsoft-altman-
| rea...
| hinkley wrote:
| Ugh. Didn't realize this was Altman. That's disappointing.
|
| Seemed like there was a certain amount of magic thinking
| about neutron damage but a bit less than fission typically
| does. Guess we'll see.
| SilverElfin wrote:
| It is not exactly Altman's company. It was founded in 2013
| by David Kirtley, John Slough, Chris Pihl, and George
| Votroubek. These three won the ARPA-E competition around
| then. Altman funded the company more recently and is on the
| board. But he isn't a founder or executive there.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Altman's a major investor, but not the founder.
| paddw wrote:
| Presumably, if it's just a per-agreement to purchase power,
| there's no downside in the likely case the project implodes.
| AIPedant wrote:
| The problem is that the agreement does not seem to specify
| that the electricity has to come from fusion![1] This is
| actually common in renewable PPAs - if the specific project
| doesn't come online then the provider has to find an
| alternative. But those are usually done with established
| providers which have > 0MW overall capacity. Helion does
| not. If the PPA is fixed amount vs fixed price, Microsoft
| might end up on the hook for inflated wholesale prices
| instead of cheap fusion.
|
| FWIW I agree with the author of that Data Center Dynamics
| post, it's quite likely that MSFT and Helion are
| essentially in cahoots by stoking investors with vaporware.
| But it also seems like Altman might have sold Nadella 50MW
| of magic beans.
|
| [1]
| https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/opinions/microsoft-
| and... This is second-hand, the agreement is not public.
| xorcist wrote:
| Investors gets ruined on PPAs all the time. With
| renewables, there's usually some sort of wind turbine or
| solar park attached, so after declaring bankrupcy the new
| owners can settle out of court and continue production.
|
| Here there's realistically no way to continue electricity
| production so the assets will likely be chopped up and
| sold, if possible. Nobody owns anyone anything and
| Microsoft doesn't have to pay a dime. They won't get
| their power of course, but there's no downside for them.
|
| These types articles where a PPA contract is confused
| with an investment is really common, mostly for nuclear
| and renewables, but that doesn't make them any more true.
| Microsoft hasn't invested anything, likely because they
| know this is (pardon the pun) hot air.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > either Altman...
|
| Another option is this was to sweeten the pot during OpenAI
| negotiations.
| cornholio wrote:
| I'm not aware of Helion publishing any peer reviewed data
| claiming a physics breakeven (the point where the total energy
| generated by the reactor exceeds the external energy fed in to
| maintain the reaction going); let alone an engineering
| breakeven (the point where the fission generates about an order
| of magnitude more energy, to allow for the energy conversion
| losses, cooling and fuel breeding etc. so as to actually output
| any useful amount of electricity); let alone an economic
| breakeven, where the reactor generates sufficient useful energy
| that its market price can allow the capital and operating costs
| of the reactor and associated infrastructure to be recovered in
| a certain number of decades.
|
| If fusion had all three today, it would still e a though sell;
| fission has them and is still failing economically.
| staplung wrote:
| I don't disagree with any of what you say but _if_ Helion 's
| approach works (and that's a huge if) it would generate
| electricity directly, without need for a steam turbine or any
| of the associated plumbing. My understanding is that a big
| part of the cost for fission is the turbine etc.
| hinkley wrote:
| And danger. Turbines are more powerful at high temps, and
| now you have hot liquids near your reactor. Or you use
| molten salt as a middleman so the potential steam
| explosions are a little farther from the reactor.
| captain_coffee wrote:
| And how would you "generate electricity directly",
| specifically? Let's talk physics and engineering, not vague
| statements.
|
| How would that energy generated from nuclear fusion be
| transformed into electricity "directly"? By which process /
| series of processes?
| cyberax wrote:
| > And how would you "generate electricity directly",
| specifically?
|
| Using a particle accelerator (decelerator?) in reverse.
| I'm an investor in Tri-Alpha Energy, and they have tested
| a direct converter with the claimed 90+% efficiency.
| Animats wrote:
| See "Induction systems"[1] The concept was proposed in
| 1963, but nobody ever made it work. That's the plan.
| Magnetohydrodynamic generators [2] do work, but they have
| electrodes in the gas. That works for jet engine type MHD
| generators, but fusion plasma is too hot for any solid
| material.
|
| What they're trying to do is known physics but very hard
| engineering.
|
| They're also trying for aneutronic fusion, using
| helium-3. If the plant generates large volumes of
| neutrons, it chews up the first wall between the reaction
| and the outside. It also makes what it hits radioactive,
| so there's a waste problem. Aneutronic fusion uses
| reactions that (mostly) generate alphas and betas. This
| is, again, known physics but very hard engineering.
|
| If they can get a demo machine going which solves either
| problem, that would be a huge advance. So far, that does
| not seem to have happened.
|
| There are other startups in this space. It's probably the
| way commercial fusion power will eventually be done. Not
| via the tokamaks, like ITER.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_gen
| erator
|
| [3] https://spectrum.ieee.org/aneutronic-fusion
| XorNot wrote:
| > There are other startups in this space. It's probably
| the way commercial fusion power will eventually be done.
| Not via the tokamaks, like ITER.
|
| There is literally no evidence to suggest this: Helion
| are making big claims but as noted have shown little
| incremental progress on their machines.
|
| The balance of history says if it happens it'll come out
| of a large government funded project: that's how fission
| happened, and there's plain old fission startups too who
| also are yet to deliver _anything_ and we know fission
| works.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| From their Wikipedia page
|
| > Energy is captured by direct energy conversion that
| uses the expansion of the plasma to induce a current in
| the magnetic compression- and acceleration - coils.
| Separately it translates high-energy fusion products,
| such as alpha particles directly into a voltage. 3He
| produced by D-D fusion carries 0.82 MeV of energy.
| Tritium byproducts carry 1.01 MeV, while the proton
| produces 3.02 MeV.
|
| > This approach eliminates the need for steam turbines,
| cooling towers, and their associated energy losses.
| According to the company, this process also allows the
| recovery of a significant part of the input energy at a
| round-trip efficiency of over 95%.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion_Energy
| slashdave wrote:
| Well, at least they know how to invest in good PR.
|
| I assume their building permit includes plans. Someone
| should look them up.
| WJW wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_generat
| or is the gist of it. If you have enough conductive
| plasma then just moving it through a magnetic field
| generates a current. Applied to fusion power, you heat
| the plasma through the fusion reaction then divert part
| of the plasma through the MHD generator.
|
| Tbh, I very much doubt that this is a realistic path in
| the coming decade (but would love to be proven wrong).
| AFAIK no experimental reactor has yet generated any net
| electrical power at all, let alone with any big (ie
| dozens to hundreds of) MW MHD generators. Getting even
| one of these aspects working would be a major advance,
| let alone doing both at once.
| jcims wrote:
| Conceptual overview:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlNfP3iywvI
| cornholio wrote:
| Sure, they aim to extract energy directly from the field,
| but the three breakeven points are still important. A
| significant part of the energy will be lost as x rays and
| neutrons, since their D-H3 fuel cycle is not aneutronic;
| they will also have significant D-D reactions that are
| required to breed Tritium which they capture and then let
| ti decay to Helium-3.
|
| Overall, when you look at the total complexity and energy
| balance of the full reactor + fueling cycle, maintaining
| vacuum, keeping superconducting magnets at cryogenic
| temperatures, tritium extraction etc. then generating an
| order of magnitude more energy than inserted still seems
| necessary to achieve engineering breakeven.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Comparing the economics of fission and fusion is quite a
| stretch. Even with the massive number of unknowns they've
| literally nothing in common.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| why would they need to publish a peer reviewed paper? that'd
| be a distraction, unless they needed to snag a customer. they
| apparently have a customer.
| fcpguru wrote:
| i think the idea is chatgpt-5 (or maybe 6) will very quickly
| solve the 3 main blockers:
|
| 1. Plasma Stability & Control
|
| 2. Neutron-Resistant Materials
|
| 3. Tritium Breeding
|
| 4. Heat Exhaust & Divertor Design
|
| Because:
|
| Trained on terabytes of tokamak operation data. Will Ssggest
| new coil configurations, feedback loops, and magnetic
| geometries in minutes instead of months. LLMs can read the
| entire materials science literature, cross-reference neutron
| scattering data, and propose new alloys or composites. ML
| models can simulate atom-level neutron impacts in hours, not
| months, narrowing the search space. Use reinforcement learning
| to optimize lithium arrangement, coolant flows, and neutron
| multipliers. LLMs can generate and evaluate hundreds of
| engineering CAD designs in parallel. Predict tritium production
| efficiency before we build the prototype. LLMs + physics-
| informed ML can propose thousands of divertor designs that
| maximize heat spread, self-cooling, or vapor shielding. Suggest
| novel coolant chemistries based on prior patents and obscure
| literature.
|
| TLDR: Altman knows how well LLMs are getting at physics enough
| to be sure fusion will be solved very soon.
| salynchnew wrote:
| Wow. A lot to unpack here. "Propose new alloys or composites"
| is certainly quite a phrase, given the context.
|
| Has an LLM ever generated any complex CAD design like this
| that has been built & worked?
| captain_coffee wrote:
| Not sure if that reply is intentional trolling or
| schizophrenia to be honest.
| fcpguru wrote:
| was just watching this!
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUIn-ZLdtkk what are the
| odds?
| Alive-in-2025 wrote:
| I know some friends who are total believers in llms
| solving all problems. I keep pointing out the issues you
| are raising. They just want to believe in magic. They
| also believe in this WA fusion company, even though it
| has problems as raised here, never demonstrated a working
| system really.
|
| I see similar behaviors in people that believe tesla has
| almost cracked self-driving, just trust them because it
| will start working "real soon now", and also optimus
| robots from tesla will take over (but there's no brain
| for the robot, not even a demo, all the demos were remote
| controlled but they don't care!).
| ben_w wrote:
| My experience using them to make OpenSCAD code is
| marginally better than you may expect from @simonw's
| pellican-on-a-bike challenge, but only marginally.
| xorcist wrote:
| If only someone told me proposing new allows is the
| bottleneck to fusion engineering! I could have been rich!
| Animats wrote:
| They've been through a few generations of test machines. They
| have something called "Polaris". It was supposed to be finished
| around the end of 2024.[1] Their own site still talks of it as
| being under construction.
|
| Discussion on Reddit.[2]
|
| They previously built something called "Trenta".[3] That
| generates two balls of plasma and fires them at each other.
| There's no fusion or fusion fuel. It's a test rig for plasma
| generation and manipulation. That was running two years ago.
|
| "Polaris" is a scale-up of Trenta, with something to fuse, and
| with energy recovery. It's very unclear how far that project
| has progressed. If they were getting energy out, that would be
| big news. Helion is vague about how that's progressing.
|
| [1] https://www.helionenergy.com/polaris/
|
| [2]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/1hlojqu/any_news_on...
|
| [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bDXXWQxK38
| WJW wrote:
| > If they were getting energy out, that would be big news.
|
| That's rather underselling it. If they have a proven,
| working, commercially viable design for a fusion power plant,
| they could probably just write a paper about how it works and
| collect their Nobel prize for physics next year.
| creato wrote:
| I'm ambivalent about whether their design can work but if
| they were confident in their design and have the necessary
| funding, a paper and a nobel prize are going to be very far
| down their priority list.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Commercially viable means more than getting energy out of
| it though - it also requires that the build, operation and
| maintenance costs over the lifetime of the machine don't
| outweigh the value of the net energy generated. Of course
| it needs to work on paper before you build it, but this is
| experimental science and until you have built it you
| haven't proved it.
| jjjggggggg wrote:
| Maybe they'll go the Theranos route. Don't mind the
| hydroelectric dam behind the "fusion reactor."
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| you could speculate that about 90% of hard tech startups at
| some point in their early stage, even the ones that made it.
| johnnienaked wrote:
| No they don't. This is just more bluster and baloney from the
| liar of liars.
| trhway wrote:
| with power hungry AI datacenters popping up like mushrooms after
| a rain the timing couldn't be better for fusion. I guess VCs see
| that too. Well, some VCs also paid for that back then
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_Rocket - single stage half-
| helicopter half-rocket to orbit (and $30M in VC funding 30 years
| ago were really huge money) - despite 6th grade math.
| ck2 wrote:
| There's an excellent PBS Space Time for that
|
| https://www.pbs.org/video/the-final-barrier-to-nearly-infini...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAJN1CrJsVE
| khalic wrote:
| RIP PBS
| vessenes wrote:
| I was surprised to see any nuclear power funded in Washington,
| what with the state's infinite hydro power and all, but on
| reflection, it may be a sort of more is more situation - along
| with existing hydro is tons of electrical and service
| infrastructure. Interesting to imagine Wenatchee becoming even
| more of a data center and power hub over the next 10 years.
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