Elon Musk is prolly speaking to his middle-eastern finaciers already!

I purchased a sub from curiosity stream but never got access to nebula, is there any way i could get this backdated?

@@garcope7858 I did the same. I thought Curiosity and Nebula were the same

Was total output greater than total input? In this lab:NO. There are lots of fusion experiments running currently but only one has achieved ignition, the USA's NIF. The rest has succeeded in fusion but not ignition.

@@garcope7858 My Nebula invitation went to the spam folder.

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

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.

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.

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" 😀

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"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

Artificial gravity as the confinement system will finally put 'hot' fusion into "breakeven-plus' range. Artificial gravity confinement is coming, but the sequestering of artgrav tech will need to be relaxed first. The Sun is a very simple machine: hydrogen and gravity field. That is a proven successful configuration. .

this new way of “fusion” is nonsense

first of all: at the temperatures they are using (100-150 million degrees) Deuterium would be more likely to just fuse with itself, creating tons and tons of radioactive neutrons

second of all: trying to create energy from high-energy electrons is just plain old stupid, it would create gigantic amounts of lethal xray

thirdly: electrons traveling at such high speed would emit a lethal dose of x-ray and it will also irradiate the reactor

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

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.

@@r04te 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!!

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 ?

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]👀

@@Kink-Panther 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.

Compare this dude to Elon "full self-driving robotaxis since 2018" Musk

@@ZdenekHorsak 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.

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 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

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

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

Some knowledge which u just can't Google XD

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 😅

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.

@@IvanTre 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.

@@IvanTre 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.

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

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

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.

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 UKposts. 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.

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.

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.

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 !

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.)

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..."

This comment sounds like some random AI wrote it.

@@cumburger69 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.

This company is an investment scam. No honesty about this video at all.

Or some aliens stopped by and were like “can we just give them a hint?”

Congrats you're now a victim of a very effective startup PR campaign.

Its important to recognise tokamaks like JET don't represent a purely energy output, profit driven project. Controlled fusion is one of, if not the most complicated and technically challenging endeavours ever undertaken. As described in the video, nearly every part of modern science and technology needed to advance before any of this was feasible. JET, LHC etc. are publicly funded research projects. They publish huge amounts of cutting edge papers that advance humanity. A big part of that is around superconductors and magnet. From early manufacture where the exact composition of material and its processing affects the final magnetic field, to the extreme complexity of real world performance and the electronics and software required to fully understand and manipulate the field. What this company seems to have achieved so far is incredible, but it is only on the back of publicly funded research where our insights and advancements have been shared across the world. They are the reason that you can now buy relatively "cheap" superconductor setups with well understood uniform fields that originally cost CERN hundreds of millions in grants. I truly love what they have achieved, but the fact this video represents the first time they are sharing it with the world is terribly sad. They are building on the backs of giants and I don't mean Maxwell but their contemporaries in publicly funded science. Fusion and other energy solutions should have had trillions of investment, it is sad that we are relying on a private company who benefits from public research instead of humanity properly funding it for reasons beyond profit. With all that said, I have huge respect for everyone involved in Helions research and engineering. If realised, controlled fusion represents perhaps the single most important technology ever developed. If humanity has politically failed to fund energy research, then it is better that entrepreneurs take the risk and move us forward for profit if it ends coal power.

@@a-iz4pg ????

The Tokomak was an important stepping stone and a scaled down version is literally used here as an initial plasma injection

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!

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 UKposts video?

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

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

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.

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

It's all compression and refraction theory. No different than a diesel engine. The magnetic field density provides the compression for ignition instead of a piston. If you get the magnet to hot the field will loose stability and fail.

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

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.

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.

Trenta did not have any equipment to recover energy from fusion (or the unused input energy). I am sure Helion has internal estimates. if they are able to recover the input energy along with the fusion energy at ~95% of efficiency, then pretty much any good amount of fusion reactions will add enough energy to produce net electricity. So Trenta could have produced small amounts of net electricity (but was lacking the equipment). But of course, everything hinges on whether their energy recovery is good enough at a large scale. We will know that when Polaris is ready and fully optimized, prospectively around the end of 2024.

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 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.

"we've" You didn't do anything unless you work a farm, an energy-related plant, or other job that enables this experimentation.

@@ChainMiles777 Aren´t you part of humanity?

@@ahamay2012 yes but I hold disdain for people who wanna act like they had a part in this.

@@ChainMiles777 Where did he indicate that he directly had a part in this?

@@ChainMiles777 Everyone has that has a job contributes to something, which in turn allows these people to do things

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. ☮️

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.

i believe it does, the only part we need to do is refine the input energy to max output energy

I was searching for someone commenting exactly that. I'm skeptical about that. Sure, I hope it is all true and they are advancing fast. But a new almost miraculous fusion reactor shows up days after that announcement of achieving ignition. I don't know..

As an electrical engineer i will tell you what i think the questions to ask are. We know the conventional thermodynamic power cycle limits steam turbine electric generation to 33% efficiency, so what is the efficiency of this design from primary energy (fusion output potential) to AC electricity (usable energy to the existing grid)? We know a tokamak that is just a fancy water boiler will have to throw out around 66% of its energy, thats just the thermodynamic power cycle when operating at temperatures we can feasibly achieve, no way around it. But this direct capture generator doesn't have that limit, so what is its theoretical max efficiency and actual real world efficiency to compare to the known efficiency of the tokamak? My other question is that this thing is making pulses, its like a 1 cylinder engine, those are some big spikes that need to be captured and smoothed out into something that can then be more easily converted into either AC power or directly to HVDC for long distance transmission (and then get converted back to AC). So what are the parameters of the waveform of these pulses, and how hard is it to capture the energy contained in them and then rerelease is as a smooth AC waveform ready to be connected to the grid and supply baseload power? I'm not as concerned with how they actually are trying to get fusion to happen, thats hard so we try different ways to cheat they system and eventually one will actually be pretty good at it.

@@lkslokinhow Whenever there's an event like this where they developed something in secrecy and then it's revolutionary it starts screaming to me they need more funding which might be well justified but with all those revolutionary products we've seen advertised few if any came to be. So am skeptical but hopeful.

@@jasonreed7522 All valid questions. One of the issues I thought about was exactly capturing energy and producing a useful power that can be hooked up to the grid. Am additionally interested in their cooling, which they didn't mention at all and with all fusion reactors this is where majority of energy is going towards. We'll see. Perhaps other videos explain all of that.

Yes it is very valid to be skeptical, especially in todays world. But fusion energy and helion’s methods theoretically do have their said potential, it’s crazy. Ofc actually engineering this is a challenge and commercializing it etc. The question of viable fusion is there, but the science is checking out

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.

As mentioned in the video and other comments. This knowledge is shared across the world. If anyone cracks it, everyone will. How wonderful will that be, no energy wars.

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

Ikr haha 😂

Helion is a scam.

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.

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).

*fewer

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 :/

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