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Comment by ThePhysicist | Hacker News Reader

Reading their websites it seems they have magically solved every single major problem that the worldwide fusion research community (which probably received hundreds of billions of dollars in funding over the years) has struggled with for decades. Sounds really good but also quite hard to believe, to be honest. But hey I don't always want to be the pessimist, so I'm hoping it's actually true what they claim.

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There's dozens (hundreds?) of different types of conceptual fusion designs. Are you talking about fusion in general or just with FRCs?

In general, there's so many ideas that "don't seem like they wouldn't work" without evidence one way or the other. It wouldn't surprise me that the path with FRCs is more fruitful than tokamaks/stellarators/lasers. FRCs are rooted in the inertial-electrostatic-confinement realm of fusion research which actually does produce neutrons even on the smallest of scales.

The idea seems very nice of course, but most fusion ideas seem nice on paper. The problem is just dealing with the imperfections of a real-world setup. I'm not an expert in fusion and just briefly worked in the field as a physics student, but from what I've learned people still struggle with even producing suitable materials that can withstand the occasional plasma plume (which I think is probably inevitable to happen in Helion's design too) that can deposit 200 MW/m² of energy into the walls of the fusion vessel.

So as I said I really hope this works and makes the founders rich while also producing cheap & clean energy, but I remain at least a bit skeptical.

Any reason why you say hundreds of billions? My impression is lower but fusion research funding has been going on longer than I've been alive.

I take this with a big grain of salt too but 2.2 billion lined up is an awful lot of funding. To your point, if they are legit, I'm sure they are building off of prior fusion research and progress.

exactly. sounds really good.. but two guys in Seattle vs like the rest of the world's particle physicists? hmm..

Large groups of people are really only useful when a problem can easily be broken into smaller, self-contained parts. Or when the work requires little "moving in lock-step." This may be one of those fields where "more people" just means "more politics."

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