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Comment by gallerdude | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious what they've figured out that generations of scientists have missed. More power (ha) to them, but I'd be surprised if the solution to this infamously hard problem is just 3 years away. It's like civilization leaving a few trillion dollar bills on the ground.

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So we've been working on fusion for a long time, now it looks like we're getting close, but if we were actually close then we would have gotten there already so we must not be close? Is this a new version of Zeno's paradox?

It's not that. Just that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the evidence we have is pretty slight. Doesn't mean it's impossible, does mean we are justified to be skeptical until they publish more detail results.

I don't think they haven't figured out anything super fundamental. There's a bunch of fusion companies all with aggressive time schedules that are aiming to generate electricity within the next 5 years or so.

What you've missed is that most scientists have been expecting electricity will be generated from fusion soon for the past 10 years or so, almost definitely before ITER comes online. The development of High-temperature superconducting tape basically guarantees it.

> I'm curious what they've figured out that generations of scientists have missed.

The scientists didn't miss this - on Helion's website they state that idea here was thought about in the 1950s, although they lacked the computational power to test their theories.

All the public money is going toward a dead end, Tokamak.

Helion gets to draw on that work for magnets and plasma containment, but doesn't have to solve that system's problems. So, it is legitimately possible they could have something.

You might wonder why the international research community has ignored this approach. It is a good question. All I can think of is that the people paying the bills for that want lots of physicists to have experience with hot-neutron processes, so they have a population to draw on for weapons work.

Of course they won't say so. What they say is that they are chasing the system that needs the lowest temperature.

For a long time fusion was funding constrained: there were many more ideas than could be tested and examined under government budgets. In the US nearly all funding went to one concept, the tokamak. While the tokamak has achieved the best performance thus far, there's now sufficient interest in fusion that less-well-developed ideas are being tried, in order to not put all the eggs in one basket.

All solutions to all problems were at some point just 3 years away.

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