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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

They've been through a few generations of test machines. They have something called "Polaris". It was supposed to be finished around the end of 2024.[1] Their own site still talks of it as being under construction.

Discussion on Reddit.[2]

They previously built something called "Trenta".[3] That generates two balls of plasma and fires them at each other. There's no fusion or fusion fuel. It's a test rig for plasma generation and manipulation. That was running two years ago.

"Polaris" is a scale-up of Trenta, with something to fuse, and with energy recovery. It's very unclear how far that project has progressed. If they were getting energy out, that would be big news. Helion is vague about how that's progressing.

[1] https://www.helionenergy.com/polaris/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/1hlojqu/any_news_on...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bDXXWQxK38

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> If they were getting energy out, that would be big news.

That's rather underselling it. If they have a proven, working, commercially viable design for a fusion power plant, they could probably just write a paper about how it works and collect their Nobel prize for physics next year.

I'm ambivalent about whether their design can work but if they were confident in their design and have the necessary funding, a paper and a nobel prize are going to be very far down their priority list.

A Nobel prize is about the best marketing you could ask for. You can raise money in an environment where everyone (quite reasonably) doubts you have goods, or you can raise money in an environment where you’ve earned a Nobel prize for actually inventing the thing you claim you have. If you actually have the thing (at the point where you’re ready to deliver power at scale by 2028) this should not be a huge lift.

Without knowing any specifics, I wonder if this is a thing where the small-scale almost works, and they assume the larger scale will iron out inefficiencies.

Is anyone better versed in this? It seems strangely opaque for such a large-scale project.

> It seems strangely opaque for such a large-scale project.

They are taking very large calculated risks, attempting their first success, apparently with reason to believe it may work, in a market with enormous financial potential.

This a good period to shut-up and execute, and neither set themselves up to be a public debacle, or set up competition to arrive closer on their heals.

Commercially viable means more than getting energy out of it though - it also requires that the build, operation and maintenance costs over the lifetime of the machine don't outweigh the value of the net energy generated. Of course it needs to work on paper before you build it, but this is experimental science and until you have built it you haven't proved it.

Customer "partners" who are looking ahead to future supply needs, are often willing to help cover initial capital expenditures of promising suppliers, to get them to positive operational cash flow faster.

Then become a regular (but favored) customer, as the supply side becomes truly net profitable.

Yes, but in this case it seems there is still some(!) science to be verified and/or worked out, not just a matter of money and working out operational efficiencies.

Even once they demonstrate fusion and viable levels of power extraction, it seems there would still be an issue of what is the level of "wear and tear" (incl. any radioactivity) of the fusion chamber - which it would seem may ultimately be a matter of try it for an extended period of time and see.

That's what a good/motivated early customer partner is for. Sharing the risk, benefiting from the new supply if things succeed.

They also would have money flowing to them faster than even NVIDIA…

Would it? Or would the US keep it a secret?

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