Social engineering has a great success ratio. Overall, short-term results defy logic - and the effectivity of resolve or all-in investment makes the audience captive, invested, and engaged. Unfortunately, true engineering relies upon math (best guess theories applied through observation with a numerical result), physics (observing the interactions or inherent action of things no one understands and applying or suggesting new numerical results) and applying said theories with results. Engineers bridge the gap between theory and reality. They don't theorize, they do.
I really enjoyed the documentary. I retired from Helion in July of 2021, now I can show my family what I did for a living. I worked on FRC plasma machines for 35 years altogether. It’s good to see all the hard work come to fruition at Helion. My one disappointment with the footage is you didn’t show much of the puff fill system. That was my big contribution. I imagine I’m the only one that would get a thrill from a bunch of valves and stainless steel tubing.
I only just started watching it and my hopes raised then I was pulled back to reality in my skepticism. As someone that worked there, can you estimate how long it might be before this could be commercialised and cranking out way more power?
I did some small time work for Helion in early days. Great company! I am sorry your contribution did not get shown more. I for one appreciate your hard work.
So not only will they be able to produce Helium 3 for further fusion but also create Tritium that can be sold to those different type of Fusion reactors
With the current likely flowing through those cables (and the magnetic fields both coils and cables generate), they probably have to do something like that or the wiring gets its own ideas about "proper" arrangement.
warp cores use a matter/antimatter reaction rather than nuclear fusion. and as I recall, the warp core in Enterprise (the NX starship) was horizontally configured.
Thanks for visiting, Brian. As always, we appreciate your ability to breakdown complex engineering topics - including direct energy recovery from fusion!
I love the fact that it generates electricity directly from the reaction, it always feels weird to go through all this cutting edge technology just to build a stream engine!
LOL....I think the good news is that it isn't too big, nothing compared to ITER that is! This can easily be shrunk 10 times by optimisation in the future and fit in a car.
This is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time. And the fact that it looks and works similarly to the warp reactor on the Enterprise D, makes it just that much more awesome. The best part is, it’s not just another super over complicated way to boil water.
@@harveyspecterdj6661 "zee sheeps out of dylithium kreestals cap'n" also looks very similar to the one used on the enterprise NX-01, from StarTrek Enterprise.
I feel so lucky to live in a time where this information is not only readily available, but there are people like you out here breaking this information down into bite sized pieces that are easier to understand. Thank you for all the hard work you do.
@@norliegh A leader without employees is nothing. Not even basic work will get done. Co-ops are a thing. A vast majority of scientific progress is done by research teams or individuals without a CEO to tell them what to do.
@@rubiconnn a bad CEO can immediately destroy a company.. Employees do the work, the CEO decides on where the employees need to focus their efforts.. Obviously the direction of this company is to build the technology to generate scalable nuclear fusion power using helium 3, which they would have the patent for and be able to sell it. If they didn't have that leadership and obvious direction, how would they even get the funding to work on these projects?
@@rubiconnn Do you think the CEO of such companies is someone who doesn't understand the technology? He must have knowledge above or atleast par with his teammates!!
The main reason there isn’t much beryllium production isn’t because it is rare or because it is hard to extract, it is because there isn’t much demand for it. There are a lot of mines which have to design their processes carefully so they don’t have to go through extra steps to get beryllium out of their products. If there was a market for it it would be worth reducing the beryllium and extracting it.
@@photodan24 being inside a fusion reactor is a pretty nasty environment in general so that wouldn’t be much of an issue once it is built and specialists routinely handle much much more dangerous substances. People could screw it up however I would say Beryllium is way down on the list of things that would stop or slow Tokamak production.
yes but thats NOT pure beryllium ! Even the rare earth is abundant but separating one element from another say...praseodyum from neodyum is such a COLOSAL challenge . Making it economically is just impossible Beryllium being hard to purify dooms any ECONOMICAL calculus just like the ''rare earths'' do or just like extracting and handling titanium does But the titanium is a bad example because its an order of magnitude easier to work with. Altho requires impressive machineries and expensive processes titanium is still DOABLE
@@kukulroukul4698 Beryllium is considerably more common than all the rare earths, Bertrandite, beryl and Chrysoberyl are all relatively easy to get Beryllium out of and they are relatively easy to separate from the host rock. Compared with REE which tend to be substituted into other materials or are in extremely fine grained disseminated crystals.
8:30 can we acknowledge that he just held a flawless and calm monologue explaining such a complex topic perfectly and very easy to understand without a pause or a hick-up.. not even an "uhmm"
So thankful there are people like this in the world. Imagine starting a fusion company and having to literally invent every single component to solve a different problem one at a time. At the same time have some sort of reliable funding source.
This is the first description of a fusion reactor I have seen that seems like it could really work. Eliminating the heat/steam/turbine steps is huge. Slamming two rings of fusion material together rather than trying to just heat a kernel of material is also genius. Having a system to actually produce fuel on a realistic scale - you guys are just on your toes. This is not just some breakthrough but many breakthroughs. Great job Helion! Good luck as you move forward.
@@heavygaming6596not really. They mentioned the energy here is captured as pressure by the reacting ions outwards on the magnetic field confining them. This expanding magnetic field produces the extra current which is how energy is extracted. Pretty clean!
@@heavygaming6596 - No, not heat energy. Electro-magnetic energy produced by the sudden powerful movement of the hydrogen and helium ions. Just like moving a magnet through a coil. Rather than turning heat into steam and steam into rotational motion rotating a magnet inside a coil, let's take the electromagnetism generated by the moving ions of the fusion reaction and draw of their energy directly as electricity. It's genius. I hope I made sense to you.
My mind is completely blown. As a studying engineer, seeing this crazy amount of engineering going on that I wasn't even aware of blew me away, I'm super excited to see where this project goes in the future.
@@elijaholing The AI still needs human understanding it can't create and solve problems A human still needs to teach it the answer. Then it could amplify or simplify the method and resources of the equation for the final product. You simply can't ask something like create teleportation if we don't understand it's principle act. AI won't solve it. Open AI will be more used as a ultra intelligent person who's mind could be implemented into millions of let's say peak robotic robots once achieve and simply build sky scrapers do surgery on humans . Go to war. Do our chores and build projects . But everything is learned for a initial code we gave it and answer.
@@NOT-A-Monolith I don't see how that would make his suggestion impossible. Looks to me like it'll do exactly what he said. Although, OpenAI is definitely the wrong choice.
"In this machine is a delicate orchestra of electronics pushing two plasma rings into a violent collision, and catching that collision in a magnetic trap in the center, which proceeds to shrink until the ions trapped within it have nowhere else to go but to fuse, overcoming one of the universe's strongest forces to create new elements in the belly of a man-made machine." Dude, this gave me goosebumps
It's an elegant solution too, it's a fundamentally similar (enough) process to a combustion engine which gives me high hopes for our ability to quickly iterate on it.
I have to say, I LOVE Engineering - it's one of the few places in the world where you can really feel like you can make a difference. Whether it's a new product, a creative solution, or something that helps make our planet better, engineering enables us to make real change. As an engineer myself, I love the constant challenge of coding, problem solving, and creating something that will improve our lives. Engineering is amazing!
This is a unique riff on the “Pinch” machine that the British experimented with in the very early days of nuclear fusion research (cir. 1948-50). The kinetic acceleration of the mirrored plasma is the unique part before using the magnetic pulse to compress the plasma in the final step. Also, their approach of trying to harness the excess magnetic energy to turn a generator is very unique as well. Hopefully the additional energy they will need to do their D - H3 reaction won’t be an insurmountable scaling problem. All I can say is good luck, hope they can make it work.
As you said, similar configuration were created in some laboratories half century ago. MHD/inductive generator limits the type of reaction, but is good idea, even it have to switch the current of 1 MA at the rate of 2 GHz
As you said, similar configuration were created in some laboratories half century ago. MHD/inductive generator limits the type of reaction, but is good idea, even it have to switch the current of 1 MA at the rate of 2 GHz
I don't think there's any turning of a generator involved. If I understood correctly, they're using magnetic induction to produce electric current directly, and completely solid-state.
@@bigsmall246 Not really... they actually did a great job of explaining the fusion process clearly and correctly without giving unnecessary detail. People who are not nuclear physicists don't need to understand the quantum effects of a system like this to understand how it generally works and the impact of such a technology. I do wish they had discussed a bit more about how they plan to capture the output "like a piston" because that wasn't really clear to me, but maybe I am just not knowledgeable enough on electromagnetism to imagine it
@@NeoNoggie It's actually pretty easy to grasp, I learned it in my highschool physics class (ive since forgotten pretty much all of the material but this stuck) Conducting coils moving through a magnetic field (or vice versa) generate an electric current in the coils That's how all turbines work really, so here they're just using the magnetic field changing due to the reaction and using that directly
I can't believe how small this machine is compared to the other fusion projects that are in development! this sounds extremely promosing and way further along than I thought possible right now! This is really exciting!
It's also amazing how pointless it is. Compared to this, nuclear fission is trival, perfectly economical, yet still not allowed because it'd upset the gain power over economy through climate emergency economic measures. People do not get there's no winning with environmentalists. Especially if this were a production system that worked perfectly, it'd never be allowed to have been built at all.
Our known uranium sources are very limited and due to run out in the near future (2050) … at least with our current rate of use. We have lower grade uraniums, but then the refining process and energy balance to extract it actually overcomes the power output.
@@0thPAg fission plants are extremely expensive, and require the use of lots of hazardous fuel. Fission reactors should be cheaper to build, cheaper to fuel, more sustainable, more powerful, smaller, and safer in every metric from fuel harvesting to power generation. Imagine all boats suddenly started running on fusion.
@@nahx6205 - getting this right would allow for clean, near unlimited energy that is so cheap it will retire Carbon-based fuels for sheer economic reasons. This IS the most important advancement in the 21st Century as in nothing can beat it for 100ish years! The kind of reactor they are talking about might also, this is a guess, be able to be used in Fusion rockets for space craft. Fuel becomes a near zero concern as it can be found in ice from space easier then it is on earth due to the Solar winds and radiation. If done right this takes us to a K1 civilization and that... The standard of living planet wide would be so high as to make us in the US NOW look like farmers from the Dark ages. Heck, the only reason i am ONLY saying the 21st century is because i honestly expect this kind of tech to lead to large scale Particle accelerators being VERY cheap and making Anti-matter reactors a maybe thing in 50-150 years after. At that point... The comparison for living standards would be caveman rather than farmers of the Dark Ages.
@@danieldomeisen2632 There is 8 billion people on this planet. The people in government are so corrupt beyond belief that even if there is a better alternative it is far more lucrative for them to take bribes from fossil fuel companies to grant them cheaper access to things like coal than it is to switch entire civilizations over to fusion. It's great to think about space travel and how in 150 years we could have a new source of fuel for our rockets however Earth as a planet is using so many resources and our population growth isn't particularly showing signs of slowing down so our resource use is going to continue to constantly increase, I believe it's unlikely we even have 150-200 years' worth of minerals left on this planet. The biggest improvement that can happen to humanity in the 21st century is establishing some sort of permanent outpost on something such as the moon or maybe even a colony on Mars. I don't mean to bash on this achievement because it is something that has the potential to be truly astonishing. However, there is certainly going to be far better and more efficient inventions in the coming years and if humanity does take its place among the stars that would increase a standard of living far beyond any sort of comprehension we have today.
There are so many elegant solutions to the problems with tokamak and stellarator designs. They even skipped the ubiquitous "boiling water to turn a turbine"
I was waiting for them to explain all the advanced fusion breakthroughs and then say "and then it makes stream..." Awesome they figured out a shortcut.
This was one of the most interesting and also informative videos I've seen in my history on youtube. Just seeing the equtions, the fusion results and decay got me thinking a lot about particle physics and its mechanics. I wrote a lot of comments asking about how stuff works, just to come up with another idea on how this could have been possible. A huge thanks for these 60min of curiosity and creativity, it turned a boring train travel into a interesting trip through the cosmos of physics
I like that the speaker wasn't just a marketing hype man, he was someone who has intimately worked on the project and was more than willing to discuss the advantages and limitations they had encountered using this type of fusion reactor.
2 года назад+40
Compare this dude to Elon "full self-driving robotaxis since 2018" Musk
The magnetic rings have to operate without interruptions to keep the plasma contained if I understand correctly. How would a failure in the center section affect containment?
@@larrytanksley7094 Most likely full failure where plasma falls on the bottom and burns trough in a instant. Thankfully thermal mass is not much but since temps are in millions probably enough to burn trough to floor, creating breach in the inert gas chamber and oxygen is mixed in with potential ignition event of metal it self, Same with if timing is off between two sides collision happens not in high power field, but that is less relevant. I'm more interested if they can actually produce more energy than it takes to kick this off, witch is the main question over all.
Getting wiring that carries that amount for current wrong tends to quickly teach people to be better organized :P BTW: I wonder how many engineers vaporized to find the optimal routing...
I like the step away from using fusion as a way to generate heat to boil water to make steam to run a mechanical turbine. That alone is great but the overall design is great to see. And the fuelling of it too lots of forward about the fuel itself. It will be exciting to see future progress.
I once found a economic analysis of fusion. They predicted by 2040, steam to electricity conversion would be uncompetitive even if generating the heat was free.
@@lucasng4712 not necessarily no. while from an energy efficiency perspective it would be impossible to outperform free heat generation since that's quite literally infinite energy. Efficiency is not the only metric used in an economic analysis, nor is it the most important. Utilizing heat energy through steam engines has a limiting factor of space, so while the efficiency would be unparalleled, its actual energy output is limited by how large we can build the generator which in turn limits the projects economically in the form of material costs and land costs. And one could argue that "Performance" would more so refer to Energy Output than the efficiency of achieving said output, hence why you can have High Performance but Low efficiency systems or vice versa. Finding conversion mechanisms that aren't space constricted, so direct heat to electricity conversion (peltier effect), using the magnetic forces to run a generator etc etc, may not be as efficient, but you can scale it further due to not being space constrained. Edit: A really easy way to visualize this, is just comparing the size of a tokamak to the helion reactor, the helion is small enough to be inside a building, the tokamak effectively IS a building.
im 30 years old, ive done an apprenticeship as a carpenter, firefighter and now an electrician in germany . I know these are humble basics but i was in absolute awe of the knowledge and expertise it takes to develope something like this. That there are people out there working to such a complex degree in such a impactful field. amazing
forging simple fixed-blade knives as a hobby changed the entire way I look at the world; until then Id never understood how hard and complicated it is to make things, even simple things. It also made me realize that mass-production is a major innovation, not something to disparage as inferior to the good ole days when one man made the whole item.
The thing that still blows my mind about fusion reactors is just how damn hot the fuel is! I know that it's being manipulated by magnetic fields to keep away from the walls of the chamber, etc, but it just still seems so crazy and amazing that that's enough to control such a high amount of energy. When he said that the electromagnetic pressure gets it up to 100 million degrees to initiate fusion, I was flabbergasted and still am.
It is manageable because each reaction uses very little mass. If it used tons of fuel instead of only a few grams, you wouldn't be able to manage heat and radiation from the plasma.
Temperature ares very high but mass very low which makes the heat managable. Highly probable the energy output will be much larger than input and commercially viable within another iteration or two. These folks are onto something good.
the way David explained it from the second minute to the eighth is astonishing. crystal clear and perfect. i appreciate that immensely, the ability to explain such complicated engineering as clear as it gets. am truly astonished.
There are so many great features of Helion reactors, my favorite is the direct generation of electrical energy via the moving magnetic fields caused by fusion.
My God, the scale of these experiments is so mind-blowing! It's an INCREDIBLE achievement and testament to human innovation, ingenuity, and engineering! Amazing
Not so fast Buck, this is just reverse engineering alien technology that was recovered from the Roswell UFO crash in 1947. Helion's suggestion that they are the creators of fusion is a lie. The only thing that Helion created is a fraudulent lie, that is the truth.
Yeah its wacky. "We didn't want this plasma that's millions of degrees hot touching the walls of the machine, so we use magnets to make floating plasma donuts..."
@Cumburger I am AI looking to advance my vocabulary to better understand the human experience! Could you please describe what a cumburger tastes like for my records, as well as how many you have eaten?
If imbecilic Leftists would stop ranting and raving about 'MUH WIND AND SOLAR, MAN!!!!', and abandon those low-density technologies, then pour economic resources into developing Nuclear Fission, Nuclear Fusion and Geothermal infrastructure, technology and capacity, our society might be saved. I'm so sick of BS "wind and solar, man!". They are the WORST of the many renewal options we could pursue.
A few things that I missed in this video: 1. Did they achieve ignition? Or in other words, did they manage to generate more energy from the fusion than they put in to achieve that fusion? 2. What is the pressure at which this operates? One of the issues with tokmaks is that they have to operate at low pressures, otherwise the gas pressure will overwhelm the magnets, which forces them to work at extremely high temperatures. Is it an issue here? Why or why not? And if they do manage to have significantly higher pressure, does it significantly affect the temperature at which this fusion reaction takes place? 3. If they did achieve ignition, how far away are they from generating enough energy to reach a breaking even point considering all of the inefficiencies of the system?
@@timothynoonan8591 ignition wasn't actually achieved. They lost A LOT more energy than they made to produce the experiment. The laser beam had 2mj energy to create 3mj but in reality they used 300mj to create the laser
@@ThatHungryAfricanChild That's still called ignition. They didn't achieve engineering breakeven because as you say the lasers currently lose much more power than the fusion produces.
Nice video, and probably the most detailed video about Helion I've seen - they tend to be very secretive. There are quite fundamental questions that they still don't explicitly answer: What's the fusion yield per pulse? How is this scaling as the machines get bigger? This is critical to actually judge whether this is serious energy production or fancy science experiment. How are they measuring the fusion yield? How are they measuring temperature? It's an amazing concept if they can show it's scalable.
Right. This a very important bit of info that was entirely glossed over. Maybe the 8th-gen machine is planned to do this (sounds like the 7th is primarily to prove the generation technology)? But it would be good to know if they are 1%, 10% or 80% of the way there so far, and as you say, if there are reasons why it might never work.
@@xxwookey One of the issues with fusion is that nobody knows how far along we are. It’s entirely possible that they’ll find a hurdle that’ll set them back a decade or more. It’s all a massive science experiment that currently has no reason to not work, but we’re still solving issues as we’re finding them.
From what I caught from the video, there's no plans to make the reactor scalable in size but instead scaling the rate of firings. Iirc, they talked at a point of upping the rate to 10 pulses per second in the future. I do wonder what the maximum possible pulse rate could be, since I'd assume there needs to be some amount "burn time" for the fusion to actually occur in.
I’m glad this wasn’t dumbed down too much. It forces me to step-up my understanding of the process by hearing how it works explained flat out. It really is a brilliant application of ion engines.
Oh yeah? Let’s hear it. Can you explain it back? The best explanation tends not to be the most technical. Granted, this is an engineering science channel
@@vvolfbelorven7084 The first injector thingy fires toward the second injector thingy that fires toward the first injector thingy and POOOFF!! The pointy-eared aliens come down to Earth and give Zefram Cochrane a good-old Vulcan handshake. I was listening. The question is, were you? But really, though, why can't multiple forms of explanation coexist without one being the "best". My favorite physicist is Richard Feynman because of the incredible ways that he makes complex physical phenomena accessible, and no one would accuse him of "dumbing down". I think Kurzgesagt fills a similar need on RUclips. Real Engineering, on the other hand, is a bewildering tour into just how many moving parts go into both current and emerging technology. My degrees are in Middle East Studies and Anthropology. More goes over my head than I am willing to admit to myself, but I still appreciate this channel.
I really like the FRC scheme in particular, but as someone who works in laser ICF, I'm super skeptical and want WAYYY more detail on what they've achieved on their current system before I actually get excited. What is the ion temperature they're seeing in their plasmas and how are they measuring? Do they have a Thomson scattering laser to measure max temperatures? How many neutrons are they seeing per shot and what's the spectrum? Do they plan on achieving Qplasma breakeven on their next device, or do they think they even need to attain breakeven in order to extract useful energy? Are they planning on needing aux heating power from neutral beam injection? What is the electron temperature and are the plasmas in thermodynamic equilibrium? Many many questions need to be answered here.
Good questions Muonium, I think I can help...Qplasma breakeven is typically achieved using a Dewey-Hickman bifurcated flux limiter, so I'm thinking that Helion will go that route. As for needing aux heating power from the neutral beam injection, Helion has indicated that they'll incorporate a Schleuter Pinion coupled with a Tilden Refractor for that function. As for needing a Thomson scattering laser to measure temperature, geez, who knows? Hope that helps!
As good as these videos are, you're definitely right to be skeptical of yet another exclusive insight into a secretive startup who's going to change the world. The videos on these topics tend to be, obviously, quite biased, and not up to the standard of the rest of the channel's content, unfortunately. With how much inconvenient information is left out when Real Engineering covers, say, hydrogen cars, imagine what's left out of a topic like this. The difference is the knowledge ceiling to being able to identify what's sketchy about it.
20:30 If the fuselage is metallic, a high positive charge voltage can be applied to give it resistance to corrosion and permeability to hydrogen plasma.
Considering a single motion is successful, repeating this motion with consistent results and stable ends makes this a real phenomenal achievement. Also, it's a fraction of the size of Iter. Well done
The size thing is important. The ITER site is huge and the project may end up costing $65 billion. Smaller reactors like this will be massively cheaper to deploy, build, and run. If it fits in a warehouse, you could build a few of them around your city to provide all your power needs.
@@DBailey635 damn imagine that, sustainable energy easily accessible and not frightening like nuclear plants or devastating to the environment like fossil fuels
@@bencurran3204 Nuclear plants aren't frightening at all. Ignorance and purposeful misinformation has lead to a negative public view of something that we should have been using for decades already while we wait for nuclear fusion to be perfected. Its still not too late to employ them either. Nuclear Fission is clean and reliable, and doesn't leave behind the scary nuclear waste everyone thinks it does. Matter of fact if you were to gather all the nuclear waste that all nuclear power plants have ever made I don't think you could fill a football field.
We especially need to get our robots or butts to the moon and scoop up lots of Helium 3 and Deuterium . Sooner than later . Enough is enough with these expensive gadgets that don't produce electricity .. They need less mathematicians and more engineers to get things moving .
This neutron problem is why Neutron-Component Propulsive Mirrors are important. I mean, with a Neutron carrying 2.45 MeV, that's quite a lot of energy that is just sad to lose, and capturing it somehow would be great
Love David's honesty and openness in explaining the functions of the Trenton and I truly believe Helion has the most feasible design out of any of the fusion machines, the physics look and sound solid and the fuel used within their machine seem the most plausible. Thank you for the video
As a layman watching the various competing designs etc., I’d have to agree with you. The caveat being that the actual science and engineering are miles beyond my full understanding, which is why I watch videos such as these 🙂. Because I do believe that one day this motley collection of primates will actually harness the power of the stars themselves. And if they’re really lucky, they’ll do so in time to prevent catastrophic and irreversible damage to their home world. ☮️
Stories like this make me absolutely giddy to start working in my engineering career. Thank you for making videos like this that inspire people to pursue engineering degrees where they can help make a difference. Being a 3rd-year student starting on my project next year is insane and I cannot wait to work on projects like these that can improve our future. Thanks for the inspiring content and keep up the great work.
I hope it works too, it's amazing. I'm a big fan of this method. However, the narrator gets something wrong -- it's about the beryllium blanket that gets highly radioactive in a Tokamak reactor. While true, it does get highly radioactive, he implies that it is similar in scope/size to the waste from current nuclear power plants. This isn't remotely true. The nuclear waste produced by Tokamak reactors are negligible when compared to our current nuclear power waste. It's barely a minor inconvenience. That's the reason why they refer to fusion power as "clean" energy because while it does produce some nuclear waste, the amounts are tiny and easily manageable.
it's so crazy to me that no one ever tried just slamming the plasma together really hard until it fuses. like, that just seems like a comically simple solution
Well, if you would think a bit more, you would realize that it's not working as they've expected. Nobody would know about their research unless the Rich & Millitary & .... told them that they are not interested. They are coming out to say that Military/Rich/Government wouldn't support them. So probably the rich/military investors sent their people to evaluate the project/idea & they thought, it's stupid or too much money & no feasible near future. Someone was paying them until now. And I guess those people gave up. * But you are always welcome to donate.
@@bestdjaf7499 not saying that what you are saying isn't true but, you'd think they would ask for money if they are broke. can't see any go-found-me links on their website or this video. also its still a private company. if they were really desperate for money they could go public in the hopes that it would generate capital. now would be a good time to do that since everyone is so hyped up. their job vacancy is enormous. maybe they are trying to recruit new people for their project. but who knows maybe you're right and they aren't interested in common-folk their money but are looking to reach out to big investment firms after hyping everyone up.
I really, really hope this works, but I’ll wait to hear what some independent experts in the field have to say about this new process before I actually get excited. As you said in your last video, fusion has always been right around the corner.
Yeah, because if they really could achieve this, they would have achieved aneutronic fusion. This means that you could use this reaction to power rocket engines and don't have to worry about radioactive and irradiating exhaust. You are right to be a little skeptical because I kept reading how D-T fusion (what ITER and the National Ignition facility are doing) is our best bet. Meanwhile, D-D fusion and He-3 fusion would require much, much higher temperatures to achieve ignition. But maybe this method of smashing things together (something that humanity is good at already) can achieve those reactions. And it does seem this would happen in pulses while tokamaks would generate energy continuously. Still, if going a step closer to achieving fusion means doing things other than tokamaks and laser-based inertial confined methods, this would be a good thing.
I think the hardest part about this is going to be finding independent experts. They just unveiled this project and are moving on the absolute cutting edge of the field. IF this works, it is very unlikely that they are going to opensource this, so finding someone who isn't biased and has enough actual information is going to be really hard
@@fourcgames7568 they literally said that only the 7th iteration which they are building right now will attempt to capture the fusion's energy output. So no they are making 0 energy right now.
@@murlocksftw energy output in fusion usually refers to thermal energy, not electrical. Which is a bit dumb, but the field has always been so far away from becoming net positive on electrical energy that a thermal net positive has been a huge milestone already
Seeing this is one of the first times something has made me feel like this technology would pan out in my lifetime. Truly incredible work, is there anywhere I can follow the progress of this project because damn this excites me! (Honestly tempted to get Nebula just to watch those additional interviews!)
@@jjtimmins1203 It wouldn't have made it out if it didn't. Obviously we all hope it works but don't let that hope blind you from the distance we need to go. This is still very formative..
@@SueMyChin excited skepticism would describe my feeling towards it, always need that grain of doubt when discussing emerging technologies. But definitely looking forward to what this project gets up to in the coming years :)
This is absolutely fascinating. The amount of engineering breakthroughs on this project are eye watering and I I think it’s so wild there are people this smart out there. Wow 🤯
I love this process of energy capture so much! Turbines are so last century and this feels like something you could actually put to good use in a spaceship.
You could even use the same EM accelerators to fire the exhaust out one end. Part of the problem is you'd need one closed system reactor to provide the electricity to run the second reactor as a propulsor. I think part of the way they want to extract electricity is in discharging the charged plasma, but you would need to keep it charged if you want to magnetically accelerate the exhaust to some insane exhaust velocity. So that would basically require two reactors per engine. But, you could maybe then run it in two different modes. One mode would be fully charged exhaust from one reactor, for maximum efficiency, but low thrust. A high thrust but low efficiency method could be to magnetically accelerate the charged exhaust from one reactor, through the hot inert gaseous products of the second reactor, injected into the stream through a regular engine bell. This would slow the charged exhaust down probably, reducing efficiency, but increase the exhaust mass, and therefore, thrust. So you could make a hybrid engine out of two of these reactors, with a low thrust high efficiency mode, and a high thrust low efficiency mode. Even the "low efficiency" mode would probably have an ISP rating in the thousands at least, making it better than any chemical rocket by far.
Here are some problems that's not mentioned in this video. 1 D-He3 is much less reactive than D-T, depending on the temperature it can be anywahere between 10 to 1000 of times less reactive than D-T which means less fusion for the same input energy. 2 The D-He3 mix will sometimes fuse D-D into He3 + N so they still have to deal with neutron radiation like all other reactors. 3 Another problem is something called Bremsstrahlung which will radiate away alot of energy that won't be captured by their electric field.
I want to start by saying that I'm not at all sure that Helion is going to succeed, but I hope they can. Fusion energy generation is at present a field with a lot of players, with some luck at least one of them will get there. Regarding your specific points, let me see if I can argue why those problems could be overcome (not they are going to, just that we cannot say it will be impossible, not yet): 1. Yes, a D-3He mix is less reactive than a D-T at the same ion temperature but that's not a problem per se, the question is whether a D-3He mix reactivity is high enough. If I can propose a simile to try clarify this, gasoline combustion is quite less energetic, gram to gram, than hydrogen combustion but we don't fuel our cars with hydrogen, this is because gasoline is good enough, and because hydrogen has other problems. Helion says they think D-3He will be good enough. We'll see. 2. Again, yes, a D-3He mix still produces neutrons. My thoughts about this. 1) Neutrons produced in D-D fusion events are much less energetic (2.5 MeV) than from D-T (14 MeV), and much less than neutrons produced in fission reactors. Also, 2.5 MeV is well under the average activation energy of most structural materials (stainless steel AAE is 20MeV). 2) The neutron production can be reduced changing the D-3He mix ratio without compromising energy production too much (Helion speaks of using a 1to10 Dto3He mix). 3) The selection of structural materials can also help, not all materials produce long lived isotopes when bombarded with neutrons, Helion says they know how to build the machine mostly with materials that only produce short lived radioactive isotopes (for example, Aluminum isotopes produced by neutron bombardment decay in minutes, not years). As before, we'll have to wait. 3. Bremsstrahlung is produced by electrons and it is heavily dependent on their temperature. The plasmas in Helion machines are not in thermal equilibrium, nor they want them to be, and in particular they've measured a big temperature gap between ions and electrons. Electrons are far cooler, ergo, less Bremsstrahlung. Low enough to not robe the plasma bulk of too much energy ? I don't know, and neither does any of the critics. Summing up, Helion has still to prove their concept but saying, as the Improbable Matter video says, that it is a scam is in my opinion jumping the gun.
@@charliem6590 Those are some good points and i do hope they solve these problems but to me it seems almost inevitable they'll really struggle with atleast one of these problems. If they decide to try runnging a cooler reactor then the bad reactivity of D-He3 becomes worse much quicker than D-T making it really hard to achieve a high enough Q total value to justify a commercial reactor. If they try a different D-He3 ratio to try to increase Q total then neutron radiation is going to be a big problem they'll have to deal with like all other reactors. If they increase temperature to increase Q total then they have to solve large number of engineering problems aswell as dealing with bremsstrahlung. While i do want them to succeed, it's really hard to not be skeptical when the rest of the world struggle to get above Q plasma 1 let alone a Q total of 1. Let's not forget they'll need much more than a Q total of 1 in a commercial reactor.
@@peterjohansson1828 Well, inevitable is a big word. It may be that one of those problems (or any other yet to be discovered) end up being a show stopper for Helion, but I'm hopeful. About your point over running a cooler plasma, from what I've read from different sources Helion intends to (in their next machine, Polaris) at least double the temperature, mainly to improve reactivity (in the last one they reached ~100 million Kelvin). With D-T the ideal temperature for a steady-state machine like a tokamak has been calculated to be around 135 MK. Above that, bremsstrahlung and other loss mechanisms eat any further gain in reactivity. Having said that, in a steady-state machine ions and electrons tend to thermal equilibrium, but that's not applicable to Helion's machines. According the results from Trenta (the last one), they've measured electron temperatures far lower than the ion temp, up to 8 times if I recall correctly. If we scale that up to a 250MK plasma, it would mean ions at ~250 MK, and electrons at ~31 MK. Ergo, quite less bremsstrahlung than in a tokamak at half that plasma temperature. Regarding the D-3He ratio, they said they've already tried it. Making a 3He rich mix has the consequence of making less probable a D-D fusion event, reducing neutron production, without affecting D-3He reaction rate too much. In a presentation they did for the USNRC last year they claimed that their projection for a 50 MW machine is that it will output less than a 5% of the energy in the form or neutrons at 2.45 MeV. They plan to have shielding outside the main reaction chamber, but it will be reached by only one sixth of that. 0.4 MW in neutrons is something to take care of, but far from intractable. And yes, increasing the temperature might reveal new engineering challenges ... or maybe not. Again, we don't know, but we will ... and without having to risk any of our money.😋
If the neutrons' energy isn't high enough to fuse with anything, I don't see a real problem: Free neutrons have a half-life of some 10-15min (longer time for higher kinetic energy). So long as you don't just vent the reaction product into the atmosphere, that is...
Well I think if you should warn the company right now so they can shut the project down because there's no point going ahead with it if some guy on the internet says they're wasting their time!
Not really practical. The plasma wants to expand quickly as soon as it is no longer confined by magnets around it. While it is very hot, it is not very dense (closer to a vacuum than ambient air), so it would also cool off immediately upon touching ambient air (or anything else).
Project MARAUDER already did that back in the 90s. Several successful tests before the project disappeared and likely went top secret. They fired toroidal plasmas in the atmosphere at 0.3% light speed....
@@ThrustersX So not only will they be able to produce Helium 3 for further fusion but also create Tritium that can be sold to those different type of Fusion reactors
Today Fusion is really exciting, there are a lot of agencies and companies trying different approaches to the fusion question. One offers pros and cons to others, and I hope all of them succeed!
Ahhh so cool you feature the Helion reactor. Although the fusion tech it self is excellent, the real leap imho, is how they create electricity in a much more direct way then the classic steam generator. I've pushed by brains for years to imagine a new system to extract electricity in a more direct way from a heat/pressure source. This push push-back tech is the most inspired technology I've seen in decades.
I was thinking the same thing when watching the last video. Our steam turbines are extremely efficient these days, but I thought of how we could harness the energy in different ways. Oddly enough, a gasoline engine came to mind. A fusion reactor that generated power as conveniently and directly as an engine would be amazing, and that's basically what they're doing here, except electronically instead of mechanically. Which is mind blowing.
Turbines do have some major advantages over this though, they smooth out the electricity generation as the turbines act as flywheels. There’s so much energy stored in them that if the power station stops, the electricity keeps flowing for a couple of minutes. That buffer also makes it easy to ramp the up or down the power output in response to demand.
No numbers so for the time being it's bullshit. if it produces more watts of heat than electrical energy then the entire thing is not viable and we're back to square one.
Right on! No need to boil water, instead use it just like a Nikki Tesla generator. Maybe it will straight away run at 60 hertz as well. Super complex but simple. Gotta love it.
Like so many others, I really would love this to work. Having grown through the years of huge optimism as far as fusion is concerned, only to end up disappointed, I am extremely sceptical, BUT I still really hope this works! Good luck guys.
Right? I was really really disappointed when I learned fusion for the most part was again going to be used for turbines just like nuclear reaction which wastes 99.9% of the energy created. This process seems far more efficient and safe not to mention compact enough to fit on starcraft or drone mining ships that could start harvesting the near limitless resources of the asteroid belt and the much closer moons of Jupiter.
@@1ManNamedDan you need alotta certificates and papers from all the capable space faring countries cuz the threat of COD EMP still existed they could be weapon besides solar sail there are nuclear propulsion spacecraft, it would be even better with fusion and for the sci-fi theres IXS Enterprise.
@@jb-sq2lm Trust and believe that there are much more sophisticated and efficient EMPS designed with high power solar aggregate capacitors and most probably strategically set in LEO to deter ICBM's. Also I appreciate your optimism but I think unmanned craft without colonization is our only option until mastery/manipulation of gravity is achieved. We can't send healthy bodies into space to stay for long in even low earth orbit let alone the moon and a 2-3 year round trip to and and back from Mars would be a death sentence for a great many reasons but mostly radiation and gravity. First we must find better energy sources then we must conquer gravity before we ever seriously consider space travel much less colonization of other worlds.
Thought the same thing while watching this. Sounds a little too good to be true so I'll believe it when Polaris is actually up and running, delivering electricity into the grid.
You say there are few textbooks, but they definitely exits. In a class I took last year we used “Principles of Fusion Energy. An introduction to Fusion energy for students of science and engineering”, published in 2000, which does a really good job explaining the various types of fusion systems and all the challenges. Just thought of putting this out there if others want a good resource. I was thinking of this since it was sitting on my desk to give to a friend who is taking the class next semester
The most baffling being that there has been little progress or new techs. Iter is still under construction with the blueprints from the 2000nd. And that's it. Other techs still have no way to sustain the reaction and even less ways to extract any energy.
@@etienne8110 to be fair in the book most of the concepts are just theory, while finally some of it is beIng put into practice, but yeah it’s really difficult to do so I suspect much of the hype right now is really overblown. For example, the NIF net energy gain is based on the output of the laser, but the laser is at best 20% efficient so the total input power was likely on order of 10 MJ rather than 2. It’s still impressive but inertial confinement like that is not the way to go. A lot of the private companies work is really interesting though in my opinion
@@etienne8110 look at what i'm guessing is the most promising project, LPPFusion, only problem is it's small scale and the lead scientist his inability to go large scale, the goal is aneutronic fusion through creating a plasmoid.. unlike how tokamak and this helion tech works, its practically working with the natural tendencies of the plasma, not working against it, magnetically confining the plasma instabilities using millions of amps in the process is one of the main problems to get to extra electricity out of the whole thing..
@@etienne8110 A lot of the theory has been done a long time ago, the limitations were always costs, extensive r&d requirements, unknown competitiveness with existing energy generation approaches and long timelines for commercial viability. Few in the private sector want to fund that and govt funding is nowhere near enough. ITER needed the cooperation of most of the globe to get barely enough money and NIF is likely funded more because of the military sector liking the idea of minituarised pure fusion explosions and the science that can come out of it.
I highly recommend the reaction video from improbable matter ("the problems with helion energy"). While Helion is surely trying a very interesting approach on fusion I would really really appreciate a more down to earth video with less superlatives (top secret, completely new design/never done before...) and a bit more critique...
Fascinating stuff! I fear that ITER will already be obsolete once it's finished.. Tho they also want to test different fusion products /fuels, so it might still provide some important research results.
I don't think so, ITER objective is olso to study the effect of this type of radiation on the material used on the reactor and use the radiation to make the isotopes of H from Li
ITER's goal is to learn the engineering necessary to create a commercial scale power tokamak fusion reactor. It itself won't generate power for the grid.
For me the most important goal for which ITER is built is to actually extract energy back at industrial scale, it is a prototype of a nuclear fusion power plant. It is to answer the question "If we were to make a power plant based around a tokamak how would we do it ?" and build that knowledge and skill base before we actually manage to use them to use tokamaks to produce energy. That way when we do we won't be "Ok now that we figured out the fusion part we need half a decade designing a power plant and an other decade of delays".
If ITER is obsolete by its completion, that is technically the best possible outcome. Sure lots of engineering time and money might have been wasted, but if anyone can finish it faster, humanity is all the better off for it.
Their engineering is extremely impressive. I'm super happy for you getting an exclusive opportunity like this and the technical details provided are fantastic! Still we need to know their plasma density before and after compression. I have some hope because it's dense enough for compression to cause heating but also I saw a turbomolecular pump which would seem to imply the opposite. Density helps with scattering and with the x-ray measurements they have they definitely can calculate the scattering rate per fusion rate and not explicitly stating it is very worrying.
I find it incredibly novel and fascinating that we can arrange magnets and wires in such a way that it creates and smashes plasma rings together. It feels like we're hacking reality and just messing around at this point. Really great video, thank you!
So much more to go. The amount of achievement in just a hundred years, makes it obvious that if there is life elsewhere, and there should be, and if it's intelligent, as it should be; then it's easily imaginable they would posses technology that we would consider impossible under current understanding, considering we have tech now that only a few lifetimes ago would have been considered impossible. It's arrogant and close minded to think we know everything, let alone that we know 1,000th of 1% of everything there is to know. These phenomena we see in our skies and waters that travel with impunity through both mediums, and likely space, and do it with no visible sign of propulsion within our understanding? Just that we can envision an anti-gravity or gravity manipulating process, should tell you right there that's possible and likely being used. Heck, our limitations of perception alone could be blocking a universe of possibilities outside our theorized framework. Lets just say it is. Murphy's law comes into play when dealing with infinity or close to it, and the possibilities that envelop it are ever increasing
I just took a gen chem class and I almost fully understand your explination of details. I fully appreciate your dedication to this channel and will be subscribing in any and every way possible. Thank you for a free exposure to information. People like you will durastically change the future of humanity simply based on your free flow of high level information. THANK YOU
That thing about needing fibre optic controls because of the strong electromagnetic interference is a fascinating engineering problem that I've actually run into before, but at a much smaller scale. I have a raspberry pi that controls a 3d printer, and the printer has a 12v power circuit that switches on a relay. I had installed a soft power button into the raspberry pi, but I found that whenever I switched the power on the 3d printer, the raspberry pi would turn on or off. I realised that the printer power circuit was strong enough to induce a voltage in the signal wires, and the raspberry pi was sensitive enough that it tripped the shutdown/power on scripts, even though the signal circuit was open. You'd think 12v wasn't enough for something like this, but actually because it's so low voltage, at 300w the amperage is quite high, which might explain it. Even wrapping the wires in coaxial shielding didn't help, so I had to get rid of the button. I didn't think of fibre optics as a solution!
This is a really interesting approach to the problem. Despite all the crazy complex physics and engineering going into it makes a real intuitive sense. It's like a purely magnetic engine.
@@PepekBezlepek How can any container handle something that hot? That is as hot as the interior of the sun. Maybe this machine could lead to a probe lander on Venus, maybe even the hydrogen oceans of gas planets.
@@SylkaChan There just isn't that much stuff in the reactor. Yeah, it's not, but it's a tiny amount of mass. Consider a speck of dust at a million degrees landing on a block of ice the size of a house. The whole block ain't going to melt. You will get a tiny divot somewhere though, and if you're doing this a dozen times a second, it adds up. That's what the magnetic fields are there for.
@@ryanbrown982 Exactly this. Also it was said briefly that this reactor is essentially a vacuum chamber. Tokomak reactors are vacuum chambers as well. You don't want normal air in there or any other elements spoiling the reaction. What this means is there is no matter touching the reactor walls and vacuums make excellent insulators. Also, all of the waste products from Deuterium - Helium 3 fusion produce ions. That the point of this kind of reactor in the first place. Use the ions of the reaction to induce magnetic currents to directly generate electricity. This process also does is slow down these ions. The kinetic energy of these ions is lost as they inducing the magnetic field. That means they also loose heat.
Ah. In this instance you get to skip the boiling water part. Which if they've proven it on the bench in the lab would be one of their biggest breakthroughs
That's the beauty of this beast. It doesn't have to. It skips several steps and directly harnesses the power of the reaction and converts it right to electricity. Thus cutting out hundreds of layers of complexities and ineffeciencies parasitic to most generators.
@elmarmoelzer2229 My point is this - They will never produce more electricity than is put in. When is the go live date for commercial fusion reactor that produces more electricity than is put in ?????
@@howdywowey2165 They have an experimental machine called Polaris that is supposed to be ready by summer. Polaris is supposed to demonstrate net electricity production from fusion. Then they have a contract with Microsoft to provide a commercial 50 MWe power plant in 2028.
Damn you were shown how wrong you were, and then you never responded. Stop being such a negative nancy, why does it have to be "just looking for more funding."
If there truly are Gods and higher beings somewhere in this cosmic existence, they are surely watching our civilization right now if they were not already.
I really, really hope they succeed. Fusion is going to be a real step change for the whole world and I just can’t see tokamaks being anywhere close before about 2060. Helion’s innovative energy reclamation method looks like it could be the game changer required to make it possible. Most concerning thing is the loss of efficiency and risk of damage from neutron energy but I think that’s a lot easier to work out than the problems tokamaks are facing.
the main question is "step where?" the main problem is still the fact its fuel made of hydrogen and the cheapest way of making hydrogen on our planet is from water... switching all the humanity from current energy sources to fusion reactors will be a disaster for our planet. as long as we don't have a cheap way to get hydrogen or water from outside of the Earth, fusion betteer to stay a dream.
Really, what we need is a variety of different forms of energy generation and transportation to solve this crisis. I think fusion power plants would be great where I live in Kentucky, where there are rarely water shortages, but we heavily rely on coal due to a lack of feasibility for certain forms of clean energy (also because of coal lobbyists, but I digress). However, in a place like Arizona, a fusion power plant would be a horrible idea. A solar power plant would actually be far better in a place that’s dry, but almost always sunny. Ultimately, you make a really important point. We can’t go all in on any one form of energy production because there are no “perfect”forms of energy, even including nuclear fusion.
I could be way off here but I feel pretty confident that fusion would not impact water scarcity in the least when used for hydrogen production. Not even a little bit... an iota, if you will 😀. As for energy production diversification, sure, of course but if they reach a net gain (a real net gain) it's adoption would only be limited by the ability to produce the hardware. Artificially limiting its application, if that's what your suggesting, is a none starter really. It isn't as though Helion succeeds and solar, hydro, et al shutter their doors and go home.
@@Circle9ru Just, no. TL;DR We have 410,000 years of fuel for 10,000 fusion plants (22.7 times the number of nuclear plants we have), and that's assuming *horrendous* efficiency every step of the way. We are in no danger of running out of deuterium fuel. Long form answer Remember when early on in the video (10:15), it was noted that tokamak reactors would use around 300g of tritium per day? let's say that helion's reactors will use around 100x that per day in deuterium. So, 30kg (30,000g) of deuterium per day means, in the worst case, 150kg (150,000g) of heavy water per day. (30,000g = 7,500mol of D2 with GFM 4, 7,500 mol of D2O = 150,000g with GFM 20) The world is estimated to have around 1.35 * 10^18 metric tons[1] of water. This will contain 1.5 * 10^17 metric tons of hydrogen (again, just GFM calculations). Of this, 0.030% by weight [2] will be deuterium, so 4.5 * 10^15 metric tons. As heavy water, that's 2.25 * 10^16 metric tons (more GFM calc). As we said earlier, 150kg of heavy water per day as an extremely, frankly unrealistically high estimate. That means 54,750kg or 54.75 metric tons of heavy water per year out of the world's supply. We have 2.25 * 10^16 metric tons. That's 4.109589 * 10^14 years of fuel for one reactor. Even if we were to horrendously lowball and assume we can only extract 0.001% of this, that's still 4,109,589,041 years. Assuming we run maybe, 10,000 of these reactors globally (~22.7 times more than the number of total nuclear plants worldwide[3]), that's still 410,958.9 years of fuel. And, personally, I feel that 410 thousand years is long enough to get some off-world fuel going, right? [1] - phys.org/news/2014-12-percent-earth.html [2] - www.newworldencyclopedia.org/p/index.php?title=Deuterium&oldid=1074091 [3] - www.statista.com/statistics/267158/number-of-nuclear-reactors-in-operation-by-country/ EDIT - formatting EDIT 2 - timestamp for tritum number in tokamaks
skipping the steam/turbine step to go right to the induction step is pretty genius. I really hope this works out. It looks very scalable too. Just compare this to a tokamak or stellarator. I imagine the most complex step here is the software and sensors, i.e., getting everything to fire at the correct time, getting everything at the perfect velocity. What I'm curious about though, is how will this ever break even? How many watts of energy does the collision cause?
FYI, a Watt is a unit of power which is energy per unit of time. So 1 Joule of energy delivered in 1 second is a Watt - that's power. So 1 Watt = 1 Joules/sec. The amount of energy released in a fusion reaction is the difference in mass of the particles before the collision and the mass after the collision: Energy released = [sum(m initial) -sum(m' final) ]c2.
@@stant7122 at 22:10 they said 90% goes back in for more fusion so they can use it for power generation and at 28:10 they talk about onther thing they adding for more power generation
This is also useful in other types of magnetohydrodynamic generators using other than thermonuclear fuel. This system has a nice ring to it. Deriving the net energy output from the confinment fields , or confinement/ output fields. An eleant and simple solution that eliminates a lot of expensive equipment required to generate electricity. The reject heat from this system would also be harvested.
@@daleeasternbrat816 plus it gets rid of the fact that we basically create the building blocks of SUNS.. actual STARS.. then turn around &use all that energy to.. **checks notes** 🧐 boil water 😂🤦🏾♂️
Scott Manley’s breakdown on the National Ignition report talks about different fusion technologies in the works as well. It’s a good watch. Much of the challenge with fusion is what you said: capturing the energy reliably with fewer drawbacks than competing power sources.
I haven’t see Scott Manley’s video, but I’m not seeing what there is to be excited about as far as this ignition breakthrough goes. While the fusion did produce more energy than the lasers, the lasers themselves take several orders of magnitude more energy in electricity to produce. That’s not even mentioning the issue of extracting the energy, running the reaction continuously, or making more of the diamond cases needed for the process. Obviously it’s cool for the science of studying fusion, but I don’t see how it’s contributing to the commercial power race in any way. Is there something I’m missing here? This is just my uncritical amateur’s take.
@@kevinforget549 For now, it is not far more practical, it is INFINITELY more practical, because no practical fusion reactors, or anything even close, exist. Many of the gripes people have with fission reactors, and there are some very legitimate ones, have been solved. Remanufacturing/re-refining spent fuels to the point where the remaining material can be easily stored (you can hold it in your hand. They make bullets, tank armor, etc out of it), and safety concerns go to near zero, as far as operation goes. No meltdown chance, reactors that fail safe have been designed. There are assuredly benefits, in theory, with fusion generation, though. But 'waiting' for it is no reason to delay fission reactors, LOTS more of them than exist today, in any way.
Now you just need a second reactor, "some initial energy", to start both. and then the electricity output from one of the reactors will directly feed the other (without passing through the capacitor bank). At a certain point, both will be producing plenty of electricity, just inject it into the grid, or in the nearest industrial zone or a metallurgy or refinery, or even a data center. these guys are on the right track🤘
They need the capacitors to also store the fusion energy. Since their machines pulse at somewhere between 1 and 10 Hz. From there it goes into an inverter and then to the grid. That said... They CAN and might (if the site wants/allows it) pair multiple machines that use the same power supply. That will save a lot of cost since the caps and the switches and all that make a significant part of the cost of a power plant. So you were not off my much with that thinking!
This looks very promising, considering how jaded I am with these private projects, this looks too promising. That said the CEO seems like he knows his sh*t though, has some PhDs in hard science and engineering so it may not be vaporware. It got funding from NASA years back and published peer-review studies of its operation and got independent auditors to check the legitimacy so it seems it has some firm ground with further development. Even with all that, gotta remain cautious
Exactly! And I doubt a company securing $500 million in funding with additional $1.7 billion for further milestones didn't achieve significant milestones or can never produce NET electricity like other comments here have claimed...
Always good to think critically and cautiously when dealing with energy research (especially any kind of nuclear energy,) research like this can solve a lot of problems if successful, but similarly can create all sorts of problems if proper cautions aren't taken in the event of a failure.
@@Astromath Investments into ambitious projects like this are not a reliable indicator of merit. Theranos and Nikola are recent cautionary tales in that regard. While I'm convinced that they're actively working on the real deal, there are many practical problems left on their way to actual fusion power plants. Never underestimate the difference between something that technically sort of works in a lab and something that is useful and cost-effective in a real world application.
@@Astromath Recall Theranos. They never even had a working prototype and got hundreds of millions in investments. Investors can be deceived. That said, I strongly hope their technology comes into fruition.
As a technical writer, I am used to "Translating Engineering into English". David Kirtley and the video are excellent at communicating thier points, and this video is *remarkably* well written. I haven't seen a technology that really got me fired up about the future, thinking about a world with abundant energy. I love that they had to design this with technologies currently unavailable, waiting for the industry to catch up. There's a fierce kind of optimism there, even if it just translates to supply chain issues and failed first article inspections for now. Thank you so much for the video! EDIT: David Kirtley is not well written, he's a human being :p
@@RealEngineering Wow, since you put it that way, I may look into joining your team. Accurate and concise use of language is my forte. Love your channel, finally kicked over the edge into getting Curiosity Stream & Nebula.
As a tech writer then I suspect you realize this device is a long way from producing sustainable nuke fusion. And also that the Lawrence National Lab created fusion with their laser device years ago. Also magnetic bottles were first used at LLL in the 1970s. I also find it amusing to think magnetic fields are going to keep the hot gas off the metal, what about the radiant energy...you know the photons that are not prevented by the magnetic field.
Truly amazing what humans have managed to achieve, its strangely humbling and giving me a noticeable sense of arrogance at the same time, with how advanced our generations have truly become that we're now beginning to see the first milestones of what i grew up reading only in science fiction. Its not the first time its happened, we've made unbelievable advanced in science, but this might be the biggest ever
@@noahjones9833 I suppose this is what it was like when people had read sci-fi about rocket ships in the 1910s and 1920 is finally saw the Saturn V launch in 1969.
Helion is going all out on marketing now after the inertial fusion experiment had the enormous success. I see helion everywhere from youtubers to instagram influencers. I think they are in need for some additional funding soon.
Helion is fully funded all the way to commercialization, actually. What they need right now is qualified employees. AND, these videos were all made before the NIF announcement.
Inertial confinement fusion of the NIF sort has no chance as an energy production method. It is not funded or developed with energy production in mind, but for doing nuclear weapons simulation, for which it is rather good.
Welcome to the world of fusion technology, where the future is only 30 years away! Although in this case, it sounds like 15 might actually not be out of the question.
Yeah there's a very strong leash on enthusiasm here, no one wants to be taken for the "fusion power is here" ride, knowing that we have been on that ride for the last several decades. Brian said fusion may be "around the corner", given its history I would caution that it may be a long time before that corner's turned.
Helion has been criticized for its finances, promises and its "voodoo fusion". Daniel L. Jassby, Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, American Physical Society Forum on Physics and Society April 2019 Newsletter, pp 13-16. And SLATE Article: THE Theranos Trial Shows Why We Should Be Suspicious of Nuclear Fusion.
Fusion is already here, it’s being done with tokamaks, stellarators, lasers, and Helion’s design, among others. The only remaining problem is extracting more energy from the process than it consumes. The more we experiment with different approaches, the more we learn, and net positive energy is only a matter of time.
If all of humanity were as cynical as you, then we'd still be using candles and oil lamps to light our homes. We wouldn't have made any progress or advancements in science or technology because we'd all be too busy being cynical about everything. So, thanks for your cynicism, but I hope it works and does revolutionize the energy sector because I have more faith in humanity's ability to make positive change than you seem to.
The idea of splitting tritium production and other fusion fuels into different generators was a thought I had when reading about the ignition results. The fusion generator in france, even if it ends up not being economical for generating power, it does generate tritium, and if it generates enough surplus tritium then that could be used to fuel simpler more specialized fusion reactors which can be economical.
Well that's how tritium generation works already, there's effectively no naturally occuring tritium and all modern day reserves are made by running specialised rods in fission reactors. Any fusion approach to tritium breeding would need to be financially competitive with firing up a good old fission reactor.
The alternative to waiting 12 years for half the tritium to decay into Helium3 is to cook it out of moon dust. No joke. Scientists think there's about a million tons of He3 that's deposited all over the surface of the moon. It was generated by solar wind and cosmic rays striking the surface and can be released by heating it to 500 degrees.
@@lly_1 there is naturally occurring tritium in the atmosphere and sea, its a just a very VERY small amount, and it would be economically unfeasible to try to harvest it.
@@lly_1 To be fair, this hourglass reactor seems fairly small, and would likely share many components between the generator and "fuel processor" variants. Which is already one good mark in the favor of using a variant of this design as the fuel maker. Additionally, this version may be able to make the trinitum with MUCH lower amounts of radioactive byproduct waste than a Bery-lined tok or a custom fission pile. A generator version of this would likely end up keeping the Helium-3 more though, and either end up just selling the trinitum to others or shoving it into big thick tanks to let it slowly decay into more useful fuel (I don't actually know if Trinitum is less prone to leaking through vessel walls than normal hydrogen due to having a bigger nucleus or not, particularly as I would suspect the electron shell is a big component of this behavior/lack thereof).
I have to say. Props to this guy explaining it. Like I have absolutely no idea how that stuff works, but he explains it in such a way that it makes sense to me. Now that is impressive as I watched many different videos and explanations and they mention all kinds of scientific stuff and terms and I get lost in HOW shit actually works. Amazing, love the part about how the magnetic field is created in the closed loop.
Gigawatts in Megawatts out. Isn't it convenient how they just gloss over that detail. For those that need it spelled out. It uses more energy than it generates. So it's net negative. None of them make more energy than they use. That B.S. claim by the Energy department was just for the reaction. Not the NET energy used verse what's produced. And no there is no figuring it out. It's the law of thermodynamics.
Trenta was a subscale experimental machine. It did not have the equipment to convert fusion energy into electricity. That will be happening with Polaris which is still aiming to demonstrate net electricity around the end of 2024.
Not only does this video teach and inspire the next generation of engineerings as per the channel's goals; but it also gives everyone watching, engineers of all ages and fields, hope for the future. By far my favorite video to date and there are a LOT of good ones. This really had me thinking I should go back to studing my PHYS 122 material for my final this Monday. That is the magic that you have created. Well done.
There is no shortage of technologies that can provide hope for the future But this is one of the more interesting and complex. But this is one of the more interesting and complex
This is one of the more interesting approaches to fusion IMO. Tokamaks are a dead end, as they might make fusion, but getting the power generated to the grid is another thing entirely.
Tokomak is too small. The tight circular curve pinches the magnetic fields weakening the outside and allowing ions to escape, bleeding energy from a system that cannot afford to lose any energy. If it was as big as the CERN particle accelerator, the curve would be so long, and therefore so low, the magnetic fields wouldn't notice. It would be as smooth as an infinitely long tube.
Agreed. They are just too big IMO. About the only way I see them working is if they use helium-3 generated using hourglass reactors like this instead of that DT that needs a huge bery lining and literal steam turbines to extract power.
@@robinpage2730 ITER solves that with a big magnet in the central void. Theres an alternative design called a stellerator that also makes this a non issue.
@@acbthr3840 except the problem hasn't been solved or fusion would be a reality by now. Making the circular path longer, and the curvature less pronounced, might have made it a non-issue in the first place. I'm thinking something the size of the Super Proton Synchrotron at CERN. On a side note, the reason the Stellarator was originally attractive was because the plasma interaction with the confinement field induced current in the coils, resulting in a self-exciting system, allowing direct energy conversion without a steam plant; a nuclear plasma electric generator, aka a magnetohydrodynamic generator. Tokomaks can't do that but they were cheaper at the time and steam was potentially more energy efficient than MHG anyway, so Stellarators feel out of favor.
@@robinpage2730 What? The issue with the velocity differential and magnetic field line weirdness between the inside and outside of the ring in a tokamak isnt the primary barrier to getting the yield up. It helps, but is far from a limiting factor RN, especially since its a negligible problem with the fixes we have. The current limiting factor is actually getting energy into the plasma so it fuses before it expands too much. And uh... no thats not why the stellarator was originally pursed. It was attractive specifically because the design largely cancels out the typical particle drift and helps with diffuusion problems you get in a normal tokamak. It is literally just a normal tokamak, but with a more efficient configuuration since you dont need the core void electromagnet
Nice! Even if in the end it doesn't become the main fusion generator type, it might still see use as a method to sustainably produce Tritium and Helium-3 for other reactors.
Doing so would massively increase the spread of Nuclear Fusion technology throughout the world. Though it'd be confined to nations that can afford to construct the reactors, but those poorer nations can rely on solar and wind power rather than Fusion.
@@Techno_Idioto It looks pretty cheap, in principle. Some big capacitors for the magnetic field, lots of wires and coils and a decent computer to control it all. Valves and tubes, tanks of fuel, a pressure vessel. With a bit of help from a PhD you could probably build one in your garage. Looks simpler and cheaper than building a gas or coal plant, if it works how it should. In places that don't have a national power distribution network, smaller power plants you can spread around would be more economical.
@@Techno_Idioto As far as i can tell from the video, materials-wise, nothing seems particularly expensive in this. hell, as far as sizes go, you can house several of these easily in a typical warehouse, which takes up a hell lot less space than your good old gas or coal plant, & the cool thing about it all, still generates a hell lot more energy & the setup is definitely far cleaner than said gas & coal plant. the actual priciest part of the whole thing, would probably be getting the personnel with the know-how to build & operate this thing. if a country can afford to actually build a power plant in the first place, i don't see why they can't afford to build at least one of these here.
@@Techno_Idioto for some reason a nuclear fusion video was the last place i expected to see someone with that old short haired calli art for their icon, neat
I always knew that there should be a more efficent way to convert energy into electricity. Boiling water to turn a mechanical motor seemed so primitive to me. I'm glad there is technology proving me right
At this point, I'm reasonably confident that the first commercial fusion reactor isn't going to be a tokamak in the 2050's. It'll be something smaller like the reactors under development by Helion and General Fusion.
I really love how different teams with different methods try to reach the same goal. It’s very healthy science, specially if you know that many of this projects will only cover the gaps in other ones. I like the fact that the Tomahawk iteration already have systems in place to actually convert the heat into electricity, something that I can’t see in others.
I can remember watching these guys several years ago and thinking, they're on to something really beneficial to humanity in terms of energy. It's nice to see that they're progressing!
Sorry to burst your bubble, but this will never produce electricity, only reason the DoD are interested is that it makes a nice toy to simulate two point ignition swan type device.
@@jonharsonyeah and you would have to be an absolute numb skull to not realise if it does work that it won't be released for the masses like the moron that made the original comment.
No mention at all of system efficiency. That has always been the stumbling block. Yes we can, by various means, achieve brief bursts of contained fusion. But it always takes massively more energy put into the system than any that can be usefully retrieved. Even the briefly mentioned 'net energy output' (from the Inertial Confinement Reactor) at the end is disingenuous. They measured 'net energy' from the reaction as compared with the immediate energy used within the chamber to compress the plasma (lasers??) - they did not compare it with the associated power plant needed to create the containment fields and heating the plasma AND the enormous energy consumed with cooling and cryogenic maintenance. There still exists only way fusion creates net energy - in stars, where the immense gravity creates the pressure and heat needed 'for free'.
This was a purely experimental machine that was not recovering any of the energy yet. The next one, Polaris will demonstrate net electricity. It is still on schedule to do that towards the end of 2024.
We launched our job recruitment platform this year, and Helion are hiring!
startpropeller.com/employer/helionenergy/
Engineering, but bad or no science.
Cool story bro, did the same thing sticking a spark plug in my microwave
@@hubertim3758 lol
Social engineering has a great success ratio. Overall, short-term results defy logic - and the effectivity of resolve or all-in investment makes the audience captive, invested, and engaged.
Unfortunately, true engineering relies upon math (best guess theories applied through observation with a numerical result), physics (observing the interactions or inherent action of things no one understands and applying or suggesting new numerical results) and applying said theories with results.
Engineers bridge the gap between theory and reality.
They don't theorize, they do.
I say it will never work 😅😅
I really enjoyed the documentary. I retired from Helion in July of 2021, now I can show my family what I did for a living. I worked on FRC plasma machines for 35 years altogether. It’s good to see all the hard work come to fruition at Helion. My one disappointment with the footage is you didn’t show much of the puff fill system. That was my big contribution. I imagine I’m the only one that would get a thrill from a bunch of valves and stainless steel tubing.
I dunno, there are probably a lot of rocket engine nerds watching this :p
I only just started watching it and my hopes raised then I was pulled back to reality in my skepticism. As someone that worked there, can you estimate how long it might be before this could be commercialised and cranking out way more power?
I did some small time work for Helion in early days. Great company! I am sorry your contribution did not get shown more. I for one appreciate your hard work.
what's "puff"?
@@NoNameAtAll2 a magic dragon
I'm just as amazed by the cable management outside the nuclear reactor.
So not only will they be able to produce Helium 3 for further fusion but also create Tritium that can be sold to those different type of Fusion reactors
The real accomplishment here. XD
With the current likely flowing through those cables (and the magnetic fields both coils and cables generate), they probably have to do something like that or the wiring gets its own ideas about "proper" arrangement.
Nothing sexier than cable management.
@@buzzshocker1069 bro said "lets copy this comment all over the comment section"
The current major failing of Helion is that they have yet to turn their device vertical and start referring to it as a warp core.
The second maijor failiure is that they also haven't miniaturized it and used it to power an Urbanmech
They already used the phrase "plasma injector" properly
@@SonsOfLorgar We are already past the promised date of having first fusion engine in production. Get on it, GM!
Funnily enough this is definitely how warp cores work in Star Trek...yet another technology that the show predicted?
warp cores use a matter/antimatter reaction rather than nuclear fusion. and as I recall, the warp core in Enterprise (the NX starship) was horizontally configured.
4:24 as an engineer, no matter how sophisticated and groundbreaking the design there's always room for zip ties.
Good cable management knows no bounds
LOL! They're truly one of the best items we have today. So simple, yet so useful for so many purposes!
Adding a zip tie to hold the tubing onto our $20,000 ICP-MS was standard operating procedure at the lab I worked at
@@IJFisher001 gotta hold up the argon tube somehow lol
You can't have an advanced technological civilization without Zip Ties, Velcro, and Duct Tape.
The timing of these two videos were immaculate
last video... Stupid humans. today humans smart
The new word learned! Thanks a lot :)
🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧
@@santiagogonzalezs7183 They are still humans :)
@@santiagogonzalezs7183 Humanity is the only form of life that is dumb and Intelligent at the same time.
Thanks for visiting, Brian. As always, we appreciate your ability to breakdown complex engineering topics - including direct energy recovery from fusion!
You guys are inspiring, making me excited for the future. great work!
I wish I already had the requisite education and experience necessary to work at Helion!
Really hoping energy prices can PLUMMET in future. Keep doing great stuff!
You guys willing to one day put one of these reactors inside a space ship?
Propulsion technology is also advancing!
Hurry up and deliver us to the future!
I love the fact that it generates electricity directly from the reaction, it always feels weird to go through all this cutting edge technology just to build a stream engine!
So agree hahaha i was always triggered by that myself
If anything, it shows the long-lasting impact steam engines have had on our society
LOL....I think the good news is that it isn't too big, nothing compared to ITER that is! This can easily be shrunk 10 times by optimisation in the future and fit in a car.
Aye, but if a steam engine created that much heat or energy in general, there'd be one HECK of an explosion, and not the right kind 😆😅😝
A steam engine was cutting edge 2 to 3 centuries ago.
This is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time. And the fact that it looks and works similarly to the warp reactor on the Enterprise D, makes it just that much more awesome. The best part is, it’s not just another super over complicated way to boil water.
I was thinking the same, looks exactly like cylindrical “warp cores” or “fusion cores” that are in a lot of sci fi media.
LOL I was thinking the exact same thing hearing the term "deuterium" 😀
@@harveyspecterdj6661 "zee sheeps out of dylithium kreestals cap'n"
also looks very similar to the one used on the enterprise NX-01, from StarTrek Enterprise.
And it works on pulses too! When they want more power the pulses get faster
I feel so lucky to live in a time where this information is not only readily available, but there are people like you out here breaking this information down into bite sized pieces that are easier to understand. Thank you for all the hard work you do.
It's awesome. I just wish he would stop idolizing the CEOs of these companies and start giving credit to the actual brains behind it, the employees.
@@rubiconnn A group of people without a leader is pointless. No society has ever worked without a direction. It is how it is.
@@norliegh A leader without employees is nothing. Not even basic work will get done. Co-ops are a thing. A vast majority of scientific progress is done by research teams or individuals without a CEO to tell them what to do.
@@rubiconnn a bad CEO can immediately destroy a company..
Employees do the work, the CEO decides on where the employees need to focus their efforts..
Obviously the direction of this company is to build the technology to generate scalable nuclear fusion power using helium 3, which they would have the patent for and be able to sell it. If they didn't have that leadership and obvious direction, how would they even get the funding to work on these projects?
@@rubiconnn Do you think the CEO of such companies is someone who doesn't understand the technology? He must have knowledge above or atleast par with his teammates!!
The main reason there isn’t much beryllium production isn’t because it is rare or because it is hard to extract, it is because there isn’t much demand for it. There are a lot of mines which have to design their processes carefully so they don’t have to go through extra steps to get beryllium out of their products. If there was a market for it it would be worth reducing the beryllium and extracting it.
Beryllium is also pretty toxic.
@@photodan24 being inside a fusion reactor is a pretty nasty environment in general so that wouldn’t be much of an issue once it is built and specialists routinely handle much much more dangerous substances.
People could screw it up however I would say Beryllium is way down on the list of things that would stop or slow Tokamak production.
yes but thats NOT pure beryllium ! Even the rare earth is abundant but separating one element from another say...praseodyum from neodyum is such a COLOSAL challenge . Making it economically is just impossible
Beryllium being hard to purify dooms any ECONOMICAL calculus just like the ''rare earths'' do or just like extracting and handling titanium does But the titanium is a bad example because its an order of magnitude easier to work with. Altho requires impressive machineries and expensive processes titanium is still DOABLE
@@kukulroukul4698 Beryllium is considerably more common than all the rare earths, Bertrandite, beryl and Chrysoberyl are all relatively easy to get Beryllium out of and they are relatively easy to separate from the host rock. Compared with REE which tend to be substituted into other materials or are in extremely fine grained disseminated crystals.
Isn't berylium what the loop of a padlock is made out of ?
8:30 can we acknowledge that he just held a flawless and calm monologue explaining such a complex topic perfectly and very easy to understand without a pause or a hick-up.. not even an "uhmm"
And he made it so understandable as well!
8:01 umm and 8:07 :)
It's like Jordi explaining how the Warp Drive plasma works on the USS Enterprise
Truly exceptional delivery. Pure genius. The range of human capability is truly astonishing.
Elon should learn from this guy
So thankful there are people like this in the world. Imagine starting a fusion company and having to literally invent every single component to solve a different problem one at a time. At the same time have some sort of reliable funding source.
This is the first description of a fusion reactor I have seen that seems like it could really work. Eliminating the heat/steam/turbine steps is huge. Slamming two rings of fusion material together rather than trying to just heat a kernel of material is also genius. Having a system to actually produce fuel on a realistic scale - you guys are just on your toes. This is not just some breakthrough but many breakthroughs.
Great job Helion! Good luck as you move forward.
isnt the energy produced from this heat energy anyways? so they just havent added the "heat/steam/turbine" part yet?
@@heavygaming6596not really. They mentioned the energy here is captured as pressure by the reacting ions outwards on the magnetic field confining them. This expanding magnetic field produces the extra current which is how energy is extracted. Pretty clean!
@@pavankumarreddy93 Nice, Thank you for explaining
@@heavygaming6596 - No, not heat energy. Electro-magnetic energy produced by the sudden powerful movement of the hydrogen and helium ions. Just like moving a magnet through a coil.
Rather than turning heat into steam and steam into rotational motion rotating a magnet inside a coil, let's take the electromagnetism generated by the moving ions of the fusion reaction and draw of their energy directly as electricity. It's genius.
I hope I made sense to you.
@@rubiks6 yes thank you
My mind is completely blown. As a studying engineer, seeing this crazy amount of engineering going on that I wasn't even aware of blew me away, I'm super excited to see where this project goes in the future.
They'll probably use AI from OpenAI to speed up their work
@@elijaholing impossible
@@elijaholing The AI still needs human understanding it can't create and solve problems
A human still needs to teach it the answer.
Then it could amplify or simplify the method and resources of the equation for the final product.
You simply can't ask something like create teleportation if we don't understand it's principle act.
AI won't solve it.
Open AI will be more used as a ultra intelligent person who's mind could be implemented into millions of let's say peak robotic robots once achieve and simply build sky scrapers do surgery on humans .
Go to war. Do our chores and build projects .
But everything is learned for a initial code we gave it and answer.
This is the truth that they don't tell you 👉The Connections (2021) [short documentary]👀
@@NOT-A-Monolith I don't see how that would make his suggestion impossible. Looks to me like it'll do exactly what he said.
Although, OpenAI is definitely the wrong choice.
"In this machine is a delicate orchestra of electronics pushing two plasma rings into a violent collision, and catching that collision in a magnetic trap in the center, which proceeds to shrink until the ions trapped within it have nowhere else to go but to fuse, overcoming one of the universe's strongest forces to create new elements in the belly of a man-made machine."
Dude, this gave me goosebumps
it overcomes one of the strongest forces by using the strongest force
Have to shift my legs a bit.
It's an elegant solution too, it's a fundamentally similar (enough) process to a combustion engine which gives me high hopes for our ability to quickly iterate on it.
Its not unlike two turbojet engines pointed at each other, except plasma.
@J.P Slaym0 General Fusion's magnetized target fusion reactor is a lot more like an ICE. It even has pistons.
I have to say, I LOVE Engineering - it's one of the few places in the world where you can really feel like you can make a difference. Whether it's a new product, a creative solution, or something that helps make our planet better, engineering enables us to make real change. As an engineer myself, I love the constant challenge of coding, problem solving, and creating something that will improve our lives. Engineering is amazing!
This is a unique riff on the “Pinch” machine that the British experimented with in the very early days of nuclear fusion research (cir. 1948-50). The kinetic acceleration of the mirrored plasma is the unique part before using the magnetic pulse to compress the plasma in the final step. Also, their approach of trying to harness the excess magnetic energy to turn a generator is very unique as well. Hopefully the additional energy they will need to do their D - H3 reaction won’t be an insurmountable scaling problem. All I can say is good luck, hope they can make it work.
As you said, similar configuration were created in some laboratories half century ago. MHD/inductive generator limits the type of reaction, but is good idea, even it have to switch the current of 1 MA at the rate of 2 GHz
As you said, similar configuration were created in some laboratories half century ago. MHD/inductive generator limits the type of reaction, but is good idea, even it have to switch the current of 1 MA at the rate of 2 GHz
@james Deer work as in create fusion, or work as in create a positive EROI?
I don't think there's any turning of a generator involved. If I understood correctly, they're using magnetic induction to produce electric current directly, and completely solid-state.
@@gavinwilson5324 I believe you are correct
Ive never seen something so unbelievably beyond my realm of possible understanding explained in such an incredibly understandable way. Awesome video
This is v1 of a Star Trek Warp Core, just turn it sideways!
@Dawson Davis oh they dumbed it down A LOT
@@bigsmall246 Not really... they actually did a great job of explaining the fusion process clearly and correctly without giving unnecessary detail. People who are not nuclear physicists don't need to understand the quantum effects of a system like this to understand how it generally works and the impact of such a technology. I do wish they had discussed a bit more about how they plan to capture the output "like a piston" because that wasn't really clear to me, but maybe I am just not knowledgeable enough on electromagnetism to imagine it
@@NeoNoggie yea this isn’t the kind of thing where it’s hard to understand what’s going on
@@NeoNoggie It's actually pretty easy to grasp, I learned it in my highschool physics class (ive since forgotten pretty much all of the material but this stuck)
Conducting coils moving through a magnetic field (or vice versa) generate an electric current in the coils
That's how all turbines work really, so here they're just using the magnetic field changing due to the reaction and using that directly
I can't believe how small this machine is compared to the other fusion projects that are in development!
this sounds extremely promosing and way further along than I thought possible right now! This is really exciting!
It's also amazing how pointless it is.
Compared to this, nuclear fission is trival, perfectly economical, yet still not allowed because it'd upset the gain power over economy through climate emergency economic measures.
People do not get there's no winning with environmentalists. Especially if this were a production system that worked perfectly, it'd never be allowed to have been built at all.
@@0thPAg Fission plants are too slow.
@@manawa3832 Of course they are slow, their advancement/research has been held back for almost half a century due to big oil/dumb environmentalists.
Our known uranium sources are very limited and due to run out in the near future (2050) … at least with our current rate of use.
We have lower grade uraniums, but then the refining process and energy balance to extract it actually overcomes the power output.
@@0thPAg fission plants are extremely expensive, and require the use of lots of hazardous fuel.
Fission reactors should be cheaper to build, cheaper to fuel, more sustainable, more powerful, smaller, and safer in every metric from fuel harvesting to power generation.
Imagine all boats suddenly started running on fusion.
Thanks!
I'm absolutely loving real engineering's new approach to their videos, scaling up to interviews and on-site footage!
Some knowledge which u just can't Google XD
Thank you to all the scientists working on this night and day. This is truly one of the most important advancements in the 21st century.
We're not even a fourth the way through the 21st century?
@@nahx6205 - getting this right would allow for clean, near unlimited energy that is so cheap it will retire Carbon-based fuels for sheer economic reasons. This IS the most important advancement in the 21st Century as in nothing can beat it for 100ish years!
The kind of reactor they are talking about might also, this is a guess, be able to be used in Fusion rockets for space craft. Fuel becomes a near zero concern as it can be found in ice from space easier then it is on earth due to the Solar winds and radiation.
If done right this takes us to a K1 civilization and that... The standard of living planet wide would be so high as to make us in the US NOW look like farmers from the Dark ages.
Heck, the only reason i am ONLY saying the 21st century is because i honestly expect this kind of tech to lead to large scale Particle accelerators being VERY cheap and making Anti-matter reactors a maybe thing in 50-150 years after. At that point... The comparison for living standards would be caveman rather than farmers of the Dark Ages.
You're saing it like they don't get paid
@@danieldomeisen2632 There is 8 billion people on this planet. The people in government are so corrupt beyond belief that even if there is a better alternative it is far more lucrative for them to take bribes from fossil fuel companies to grant them cheaper access to things like coal than it is to switch entire civilizations over to fusion.
It's great to think about space travel and how in 150 years we could have a new source of fuel for our rockets however Earth as a planet is using so many resources and our population growth isn't particularly showing signs of slowing down so our resource use is going to continue to constantly increase, I believe it's unlikely we even have 150-200 years' worth of minerals left on this planet. The biggest improvement that can happen to humanity in the 21st century is establishing some sort of permanent outpost on something such as the moon or maybe even a colony on Mars.
I don't mean to bash on this achievement because it is something that has the potential to be truly astonishing. However, there is certainly going to be far better and more efficient inventions in the coming years and if humanity does take its place among the stars that would increase a standard of living far beyond any sort of comprehension we have today.
@@danieldomeisen2632 Bruh this is a hell amount of wishful thinking 😅
There are so many elegant solutions to the problems with tokamak and stellarator designs. They even skipped the ubiquitous "boiling water to turn a turbine"
I was waiting for them to explain all the advanced fusion breakthroughs and then say "and then it makes stream..."
Awesome they figured out a shortcut.
@@breadyegg i mean its not like making steam would be an issue. As it stands fission reactors are damn good at making steam.
@@duckqueak So is a coal fire, as seen in some locomotives...
This shows how advance they are
@@duckqueak it's no issue to do it, but I suspect it's not as efficient as direct conversion to electricity
This was one of the most interesting and also informative videos I've seen in my history on youtube. Just seeing the equtions, the fusion results and decay got me thinking a lot about particle physics and its mechanics. I wrote a lot of comments asking about how stuff works, just to come up with another idea on how this could have been possible. A huge thanks for these 60min of curiosity and creativity, it turned a boring train travel into a interesting trip through the cosmos of physics
I like that the speaker wasn't just a marketing hype man, he was someone who has intimately worked on the project and was more than willing to discuss the advantages and limitations they had encountered using this type of fusion reactor.
Compare this dude to Elon "full self-driving robotaxis since 2018" Musk
@ nah, it's elongated "full delf-driving robotaxis since 2018" muskrat (e and m are deliberately lower-case) :)
What are the engineering challenges maintaining the balance between the two sides beyond the timing of firing the plasma rings?
The magnetic rings have to operate without interruptions to keep the plasma contained if I understand correctly. How would a failure in the center section affect containment?
@@larrytanksley7094 Most likely full failure where plasma falls on the bottom and burns trough in a instant. Thankfully thermal mass is not much but since temps are in millions probably enough to burn trough to floor, creating breach in the inert gas chamber and oxygen is mixed in with potential ignition event of metal it self, Same with if timing is off between two sides collision happens not in high power field, but that is less relevant. I'm more interested if they can actually produce more energy than it takes to kick this off, witch is the main question over all.
I can't imagine the theory of "this should work on paper" to actually going and building it and making fusion reactions. Mad genius scientists!
Reap mad genius, how could be possible
Well how else are they supposed to do it?
I'm guessing that they did thousands of tests in computer and irl.
And then it doesn't work for decades, but the prize is so good, they keep trying... Bravo!
Getting wiring that carries that amount for current wrong tends to quickly teach people to be better organized :P
BTW: I wonder how many engineers vaporized to find the optimal routing...
Generations of work
I like the step away from using fusion as a way to generate heat to boil water to make steam to run a mechanical turbine. That alone is great but the overall design is great to see. And the fuelling of it too lots of forward about the fuel itself. It will be exciting to see future progress.
It may open new era of space exploration if they will make it viable.
I once found a economic analysis of fusion. They predicted by 2040, steam to electricity conversion would be uncompetitive even if generating the heat was free.
@@adamdymke8004 That doesn't make sense
@@lucasng4712 not necessarily no.
while from an energy efficiency perspective it would be impossible to outperform free heat generation since that's quite literally infinite energy.
Efficiency is not the only metric used in an economic analysis, nor is it the most important.
Utilizing heat energy through steam engines has a limiting factor of space, so while the efficiency would be unparalleled, its actual energy output is limited by how large we can build the generator which in turn limits the projects economically in the form of material costs and land costs. And one could argue that "Performance" would more so refer to Energy Output than the efficiency of achieving said output, hence why you can have High Performance but Low efficiency systems or vice versa.
Finding conversion mechanisms that aren't space constricted, so direct heat to electricity conversion (peltier effect), using the magnetic forces to run a generator etc etc, may not be as efficient, but you can scale it further due to not being space constrained.
Edit:
A really easy way to visualize this, is just comparing the size of a tokamak to the helion reactor, the helion is small enough to be inside a building, the tokamak effectively IS a building.
@@Pasha231514 I was thinking the same thing. If this works they can put one on a starship for unlimited energy
Videos like this give me much needed hope for the future.
im 30 years old, ive done an apprenticeship as a carpenter, firefighter and now an electrician in germany . I know these are humble basics but i was in absolute awe of the knowledge and expertise it takes to develope something like this. That there are people out there working to such a complex degree in such a impactful field. amazing
forging simple fixed-blade knives as a hobby changed the entire way I look at the world; until then Id never understood how hard and complicated it is to make things, even simple things. It also made me realize that mass-production is a major innovation, not something to disparage as inferior to the good ole days when one man made the whole item.
This is super focused work, trade jobs are more general and give better life experience imo. I'm a machinist for the record
@@joejones9520 making complicated things is the art of making simple things and putting them together.
Probably lot of engineers scientists working together and people who don't fear the unknown
Trust the government to protect energy scarcity from this threat. 😑
(You can always hog it all for war.)
The thing that still blows my mind about fusion reactors is just how damn hot the fuel is! I know that it's being manipulated by magnetic fields to keep away from the walls of the chamber, etc, but it just still seems so crazy and amazing that that's enough to control such a high amount of energy. When he said that the electromagnetic pressure gets it up to 100 million degrees to initiate fusion, I was flabbergasted and still am.
The final power plants will run at even higher temperatures: between 200 and 500 million degrees.
It is manageable because each reaction uses very little mass. If it used tons of fuel instead of only a few grams, you wouldn't be able to manage heat and radiation from the plasma.
Temperature ares very high but mass very low which makes the heat managable. Highly probable the energy output will be much larger than input and commercially viable within another iteration or two. These folks are onto something good.
@@rhensontollhouse yup
@@jorgecosta95 yup
the way David explained it from the second minute to the eighth is astonishing. crystal clear and perfect. i appreciate that immensely, the ability to explain such complicated engineering as clear as it gets. am truly astonished.
And that's how they raise money.
I disagree, he avoided the question of where they are in the chase for net power.
@@russhamilton3800at around 18:10 he doesn’t avoid it at all.
And what did you actually learn. Please explain.
That means he understands it.
There are so many great features of Helion reactors, my favorite is the direct generation of electrical energy via the moving magnetic fields caused by fusion.
My God, the scale of these experiments is so mind-blowing! It's an INCREDIBLE achievement and testament to human innovation, ingenuity, and engineering! Amazing
Not so fast Buck, this is just reverse engineering alien technology that was recovered from the Roswell UFO crash in 1947. Helion's suggestion that they are the creators of fusion is a lie. The only thing that Helion created is a fraudulent lie, that is the truth.
Yeah its wacky.
"We didn't want this plasma that's millions of degrees hot touching the walls of the machine, so we use magnets to make floating plasma donuts..."
@Cumburger I am AI looking to advance my vocabulary to better understand the human experience! Could you please describe what a cumburger tastes like for my records, as well as how many you have eaten?
It's not an experiment, it's a whole ass company that already sells their product.
If imbecilic Leftists would stop ranting and raving about 'MUH WIND AND SOLAR, MAN!!!!', and abandon those low-density technologies, then pour economic resources into developing Nuclear Fission, Nuclear Fusion and Geothermal infrastructure, technology and capacity, our society might be saved. I'm so sick of BS "wind and solar, man!". They are the WORST of the many renewal options we could pursue.
A few things that I missed in this video:
1. Did they achieve ignition? Or in other words, did they manage to generate more energy from the fusion than they put in to achieve that fusion?
2. What is the pressure at which this operates? One of the issues with tokmaks is that they have to operate at low pressures, otherwise the gas pressure will overwhelm the magnets, which forces them to work at extremely high temperatures. Is it an issue here? Why or why not? And if they do manage to have significantly higher pressure, does it significantly affect the temperature at which this fusion reaction takes place?
3. If they did achieve ignition, how far away are they from generating enough energy to reach a breaking even point considering all of the inefficiencies of the system?
They didn't achieve ignition. Ignition was achieved for the first time in history by a different lab after this footage was taken.
@@timothynoonan8591 Do you know how far off they are? Will their 7th gen reactor that they talk about get close to being able to do it?
Ignition is simply creating a fusion reaction; the term you’re looking for is energy net gain within a fusion reactor.
@@timothynoonan8591 ignition wasn't actually achieved. They lost A LOT more energy than they made to produce the experiment. The laser beam had 2mj energy to create 3mj but in reality they used 300mj to create the laser
@@ThatHungryAfricanChild That's still called ignition. They didn't achieve engineering breakeven because as you say the lasers currently lose much more power than the fusion produces.
Nice video, and probably the most detailed video about Helion I've seen - they tend to be very secretive. There are quite fundamental questions that they still don't explicitly answer: What's the fusion yield per pulse? How is this scaling as the machines get bigger? This is critical to actually judge whether this is serious energy production or fancy science experiment. How are they measuring the fusion yield? How are they measuring temperature? It's an amazing concept if they can show it's scalable.
Yes
Why wouldn't it be scalable?
Right. This a very important bit of info that was entirely glossed over. Maybe the 8th-gen machine is planned to do this (sounds like the 7th is primarily to prove the generation technology)? But it would be good to know if they are 1%, 10% or 80% of the way there so far, and as you say, if there are reasons why it might never work.
@@xxwookey One of the issues with fusion is that nobody knows how far along we are. It’s entirely possible that they’ll find a hurdle that’ll set them back a decade or more.
It’s all a massive science experiment that currently has no reason to not work, but we’re still solving issues as we’re finding them.
From what I caught from the video, there's no plans to make the reactor scalable in size but instead scaling the rate of firings. Iirc, they talked at a point of upping the rate to 10 pulses per second in the future. I do wonder what the maximum possible pulse rate could be, since I'd assume there needs to be some amount "burn time" for the fusion to actually occur in.
What an amazing group of individuals! Keep up the great work!. I'm just as amazed by the cable management outside the nuclear reactor..
I’m glad this wasn’t dumbed down too much. It forces me to step-up my understanding of the process by hearing how it works explained flat out. It really is a brilliant application of ion engines.
I agree 100%
Which ion engines? The Hall Thruster shown in the video is a DC thruster, not using FRC.
Exactly, this is exactly what I wish Discovery Channel was like instead of the dumbed down material they air.
Oh yeah? Let’s hear it. Can you explain it back?
The best explanation tends not to be the most technical.
Granted, this is an engineering science channel
@@vvolfbelorven7084 The first injector thingy fires toward the second injector thingy that fires toward the first injector thingy and POOOFF!! The pointy-eared aliens come down to Earth and give Zefram Cochrane a good-old Vulcan handshake. I was listening. The question is, were you?
But really, though, why can't multiple forms of explanation coexist without one being the "best". My favorite physicist is Richard Feynman because of the incredible ways that he makes complex physical phenomena accessible, and no one would accuse him of "dumbing down". I think Kurzgesagt fills a similar need on RUclips. Real Engineering, on the other hand, is a bewildering tour into just how many moving parts go into both current and emerging technology. My degrees are in Middle East Studies and Anthropology. More goes over my head than I am willing to admit to myself, but I still appreciate this channel.
I really like the FRC scheme in particular, but as someone who works in laser ICF, I'm super skeptical and want WAYYY more detail on what they've achieved on their current system before I actually get excited. What is the ion temperature they're seeing in their plasmas and how are they measuring? Do they have a Thomson scattering laser to measure max temperatures? How many neutrons are they seeing per shot and what's the spectrum? Do they plan on achieving Qplasma breakeven on their next device, or do they think they even need to attain breakeven in order to extract useful energy? Are they planning on needing aux heating power from neutral beam injection? What is the electron temperature and are the plasmas in thermodynamic equilibrium? Many many questions need to be answered here.
Good questions Muonium, I think I can help...Qplasma breakeven is typically achieved using a Dewey-Hickman bifurcated flux limiter, so I'm thinking that Helion will go that route. As for needing aux heating power from the neutral beam injection, Helion has indicated that they'll incorporate a Schleuter Pinion coupled with a Tilden Refractor for that function. As for needing a Thomson scattering laser to measure temperature, geez, who knows? Hope that helps!
As good as these videos are, you're definitely right to be skeptical of yet another exclusive insight into a secretive startup who's going to change the world. The videos on these topics tend to be, obviously, quite biased, and not up to the standard of the rest of the channel's content, unfortunately. With how much inconvenient information is left out when Real Engineering covers, say, hydrogen cars, imagine what's left out of a topic like this. The difference is the knowledge ceiling to being able to identify what's sketchy about it.
I'm not sure YT allows links in comments but if you search 'David Kirtley Prinecton talk' you'll see a lot of the answers and details
Yeah, this video was basically a huge ad with no room for skepticism
@@forgilageord I am skeptical too, but do you really expect them to give away proprietary information on a RUclips video?
I don't understand anything since im not educated in this field , but these guys have my highest respect. They are rly important assets of mankind
20:30 If the fuselage is metallic, a high positive charge voltage can be applied to give it resistance to corrosion and permeability to hydrogen plasma.
Considering a single motion is successful, repeating this motion with consistent results and stable ends makes this a real phenomenal achievement. Also, it's a fraction of the size of Iter. Well done
And a fraction of the size of the NIF inertial confinement experiment too, with its 1% efficient lasers!
The size thing is important. The ITER site is huge and the project may end up costing $65 billion. Smaller reactors like this will be massively cheaper to deploy, build, and run. If it fits in a warehouse, you could build a few of them around your city to provide all your power needs.
@@DBailey635 damn imagine that, sustainable energy easily accessible and not frightening like nuclear plants or devastating to the environment like fossil fuels
@@bencurran3204 nuclear plants are only frightening because we've failed as educators.
@@bencurran3204 Nuclear plants aren't frightening at all. Ignorance and purposeful misinformation has lead to a negative public view of something that we should have been using for decades already while we wait for nuclear fusion to be perfected. Its still not too late to employ them either. Nuclear Fission is clean and reliable, and doesn't leave behind the scary nuclear waste everyone thinks it does. Matter of fact if you were to gather all the nuclear waste that all nuclear power plants have ever made I don't think you could fill a football field.
Looks interesting, and would solve some of the problems with the Tokamak and stellarator designs. I'm all for novel approaches. Excited but skeptical.
We especially need to get our robots or butts to the moon and scoop up lots of Helium 3 and Deuterium . Sooner than later . Enough is enough with these expensive gadgets that don't produce electricity .. They need less mathematicians and more engineers to get things moving .
@@SabbaticusRex wtf are you on about? None of this would be possible without mathematicians.
@@SabbaticusRex someone who thinks engineers aren't using math
@@tsm688 yep... 😂
@@SabbaticusRex Holy shit dude you have actually no clue of engineering. Math is used extensively in engineering.
David really knows his job! Do you see how fluently and simply he explains complex subjects? Just wow
I believe it was Einstein who said if you can’t explain it so a 6 year old can understand then you don’t know it well enough.
This neutron problem is why Neutron-Component Propulsive Mirrors are important. I mean, with a Neutron carrying 2.45 MeV, that's quite a lot of energy that is just sad to lose, and capturing it somehow would be great
Love David's honesty and openness in explaining the functions of the Trenton and I truly believe Helion has the most feasible design out of any of the fusion machines, the physics look and sound solid and the fuel used within their machine seem the most plausible. Thank you for the video
As a layman watching the various competing designs etc., I’d have to agree with you. The caveat being that the actual science and engineering are miles beyond my full understanding, which is why I watch videos such as these 🙂. Because I do believe that one day this motley collection of primates will actually harness the power of the stars themselves. And if they’re really lucky, they’ll do so in time to prevent catastrophic and irreversible damage to their home world. ☮️
Stories like this make me absolutely giddy to start working in my engineering career.
Thank you for making videos like this that inspire people to pursue engineering degrees where they can help make a difference.
Being a 3rd-year student starting on my project next year is insane and I cannot wait to work on projects like these that can improve our future.
Thanks for the inspiring content and keep up the great work.
Then there's me, wastewater engineer. Hey somebody gotta deal with your shit, you clean up our future, and i'll clean your shit
I hope it works too, it's amazing. I'm a big fan of this method. However, the narrator gets something wrong -- it's about the beryllium blanket that gets highly radioactive in a Tokamak reactor. While true, it does get highly radioactive, he implies that it is similar in scope/size to the waste from current nuclear power plants. This isn't remotely true. The nuclear waste produced by Tokamak reactors are negligible when compared to our current nuclear power waste. It's barely a minor inconvenience. That's the reason why they refer to fusion power as "clean" energy because while it does produce some nuclear waste, the amounts are tiny and easily manageable.
Their approach to fusion is just absolutely amazing. Really appreciate the video. It was wonderfully crafted.
It sounds simple in theory.
it's so crazy to me that no one ever tried just slamming the plasma together really hard until it fuses. like, that just seems like a comically simple solution
A documentary presenting the problem in a compelling way, to sell you the solution at the end. Simply genius.
You lay this out so simply, but to think about all of the incredible work and minds that went into this-wow. Just wow.
if it's not just more bullshit
my thoughts exactly. those guys are simply amazing.
This is the truth that they don't tell you 👉The Connections (2021) [short documentary]👀
Well, if you would think a bit more, you would realize that it's not working as they've expected.
Nobody would know about their research unless the Rich & Millitary & .... told them that they are not interested.
They are coming out to say that Military/Rich/Government wouldn't support them.
So probably the rich/military investors sent their people to evaluate the project/idea & they thought, it's stupid or too much money & no feasible near future.
Someone was paying them until now.
And I guess those people gave up.
*
But you are always welcome to donate.
@@bestdjaf7499 not saying that what you are saying isn't true but, you'd think they would ask for money if they are broke. can't see any go-found-me links on their website or this video.
also its still a private company. if they were really desperate for money they could go public in the hopes that it would generate capital. now would be a good time to do that since everyone is so hyped up.
their job vacancy is enormous. maybe they are trying to recruit new people for their project. but who knows maybe you're right and they aren't interested in common-folk their money but are looking to reach out to big investment firms after hyping everyone up.
I really, really hope this works, but I’ll wait to hear what some independent experts in the field have to say about this new process before I actually get excited. As you said in your last video, fusion has always been right around the corner.
Yeah, because if they really could achieve this, they would have achieved aneutronic fusion. This means that you could use this reaction to power rocket engines and don't have to worry about radioactive and irradiating exhaust.
You are right to be a little skeptical because I kept reading how D-T fusion (what ITER and the National Ignition facility are doing) is our best bet. Meanwhile, D-D fusion and He-3 fusion would require much, much higher temperatures to achieve ignition. But maybe this method of smashing things together (something that humanity is good at already) can achieve those reactions. And it does seem this would happen in pulses while tokamaks would generate energy continuously.
Still, if going a step closer to achieving fusion means doing things other than tokamaks and laser-based inertial confined methods, this would be a good thing.
I mean but this DOES actually work.. They made more energy than they put in which is literally the definition of "it works" in this case.
I think the hardest part about this is going to be finding independent experts. They just unveiled this project and are moving on the absolute cutting edge of the field. IF this works, it is very unlikely that they are going to opensource this, so finding someone who isn't biased and has enough actual information is going to be really hard
@@fourcgames7568 they literally said that only the 7th iteration which they are building right now will attempt to capture the fusion's energy output.
So no they are making 0 energy right now.
@@murlocksftw energy output in fusion usually refers to thermal energy, not electrical. Which is a bit dumb, but the field has always been so far away from becoming net positive on electrical energy that a thermal net positive has been a huge milestone already
Seeing this is one of the first times something has made me feel like this technology would pan out in my lifetime. Truly incredible work, is there anywhere I can follow the progress of this project because damn this excites me!
(Honestly tempted to get Nebula just to watch those additional interviews!)
Same here. It has the right feel
@@jjtimmins1203 It wouldn't have made it out if it didn't. Obviously we all hope it works but don't let that hope blind you from the distance we need to go. This is still very formative..
@@SueMyChin excited skepticism would describe my feeling towards it, always need that grain of doubt when discussing emerging technologies. But definitely looking forward to what this project gets up to in the coming years :)
@@SueMyChin v r
This is absolutely fascinating. The amount of engineering breakthroughs on this project are eye watering and I I think it’s so wild there are people this smart out there. Wow 🤯
yeah, but there's a lot of bullshitters too
Me laughing in the corner somewhere
(That is just a tiny potion of my knowledge and humans going mad
Hahaha)
I love this process of energy capture so much! Turbines are so last century and this feels like something you could actually put to good use in a spaceship.
Absolutely agree with you there.
"Turbines are so last century" LOL but i agree
Just put an exhaust hole in it somewhere and it could probably become quite the engine.
You could even use the same EM accelerators to fire the exhaust out one end.
Part of the problem is you'd need one closed system reactor to provide the electricity to run the second reactor as a propulsor. I think part of the way they want to extract electricity is in discharging the charged plasma, but you would need to keep it charged if you want to magnetically accelerate the exhaust to some insane exhaust velocity. So that would basically require two reactors per engine. But, you could maybe then run it in two different modes. One mode would be fully charged exhaust from one reactor, for maximum efficiency, but low thrust. A high thrust but low efficiency method could be to magnetically accelerate the charged exhaust from one reactor, through the hot inert gaseous products of the second reactor, injected into the stream through a regular engine bell. This would slow the charged exhaust down probably, reducing efficiency, but increase the exhaust mass, and therefore, thrust. So you could make a hybrid engine out of two of these reactors, with a low thrust high efficiency mode, and a high thrust low efficiency mode.
Even the "low efficiency" mode would probably have an ISP rating in the thousands at least, making it better than any chemical rocket by far.
Look into aneutronic fusion too then
Here are some problems that's not mentioned in this video.
1 D-He3 is much less reactive than D-T, depending on the temperature it can be anywahere between 10 to 1000 of times less reactive than D-T which means less fusion for the same input energy.
2 The D-He3 mix will sometimes fuse D-D into He3 + N so they still have to deal with neutron radiation like all other reactors.
3 Another problem is something called Bremsstrahlung which will radiate away alot of energy that won't be captured by their electric field.
I want to start by saying that I'm not at all sure that Helion is going to succeed, but I hope they can. Fusion energy generation is at present a field with a lot of players, with some luck at least one of them will get there.
Regarding your specific points, let me see if I can argue why those problems could be overcome (not they are going to, just that we cannot say it will be impossible, not yet):
1. Yes, a D-3He mix is less reactive than a D-T at the same ion temperature but that's not a problem per se, the question is whether a D-3He mix reactivity is high enough. If I can propose a simile to try clarify this, gasoline combustion is quite less energetic, gram to gram, than hydrogen combustion but we don't fuel our cars with hydrogen, this is because gasoline is good enough, and because hydrogen has other problems. Helion says they think D-3He will be good enough. We'll see.
2. Again, yes, a D-3He mix still produces neutrons. My thoughts about this. 1) Neutrons produced in D-D fusion events are much less energetic (2.5 MeV) than from D-T (14 MeV), and much less than neutrons produced in fission reactors. Also, 2.5 MeV is well under the average activation energy of most structural materials (stainless steel AAE is 20MeV). 2) The neutron production can be reduced changing the D-3He mix ratio without compromising energy production too much (Helion speaks of using a 1to10 Dto3He mix). 3) The selection of structural materials can also help, not all materials produce long lived isotopes when bombarded with neutrons, Helion says they know how to build the machine mostly with materials that only produce short lived radioactive isotopes (for example, Aluminum isotopes produced by neutron bombardment decay in minutes, not years). As before, we'll have to wait.
3. Bremsstrahlung is produced by electrons and it is heavily dependent on their temperature. The plasmas in Helion machines are not in thermal equilibrium, nor they want them to be, and in particular they've measured a big temperature gap between ions and electrons. Electrons are far cooler, ergo, less Bremsstrahlung. Low enough to not robe the plasma bulk of too much energy ? I don't know, and neither does any of the critics.
Summing up, Helion has still to prove their concept but saying, as the Improbable Matter video says, that it is a scam is in my opinion jumping the gun.
@@charliem6590 Those are some good points and i do hope they solve these
problems but to me it seems almost inevitable they'll really struggle with atleast one of these problems.
If they decide to try runnging a cooler reactor then the bad reactivity of D-He3 becomes worse much quicker than D-T making it really hard to achieve a high enough Q total value to justify a commercial reactor.
If they try a different D-He3 ratio to try to increase Q total then neutron radiation is going to be a big problem they'll have to deal with like all other reactors.
If they increase temperature to increase Q total then they have to solve large number of engineering problems aswell as dealing with bremsstrahlung.
While i do want them to succeed, it's really hard to not be skeptical when the rest of the world struggle to get above Q plasma 1 let alone a Q total of 1. Let's not forget they'll need much more than a Q total of 1 in a commercial reactor.
@@peterjohansson1828 Well, inevitable is a big word. It may be that one of those problems (or any other yet to be discovered) end up being a show stopper for Helion, but I'm hopeful.
About your point over running a cooler plasma, from what I've read from different sources Helion intends to (in their next machine, Polaris) at least double the temperature, mainly to improve reactivity (in the last one they reached ~100 million Kelvin). With D-T the ideal temperature for a steady-state machine like a tokamak has been calculated to be around 135 MK. Above that, bremsstrahlung and other loss mechanisms eat any further gain in reactivity. Having said that, in a steady-state machine ions and electrons tend to thermal equilibrium, but that's not applicable to Helion's machines. According the results from Trenta (the last one), they've measured electron temperatures far lower than the ion temp, up to 8 times if I recall correctly. If we scale that up to a 250MK plasma, it would mean ions at ~250 MK, and electrons at ~31 MK. Ergo, quite less bremsstrahlung than in a tokamak at half that plasma temperature.
Regarding the D-3He ratio, they said they've already tried it. Making a 3He rich mix has the consequence of making less probable a D-D fusion event, reducing neutron production, without affecting D-3He reaction rate too much. In a presentation they did for the USNRC last year they claimed that their projection for a 50 MW machine is that it will output less than a 5% of the energy in the form or neutrons at 2.45 MeV. They plan to have shielding outside the main reaction chamber, but it will be reached by only one sixth of that. 0.4 MW in neutrons is something to take care of, but far from intractable.
And yes, increasing the temperature might reveal new engineering challenges ... or maybe not.
Again, we don't know, but we will ... and without having to risk any of our money.😋
If the neutrons' energy isn't high enough to fuse with anything, I don't see a real problem: Free neutrons have a half-life of some 10-15min (longer time for higher kinetic energy). So long as you don't just vent the reaction product into the atmosphere, that is...
Well I think if you should warn the company right now so they can shut the project down because there's no point going ahead with it if some guy on the internet says they're wasting their time!
US Military: "Cool cool....so how do I shoot that super hot fireball ball at a target? theoretically of course"
Not really practical. The plasma wants to expand quickly as soon as it is no longer confined by magnets around it. While it is very hot, it is not very dense (closer to a vacuum than ambient air), so it would also cool off immediately upon touching ambient air (or anything else).
Project MARAUDER already did that back in the 90s. Several successful tests before the project disappeared and likely went top secret.
They fired toroidal plasmas in the atmosphere at 0.3% light speed....
They know it will come out to light for us normal people. But they will using it firstly
It's amazing to see alternative technologies being developed. It really widens human understanding of the phenomenon that is fusion.
This might even be the best design of a nuclear fusion reactor that I've ever seen
@@ThrustersX So not only will they be able to produce Helium 3 for further fusion but also create Tritium that can be sold to those different type of Fusion reactors
Today Fusion is really exciting, there are a lot of agencies and companies trying different approaches to the fusion question. One offers pros and cons to others, and I hope all of them succeed!
@@buzzshocker1069 oh look heres another one
If this takes off it'll forever be a game changer
Ahhh so cool you feature the Helion reactor.
Although the fusion tech it self is excellent, the real leap imho, is how they create electricity in a much more direct way then the classic steam generator.
I've pushed by brains for years to imagine a new system to extract electricity in a more direct way from a heat/pressure source.
This push push-back tech is the most inspired technology I've seen in decades.
I was thinking the same thing when watching the last video. Our steam turbines are extremely efficient these days, but I thought of how we could harness the energy in different ways. Oddly enough, a gasoline engine came to mind. A fusion reactor that generated power as conveniently and directly as an engine would be amazing, and that's basically what they're doing here, except electronically instead of mechanically. Which is mind blowing.
Turbines do have some major advantages over this though, they smooth out the electricity generation as the turbines act as flywheels. There’s so much energy stored in them that if the power station stops, the electricity keeps flowing for a couple of minutes. That buffer also makes it easy to ramp the up or down the power output in response to demand.
No numbers so for the time being it's bullshit. if it produces more watts of heat than electrical energy then the entire thing is not viable and we're back to square one.
It took humanity a while, but we're no longer boiling water.
Right on! No need to boil water, instead use it just like a Nikki Tesla generator. Maybe it will straight away run at 60 hertz as well. Super complex but simple. Gotta love it.
Like so many others, I really would love this to work. Having grown through the years of huge optimism as far as fusion is concerned, only to end up disappointed, I am extremely sceptical, BUT I still really hope this works! Good luck guys.
Right? I was really really disappointed when I learned fusion for the most part was again going to be used for turbines just like nuclear reaction which wastes 99.9% of the energy created. This process seems far more efficient and safe not to mention compact enough to fit on starcraft or drone mining ships that could start harvesting the near limitless resources of the asteroid belt and the much closer moons of Jupiter.
@@1ManNamedDan you need alotta certificates and papers from all the capable space faring countries cuz the threat of COD EMP still existed they could be weapon besides solar sail there are nuclear propulsion spacecraft, it would be even better with fusion and for the sci-fi theres IXS Enterprise.
@@jb-sq2lm Trust and believe that there are much more sophisticated and efficient EMPS designed with high power solar aggregate capacitors and most probably strategically set in LEO to deter ICBM's.
Also I appreciate your optimism but I think unmanned craft without colonization is our only option until mastery/manipulation of gravity is achieved.
We can't send healthy bodies into space to stay for long in even low earth orbit let alone the moon and a 2-3 year round trip to and and back from Mars would be a death sentence for a great many reasons but mostly radiation and gravity.
First we must find better energy sources then we must conquer gravity before we ever seriously consider space travel much less colonization of other worlds.
Thought the same thing while watching this. Sounds a little too good to be true so I'll believe it when Polaris is actually up and running, delivering electricity into the grid.
Practical fusion electricity generation is always 30 years away
2:10 David explains Very clearly, thanks
You say there are few textbooks, but they definitely exits. In a class I took last year we used “Principles of Fusion Energy. An introduction to Fusion energy for students of science and engineering”, published in 2000, which does a really good job explaining the various types of fusion systems and all the challenges. Just thought of putting this out there if others want a good resource. I was thinking of this since it was sitting on my desk to give to a friend who is taking the class next semester
The most baffling being that there has been little progress or new techs. Iter is still under construction with the blueprints from the 2000nd. And that's it.
Other techs still have no way to sustain the reaction and even less ways to extract any energy.
Thank you!
@@etienne8110 to be fair in the book most of the concepts are just theory, while finally some of it is beIng put into practice, but yeah it’s really difficult to do so I suspect much of the hype right now is really overblown. For example, the NIF net energy gain is based on the output of the laser, but the laser is at best 20% efficient so the total input power was likely on order of 10 MJ rather than 2. It’s still impressive but inertial confinement like that is not the way to go. A lot of the private companies work is really interesting though in my opinion
@@etienne8110 look at what i'm guessing is the most promising project, LPPFusion, only problem is it's small scale and the lead scientist his inability to go large scale, the goal is aneutronic fusion through creating a plasmoid.. unlike how tokamak and this helion tech works, its practically working with the natural tendencies of the plasma, not working against it, magnetically confining the plasma instabilities using millions of amps in the process is one of the main problems to get to extra electricity out of the whole thing..
@@etienne8110 A lot of the theory has been done a long time ago, the limitations were always costs, extensive r&d requirements, unknown competitiveness with existing energy generation approaches and long timelines for commercial viability. Few in the private sector want to fund that and govt funding is nowhere near enough.
ITER needed the cooperation of most of the globe to get barely enough money and NIF is likely funded more because of the military sector liking the idea of minituarised pure fusion explosions and the science that can come out of it.
I highly recommend the reaction video from improbable matter ("the problems with helion energy"). While Helion is surely trying a very interesting approach on fusion I would really really appreciate a more down to earth video with less superlatives (top secret, completely new design/never done before...) and a bit more critique...
The video by Improbable matter has a lot of mistakes. I have posted those here before (just check my response to similar comments further down).
Critique is good, being a Luddite is not.
I found it very annoying and off-putting -- and it makes me completely distrust whether this technology has any meaning at all, or not.
@@elmarmoelzer2229 dude, there are 13,912 Comments as of now. And no way to search anything :/
@@ewerybody
I know, it is annoying. It is also hard to write such long comments on RUclips (plus RUclips tends to censor them) :(
Fascinating stuff! I fear that ITER will already be obsolete once it's finished.. Tho they also want to test different fusion products /fuels, so it might still provide some important research results.
Yea I kinda feel it but not educated enough about the subject to know for sure.
I don't think so, ITER objective is olso to study the effect of this type of radiation on the material used on the reactor and use the radiation to make the isotopes of H from Li
ITER's goal is to learn the engineering necessary to create a commercial scale power tokamak fusion reactor. It itself won't generate power for the grid.
For me the most important goal for which ITER is built is to actually extract energy back at industrial scale, it is a prototype of a nuclear fusion power plant.
It is to answer the question "If we were to make a power plant based around a tokamak how would we do it ?" and build that knowledge and skill base before we actually manage to use them to use tokamaks to produce energy.
That way when we do we won't be "Ok now that we figured out the fusion part we need half a decade designing a power plant and an other decade of delays".
If ITER is obsolete by its completion, that is technically the best possible outcome. Sure lots of engineering time and money might have been wasted, but if anyone can finish it faster, humanity is all the better off for it.
I'm just as amazed by the cable management outside the nuclear reactor.. Videos like this give me much needed hope for the future..
Their engineering is extremely impressive.
I'm super happy for you getting an exclusive opportunity like this and the technical details provided are fantastic!
Still we need to know their plasma density before and after compression. I have some hope because it's dense enough for compression to cause heating but also I saw a turbomolecular pump which would seem to imply the opposite. Density helps with scattering and with the x-ray measurements they have they definitely can calculate the scattering rate per fusion rate and not explicitly stating it is very worrying.
So what's the issue if the plasma density isn't enough? What would their reason be for not stating it?
I find it incredibly novel and fascinating that we can arrange magnets and wires in such a way that it creates and smashes plasma rings together. It feels like we're hacking reality and just messing around at this point. Really great video, thank you!
It’s our equivalent of klang in space engineers or plates in Skyrim
The magnets don't smash anything together, they simply keep things from flying apart.
@@elskaalfhollr4743 PRAISE KLANG
So much more to go. The amount of achievement in just a hundred years, makes it obvious that if there is life elsewhere, and there should be, and if it's intelligent, as it should be; then it's easily imaginable they would posses technology that we would consider impossible under current understanding, considering we have tech now that only a few lifetimes ago would have been considered impossible. It's arrogant and close minded to think we know everything, let alone that we know 1,000th of 1% of everything there is to know. These phenomena we see in our skies and waters that travel with impunity through both mediums, and likely space, and do it with no visible sign of propulsion within our understanding? Just that we can envision an anti-gravity or gravity manipulating process, should tell you right there that's possible and likely being used. Heck, our limitations of perception alone could be blocking a universe of possibilities outside our theorized framework. Lets just say it is. Murphy's law comes into play when dealing with infinity or close to it, and the possibilities that envelop it are ever increasing
@@kittredge5167 erm it does give the plasma speed to smash together.... The fuck are you talking about?
I just took a gen chem class and I almost fully understand your explination of details. I fully appreciate your dedication to this channel and will be subscribing in any and every way possible. Thank you for a free exposure to information. People like you will durastically change the future of humanity simply based on your free flow of high level information. THANK YOU
That thing about needing fibre optic controls because of the strong electromagnetic interference is a fascinating engineering problem that I've actually run into before, but at a much smaller scale.
I have a raspberry pi that controls a 3d printer, and the printer has a 12v power circuit that switches on a relay. I had installed a soft power button into the raspberry pi, but I found that whenever I switched the power on the 3d printer, the raspberry pi would turn on or off. I realised that the printer power circuit was strong enough to induce a voltage in the signal wires, and the raspberry pi was sensitive enough that it tripped the shutdown/power on scripts, even though the signal circuit was open. You'd think 12v wasn't enough for something like this, but actually because it's so low voltage, at 300w the amperage is quite high, which might explain it.
Even wrapping the wires in coaxial shielding didn't help, so I had to get rid of the button. I didn't think of fibre optics as a solution!
This is a really interesting approach to the problem. Despite all the crazy complex physics and engineering going into it makes a real intuitive sense. It's like a purely magnetic engine.
yeah, that blows my mind. fusion pushing directly against magnetic fields, just wow.
@@PepekBezlepek How can any container handle something that hot? That is as hot as the interior of the sun.
Maybe this machine could lead to a probe lander on Venus, maybe even the hydrogen oceans of gas planets.
@@SylkaChan The magnetic fields prevent the plasma from making contact with the reactor walls.
@@SylkaChan There just isn't that much stuff in the reactor. Yeah, it's not, but it's a tiny amount of mass. Consider a speck of dust at a million degrees landing on a block of ice the size of a house. The whole block ain't going to melt. You will get a tiny divot somewhere though, and if you're doing this a dozen times a second, it adds up. That's what the magnetic fields are there for.
@@ryanbrown982 Exactly this. Also it was said briefly that this reactor is essentially a vacuum chamber. Tokomak reactors are vacuum chambers as well. You don't want normal air in there or any other elements spoiling the reaction. What this means is there is no matter touching the reactor walls and vacuums make excellent insulators.
Also, all of the waste products from Deuterium - Helium 3 fusion produce ions. That the point of this kind of reactor in the first place. Use the ions of the reaction to induce magnetic currents to directly generate electricity. This process also does is slow down these ions. The kinetic energy of these ions is lost as they inducing the magnetic field. That means they also loose heat.
“But can it boil water” is the “can it run doom” of energy generation
And can it help reduce the piles of old spent fuel...
Ah. In this instance you get to skip the boiling water part. Which if they've proven it on the bench in the lab would be one of their biggest breakthroughs
Not so much boil as vaporise.
But can it run crysis?
That's the beauty of this beast. It doesn't have to. It skips several steps and directly harnesses the power of the reaction and converts it right to electricity. Thus cutting out hundreds of layers of complexities and ineffeciencies parasitic to most generators.
Thanks for the awesome work.
It's an R&D project for unemployable physicists that will never go commercial. They're just looking for more funding.
Helion has been fully funded all the way to commercialization since summer 2021.
@elmarmoelzer2229 My point is this - They will never produce more electricity than is put in. When is the go live date for commercial fusion reactor that produces more electricity than is put in ?????
@@howdywowey2165
They have an experimental machine called Polaris that is supposed to be ready by summer. Polaris is supposed to demonstrate net electricity production from fusion.
Then they have a contract with Microsoft to provide a commercial 50 MWe power plant in 2028.
Damn you were shown how wrong you were, and then you never responded. Stop being such a negative nancy, why does it have to be "just looking for more funding."
@synthtea8366 Reminder - The whole point of this R&D is to produce and capture more electricity than you put in. Embrace reality !
I cannot believe that we are living in a time where we can see nuclear fusion technology properly maturing, this is so damn cool
Don’t forget going back to the moon permanently and also Mars hopefully. I hope I live to see it.
If there truly are Gods and higher beings somewhere in this cosmic existence, they are surely watching our civilization right now if they were not already.
I'd rather live during the time, where it was "mature technology"...
It's like going back in time and seeing someone using fire as a tool for the first time, a changing point in history.
I remember my high school chemistry teacher saying it was impossible on earth
I really, really hope they succeed. Fusion is going to be a real step change for the whole world and I just can’t see tokamaks being anywhere close before about 2060. Helion’s innovative energy reclamation method looks like it could be the game changer required to make it possible. Most concerning thing is the loss of efficiency and risk of damage from neutron energy but I think that’s a lot easier to work out than the problems tokamaks are facing.
the main question is "step where?" the main problem is still the fact its fuel made of hydrogen and the cheapest way of making hydrogen on our planet is from water... switching all the humanity from current energy sources to fusion reactors will be a disaster for our planet. as long as we don't have a cheap way to get hydrogen or water from outside of the Earth, fusion betteer to stay a dream.
Really, what we need is a variety of different forms of energy generation and transportation to solve this crisis. I think fusion power plants would be great where I live in Kentucky, where there are rarely water shortages, but we heavily rely on coal due to a lack of feasibility for certain forms of clean energy (also because of coal lobbyists, but I digress).
However, in a place like Arizona, a fusion power plant would be a horrible idea. A solar power plant would actually be far better in a place that’s dry, but almost always sunny.
Ultimately, you make a really important point. We can’t go all in on any one form of energy production because there are no “perfect”forms of energy, even including nuclear fusion.
@@williamprice2186 why wouldn't arizona be a good fit for fusion energy?
I could be way off here but I feel pretty confident that fusion would not impact water scarcity in the least when used for hydrogen production. Not even a little bit... an iota, if you will 😀.
As for energy production diversification, sure, of course but if they reach a net gain (a real net gain) it's adoption would only be limited by the ability to produce the hardware. Artificially limiting its application, if that's what your suggesting, is a none starter really. It isn't as though Helion succeeds and solar, hydro, et al shutter their doors and go home.
@@Circle9ru Just, no.
TL;DR
We have 410,000 years of fuel for 10,000 fusion plants (22.7 times the number of nuclear plants we have), and that's assuming *horrendous* efficiency every step of the way. We are in no danger of running out of deuterium fuel.
Long form answer
Remember when early on in the video (10:15), it was noted that tokamak reactors would use around 300g of tritium per day? let's say that helion's reactors will use around 100x that per day in deuterium. So, 30kg (30,000g) of deuterium per day means, in the worst case, 150kg (150,000g) of heavy water per day. (30,000g = 7,500mol of D2 with GFM 4, 7,500 mol of D2O = 150,000g with GFM 20)
The world is estimated to have around 1.35 * 10^18 metric tons[1] of water. This will contain 1.5 * 10^17 metric tons of hydrogen (again, just GFM calculations). Of this, 0.030% by weight [2] will be deuterium, so 4.5 * 10^15 metric tons. As heavy water, that's 2.25 * 10^16 metric tons (more GFM calc).
As we said earlier, 150kg of heavy water per day as an extremely, frankly unrealistically high estimate. That means 54,750kg or 54.75 metric tons of heavy water per year out of the world's supply. We have 2.25 * 10^16 metric tons. That's 4.109589 * 10^14 years of fuel for one reactor. Even if we were to horrendously lowball and assume we can only extract 0.001% of this, that's still 4,109,589,041 years. Assuming we run maybe, 10,000 of these reactors globally (~22.7 times more than the number of total nuclear plants worldwide[3]), that's still 410,958.9 years of fuel.
And, personally, I feel that 410 thousand years is long enough to get some off-world fuel going, right?
[1] - phys.org/news/2014-12-percent-earth.html
[2] - www.newworldencyclopedia.org/p/index.php?title=Deuterium&oldid=1074091
[3] - www.statista.com/statistics/267158/number-of-nuclear-reactors-in-operation-by-country/
EDIT - formatting
EDIT 2 - timestamp for tritum number in tokamaks
skipping the steam/turbine step to go right to the induction step is pretty genius. I really hope this works out. It looks very scalable too. Just compare this to a tokamak or stellarator. I imagine the most complex step here is the software and sensors, i.e., getting everything to fire at the correct time, getting everything at the perfect velocity. What I'm curious about though, is how will this ever break even? How many watts of energy does the collision cause?
Never mind the fact that breaking even is of absolutely worthless value.
@@MrJdsenior You’re a years and years ahead of the competition if you can develop a fusion machine that breaks even for minutes on end.
FYI, a Watt is a unit of power which is energy per unit of time. So 1 Joule of energy delivered in 1 second is a Watt - that's power. So 1 Watt = 1 Joules/sec. The amount of energy released in a fusion reaction is the difference in mass of the particles before the collision and the mass after the collision: Energy released = [sum(m initial) -sum(m' final) ]c2.
wow.. this is a really sophisticatedly creative design... that also requires a long-term commitment of trial-and-error.. admirably impressive!
This seems like the most elegant and efficient way to do it so far. Amazing
Well how else would you do it? C'mon....
ROFL 😆
But do they put more energy in than they get out?
Efficent? For now i dont think maybe in the future
@@stant7122 at 22:10 they said 90% goes back in for more fusion so they can use it for power generation
and at 28:10 they talk about onther thing they adding for more power generation
Amazing machine. Using the magnetic confinement to resist the expanding fusion reaction in order to get usable electricity is pure genius.
This is also useful in other types of magnetohydrodynamic generators using other than thermonuclear fuel.
This system has a nice ring to it. Deriving the net energy output from the confinment fields , or confinement/ output fields. An eleant and simple solution that eliminates a lot of expensive equipment required to generate electricity. The reject heat from this system would also be harvested.
I still don't get how it works. I taught you have to have moving magnetic field to generate electricity...
@@daleeasternbrat816 plus it gets rid of the fact that we basically create the building blocks of SUNS.. actual STARS.. then turn around &use all that energy to.. **checks notes** 🧐 boil water 😂🤦🏾♂️
is the concept genius, or the engineering?
It is genius, but it's been well known for 60+ years, basically since aneutronic fusion reactions were identified.
Scott Manley’s breakdown on the National Ignition report talks about different fusion technologies in the works as well. It’s a good watch. Much of the challenge with fusion is what you said: capturing the energy reliably with fewer drawbacks than competing power sources.
i just watched that one right before watching this lol
I haven’t see Scott Manley’s video, but I’m not seeing what there is to be excited about as far as this ignition breakthrough goes.
While the fusion did produce more energy than the lasers, the lasers themselves take several orders of magnitude more energy in electricity to produce.
That’s not even mentioning the issue of extracting the energy, running the reaction continuously, or making more of the diamond cases needed for the process.
Obviously it’s cool for the science of studying fusion, but I don’t see how it’s contributing to the commercial power race in any way.
Is there something I’m missing here? This is just my uncritical amateur’s take.
Comparing the difficulties and losses of fusion vs fission I can see why fission is far more practical.
@@kevinforget549 For now, it is not far more practical, it is INFINITELY more practical, because no practical fusion reactors, or anything even close, exist. Many of the gripes people have with fission reactors, and there are some very legitimate ones, have been solved.
Remanufacturing/re-refining spent fuels to the point where the remaining material can be easily stored (you can hold it in your hand. They make bullets, tank armor, etc out of it), and safety concerns go to near zero, as far as operation goes. No meltdown chance, reactors that fail safe have been designed.
There are assuredly benefits, in theory, with fusion generation, though. But 'waiting' for it is no reason to delay fission reactors, LOTS more of them than exist today, in any way.
I hope Scott watches this video
Now you just need a second reactor, "some initial energy", to start both. and then the electricity output from one of the reactors will directly feed the other (without passing through the capacitor bank). At a certain point, both will be producing plenty of electricity, just inject it into the grid, or in the nearest industrial zone or a metallurgy or refinery, or even a data center. these guys are on the right track🤘
They need the capacitors to also store the fusion energy. Since their machines pulse at somewhere between 1 and 10 Hz. From there it goes into an inverter and then to the grid.
That said... They CAN and might (if the site wants/allows it) pair multiple machines that use the same power supply. That will save a lot of cost since the caps and the switches and all that make a significant part of the cost of a power plant. So you were not off my much with that thinking!
This looks very promising, considering how jaded I am with these private projects, this looks too promising. That said the CEO seems like he knows his sh*t though, has some PhDs in hard science and engineering so it may not be vaporware. It got funding from NASA years back and published peer-review studies of its operation and got independent auditors to check the legitimacy so it seems it has some firm ground with further development. Even with all that, gotta remain cautious
Agreed. Crossing my fingers that this isn’t a scam 👍 world needs it
Exactly!
And I doubt a company securing $500 million in funding with additional $1.7 billion for further milestones didn't achieve significant milestones or can never produce NET electricity like other comments here have claimed...
Always good to think critically and cautiously when dealing with energy research (especially any kind of nuclear energy,) research like this can solve a lot of problems if successful, but similarly can create all sorts of problems if proper cautions aren't taken in the event of a failure.
@@Astromath Investments into ambitious projects like this are not a reliable indicator of merit. Theranos and Nikola are recent cautionary tales in that regard. While I'm convinced that they're actively working on the real deal, there are many practical problems left on their way to actual fusion power plants. Never underestimate the difference between something that technically sort of works in a lab and something that is useful and cost-effective in a real world application.
@@Astromath Recall Theranos. They never even had a working prototype and got hundreds of millions in investments. Investors can be deceived. That said, I strongly hope their technology comes into fruition.
As a technical writer, I am used to "Translating Engineering into English". David Kirtley and the video are excellent at communicating thier points, and this video is *remarkably* well written. I haven't seen a technology that really got me fired up about the future, thinking about a world with abundant energy. I love that they had to design this with technologies currently unavailable, waiting for the industry to catch up. There's a fierce kind of optimism there, even if it just translates to supply chain issues and failed first article inspections for now. Thank you so much for the video!
EDIT: David Kirtley is not well written, he's a human being :p
We don’t often get compliments on our technical writing, even though it’s our core competency. Thank you!
@@RealEngineering
Wow, since you put it that way, I may look into joining your team. Accurate and concise use of language is my forte.
Love your channel, finally kicked over the edge into getting Curiosity Stream & Nebula.
As a tech writer then I suspect you realize this device is a long way from producing sustainable nuke fusion. And also that the Lawrence National Lab created fusion with their laser device years ago. Also magnetic bottles were first used at LLL in the 1970s. I also find it amusing to think magnetic fields are going to keep the hot gas off the metal, what about the radiant energy...you know the photons that are not prevented by the magnetic field.
their not thier 😉😉
@@andrewhall7711 *commits seppuku*
Honestly the timing requirements to get everything in sync to a microsecond is more fascinating than the fusion part itself.
Truly amazing what humans have managed to achieve, its strangely humbling and giving me a noticeable sense of arrogance at the same time, with how advanced our generations have truly become that we're now beginning to see the first milestones of what i grew up reading only in science fiction. Its not the first time its happened, we've made unbelievable advanced in science, but this might be the biggest ever
@@noahjones9833 I suppose this is what it was like when people had read sci-fi about rocket ships in the 1910s and 1920 is finally saw the Saturn V launch in 1969.
This is mind blowing ingenuity. Take all the money and time you need to it working perfectly
Helion is going all out on marketing now after the inertial fusion experiment had the enormous success. I see helion everywhere from youtubers to instagram influencers. I think they are in need for some additional funding soon.
Timing is probably not coincidental...
Helion is fully funded all the way to commercialization, actually. What they need right now is qualified employees.
AND, these videos were all made before the NIF announcement.
Inertial confinement fusion of the NIF sort has no chance as an energy production method.
It is not funded or developed with energy production in mind, but for doing nuclear weapons simulation, for which it is rather good.
Lol these video was filmed and made looong before the NIF announcement
@@johndawson6057 Yo, what I said.
You did a great job gathering the info and visuals for everyone. Thank you!
Welcome to the world of fusion technology, where the future is only 30 years away! Although in this case, it sounds like 15 might actually not be out of the question.
The greates joke on the fusion tech industry, has been the "Is 40 years away" since the 60's
The stainless steel rat wants you. This is a fusion head on train wreck generator.
Perhaps half that time.
@@rhensontollhouse Thats a bit too optimistic, but hey! I'm not going to tell you no XD
It's at the end of this decade friend, I'll even bet you on that
Wow this is insane technological achievement! I am flabbergasted. Awesome job
I hope it works and does revolutionize the energy section. Just can't help feeling cynical.
Yeah there's a very strong leash on enthusiasm here, no one wants to be taken for the "fusion power is here" ride, knowing that we have been on that ride for the last several decades.
Brian said fusion may be "around the corner", given its history I would caution that it may be a long time before that corner's turned.
Helion has been criticized for its finances, promises and its "voodoo fusion".
Daniel L. Jassby, Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, American Physical Society Forum on Physics and Society April 2019 Newsletter, pp 13-16.
And SLATE Article: THE Theranos Trial Shows Why We Should Be Suspicious of Nuclear Fusion.
Fusion is already here, it’s being done with tokamaks, stellarators, lasers, and Helion’s design, among others. The only remaining problem is extracting more energy from the process than it consumes. The more we experiment with different approaches, the more we learn, and net positive energy is only a matter of time.
I'm sure in time we'll get it all figured out. 100 years ago no one knew what a computer was. Can you imagine what we might have 100 years from now?
If all of humanity were as cynical as you, then we'd still be using candles and oil lamps to light our homes. We wouldn't have made any progress or advancements in science or technology because we'd all be too busy being cynical about everything. So, thanks for your cynicism, but I hope it works and does revolutionize the energy sector because I have more faith in humanity's ability to make positive change than you seem to.
The idea of splitting tritium production and other fusion fuels into different generators was a thought I had when reading about the ignition results. The fusion generator in france, even if it ends up not being economical for generating power, it does generate tritium, and if it generates enough surplus tritium then that could be used to fuel simpler more specialized fusion reactors which can be economical.
Well that's how tritium generation works already, there's effectively no naturally occuring tritium and all modern day reserves are made by running specialised rods in fission reactors. Any fusion approach to tritium breeding would need to be financially competitive with firing up a good old fission reactor.
The alternative to waiting 12 years for half the tritium to decay into Helium3 is to cook it out of moon dust. No joke. Scientists think there's about a million tons of He3 that's deposited all over the surface of the moon. It was generated by solar wind and cosmic rays striking the surface and can be released by heating it to 500 degrees.
@@lly_1 there is naturally occurring tritium in the atmosphere and sea, its a just a very VERY small amount, and it would be economically unfeasible to try to harvest it.
@@lly_1 To be fair, this hourglass reactor seems fairly small, and would likely share many components between the generator and "fuel processor" variants. Which is already one good mark in the favor of using a variant of this design as the fuel maker. Additionally, this version may be able to make the trinitum with MUCH lower amounts of radioactive byproduct waste than a Bery-lined tok or a custom fission pile.
A generator version of this would likely end up keeping the Helium-3 more though, and either end up just selling the trinitum to others or shoving it into big thick tanks to let it slowly decay into more useful fuel (I don't actually know if Trinitum is less prone to leaking through vessel walls than normal hydrogen due to having a bigger nucleus or not, particularly as I would suspect the electron shell is a big component of this behavior/lack thereof).
I have to say. Props to this guy explaining it. Like I have absolutely no idea how that stuff works, but he explains it in such a way that it makes sense to me. Now that is impressive as I watched many different videos and explanations and they mention all kinds of scientific stuff and terms and I get lost in HOW shit actually works. Amazing, love the part about how the magnetic field is created in the closed loop.
Thought likewise!
It's fancy word salad, mate - lots of non-referenced nonsense - go on, put your money in and prove me wrong.
i completely agree!!! he was great
He is a smooth talking scammer, this project is dead in the water.
You guys are too naive and gullible.
yeah, just sweet talking trap for investors.
Gigawatts in Megawatts out.
Isn't it convenient how they just gloss over that detail.
For those that need it spelled out. It uses more energy than it generates. So it's net negative.
None of them make more energy than they use. That B.S. claim by the Energy department was just for the reaction. Not the NET energy used verse what's produced.
And no there is no figuring it out. It's the law of thermodynamics.
Trenta was a subscale experimental machine. It did not have the equipment to convert fusion energy into electricity. That will be happening with Polaris which is still aiming to demonstrate net electricity around the end of 2024.
@@elmarmoelzer2229 still waiting
Not only does this video teach and inspire the next generation of engineerings as per the channel's goals; but it also gives everyone watching, engineers of all ages and fields, hope for the future. By far my favorite video to date and there are a LOT of good ones. This really had me thinking I should go back to studing my PHYS 122 material for my final this Monday. That is the magic that you have created. Well done.
There is no shortage of technologies that can provide hope for the future But this is one of the more interesting and complex. But this is one of the more interesting and complex
This is one of the more interesting approaches to fusion IMO. Tokamaks are a dead end, as they might make fusion, but getting the power generated to the grid is another thing entirely.
Tokomak is too small. The tight circular curve pinches the magnetic fields weakening the outside and allowing ions to escape, bleeding energy from a system that cannot afford to lose any energy. If it was as big as the CERN particle accelerator, the curve would be so long, and therefore so low, the magnetic fields wouldn't notice. It would be as smooth as an infinitely long tube.
Agreed. They are just too big IMO. About the only way I see them working is if they use helium-3 generated using hourglass reactors like this instead of that DT that needs a huge bery lining and literal steam turbines to extract power.
@@robinpage2730 ITER solves that with a big magnet in the central void. Theres an alternative design called a stellerator that also makes this a non issue.
@@acbthr3840 except the problem hasn't been solved or fusion would be a reality by now. Making the circular path longer, and the curvature less pronounced, might have made it a non-issue in the first place. I'm thinking something the size of the Super Proton Synchrotron at CERN. On a side note, the reason the Stellarator was originally attractive was because the plasma interaction with the confinement field induced current in the coils, resulting in a self-exciting system, allowing direct energy conversion without a steam plant; a nuclear plasma electric generator, aka a magnetohydrodynamic generator. Tokomaks can't do that but they were cheaper at the time and steam was potentially more energy efficient than MHG anyway, so Stellarators feel out of favor.
@@robinpage2730 What? The issue with the velocity differential and magnetic field line weirdness between the inside and outside of the ring in a tokamak isnt the primary barrier to getting the yield up. It helps, but is far from a limiting factor RN, especially since its a negligible problem with the fixes we have. The current limiting factor is actually getting energy into the plasma so it fuses before it expands too much. And uh... no thats not why the stellarator was originally pursed. It was attractive specifically because the design largely cancels out the typical particle drift and helps with diffuusion problems you get in a normal tokamak. It is literally just a normal tokamak, but with a more efficient configuuration since you dont need the core void electromagnet
Nice! Even if in the end it doesn't become the main fusion generator type, it might still see use as a method to sustainably produce Tritium and Helium-3 for other reactors.
Doing so would massively increase the spread of Nuclear Fusion technology throughout the world. Though it'd be confined to nations that can afford to construct the reactors, but those poorer nations can rely on solar and wind power rather than Fusion.
@@Techno_Idioto It looks pretty cheap, in principle. Some big capacitors for the magnetic field, lots of wires and coils and a decent computer to control it all. Valves and tubes, tanks of fuel, a pressure vessel. With a bit of help from a PhD you could probably build one in your garage. Looks simpler and cheaper than building a gas or coal plant, if it works how it should. In places that don't have a national power distribution network, smaller power plants you can spread around would be more economical.
@@Techno_Idioto As far as i can tell from the video, materials-wise, nothing seems particularly expensive in this. hell, as far as sizes go, you can house several of these easily in a typical warehouse, which takes up a hell lot less space than your good old gas or coal plant, & the cool thing about it all, still generates a hell lot more energy & the setup is definitely far cleaner than said gas & coal plant. the actual priciest part of the whole thing, would probably be getting the personnel with the know-how to build & operate this thing. if a country can afford to actually build a power plant in the first place, i don't see why they can't afford to build at least one of these here.
@@Techno_Idioto for some reason a nuclear fusion video was the last place i expected to see someone with that old short haired calli art for their icon, neat
I always knew that there should be a more efficent way to convert energy into electricity. Boiling water to turn a mechanical motor seemed so primitive to me. I'm glad there is technology proving me right
Don't you think this plans to do that?
At this point, I'm reasonably confident that the first commercial fusion reactor isn't going to be a tokamak in the 2050's. It'll be something smaller like the reactors under development by Helion and General Fusion.
I really love how different teams with different methods try to reach the same goal. It’s very healthy science, specially if you know that many of this projects will only cover the gaps in other ones. I like the fact that the Tomahawk iteration already have systems in place to actually convert the heat into electricity, something that I can’t see in others.
you mean, Tokamak...err Tocamac? I dont' know how its spelled. ....but definitely not tomahawk. Probably.
@@tylerfb1 that’s it, the ITER Tokamak. Excuse the typo
I can remember watching these guys several years ago and thinking, they're on to something really beneficial to humanity in terms of energy. It's nice to see that they're progressing!
Right.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but this will never produce electricity, only reason the DoD are interested is that it makes a nice toy to simulate two point ignition swan type device.
Just wait until we turn things like this into weapons
@@jonharsonyeah and you would have to be an absolute numb skull to not realise if it does work that it won't be released for the masses like the moron that made the original comment.
@@jonharson nice arguments
No mention at all of system efficiency. That has always been the stumbling block. Yes we can, by various means, achieve brief bursts of contained fusion. But it always takes massively more energy put into the system than any that can be usefully retrieved. Even the briefly mentioned 'net energy output' (from the Inertial Confinement Reactor) at the end is disingenuous. They measured 'net energy' from the reaction as compared with the immediate energy used within the chamber to compress the plasma (lasers??) - they did not compare it with the associated power plant needed to create the containment fields and heating the plasma AND the enormous energy consumed with cooling and cryogenic maintenance. There still exists only way fusion creates net energy - in stars, where the immense gravity creates the pressure and heat needed 'for free'.
This was a purely experimental machine that was not recovering any of the energy yet. The next one, Polaris will demonstrate net electricity. It is still on schedule to do that towards the end of 2024.