Commonwealth says they will have a 100 Mw plant operating in 2025. Do you believe that?
......
well if you believe that fusion power is 20 years away and always will be—which is the conventional wisdom for the last 70 years—then no.
but commonwealth is not alone.
as well, Helion has signed a contract with microsoft to provide fusion powered electricity in 2028. there is a wall st journal article about that. (google wall st journal helion, microsoft contract)
now think about that.
proof is in the pudding of course. but you have to say that these guys do have their considerable reputations on the line. and they are competitive. and they don’t sound like goofs. why would they otherwise stick their necks out to make such bold predictions? these guys are no less engineers than you. that means they’re looking at something completely different than you.
What also makes it believable is that one or the other company is not an outlier. these guys know each other. they go to the same conferences. they’re only two out of many other fusion power companies that have sprung up in the last five years or so. why are there so many fusion company start ups? we’re talking about a technological change on a broad front.
the other thing that makes it believable is that the funding coming into fusion is private capital. Government funding for r&d doesn’t have any required payback time. Private capital is different. Private capital needs a return on investment within 5-10 years—preferably within 5 years.
So people with deep pockets have been convinced that they will get a return on capital in a reasonable amount of time.
So here is a huge group of people with serious skin in the game who are betting that fusion energy is right around the corner.
So, I would say based on the evidence that I’ve seen—fusion power is right around the corner.
Until disproven, I believe these guys.
but that’s just me.
You’re free to say the opposite. that is, until proven otherwise, fusion energy is vaporware.
we are both just speculating.
“the other thing that makes it believable is that the funding coming into fusion is private capital.”
It’s GREEN! CFS is mainly funded by Bill Gates. Along with Temasek. Temasek has a great track record. Lost their shirt in FTX.
Strange bedfellows. Peter Thiel was first outside investor in Facebook. Peter put $1700 in his Roth IRA. into the company that became PayPal. Now worth $5 billion which becomes tax free!
” I believe these guys.”
-———————Helion————————
You might wish to take those claims with a healthy dose of salt. Diving through past coverage of the fusion upstart reveals the company has made some rather fantastic claims. In a 2018 article, the company claimed it would produce a 50MW reactor by 2021. And in 2014, the company was claiming commercial fusion by 2019.
Helion’s habit of insisting fusion power is almost here led Daniel Jassby, who ran the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab until 1999, to label the company’s tech as voodoo fusion in a 2018 article [PDF].
Jassby defines voodoo fusion energy as “those plasma systems that have never produced any fusion neutrons, but whose promoters make the claim of near-term electric power generation.”
https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/17/microsoft_bet_on_fusion/
Earlier you posted that they were inspired by their
‘iterative process”.
CFS is building SPARC and ARC in parallel. Definitely no iterative ...
“So people with deep pockets have been convinced that they will get a return on capital in a reasonable amount of time.”
Bill Gates, the major funder, has vowed to give away all his monet!
“I believe these guys.”
The fusioneers don’t really even have to fake anything. Unlike Theranos, which built (terribly flawed) hardware that was used to analyze patient samples, not a single one of the nuclear fusion “startups” has produced a prototype machine that they propose to base their business upon. Nobody has demonstrated that they’re even close to building a fusion device that produces—rather than consumes—energy. Luckily for them, assurances of honorable intentions have been sufficient for investors. These companies are able to trade on promises, not products. Yet despite the short history of purely commercial fusion, those promises already have a history of being broken. In 2016, Tokamak Energy promised energy production in five years. General Fusion: prototype plant within a decade—and that was in 2009. Most recently, the press went gaga in November over Helion Energy’s raising $2.2 billion in venture capital to build a working reactor by 2024. Almost none of that coverage mentioned Helion Energy’s business plan of building “a useful reactor in the next three years” way back in 2015, when it had only raised some $10 million. It’s the exact same promise, resold six years later at 200 times the price.
https://slate.com/technology/2021/12/nuclear-fusion-climate-change-theranos.html
” Until disproven, I believe these guys.”
Disproven
———————August 2015-————
David indicated a breakeven fusion machine would need about $35 million in funding (2015-2016) and the target is to develop it in 2016.
If all proceeds on schedule then a Helion Energy machine that that proves commercial energy gain would be a 50 Megawatt system built in 2019. $200 million will be needed for the commercial pilot plant. The plan would be to start building commercial systems by 2022.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2015/08/helion-energy-raised-109-million-and.html
Altman ouated from OpenAI, joins Microsoft