Avalanche Energy – Fusion power you can hold in your hands | Hacker News Reader

Avalanche Energy – Fusion power you can hold in your hands

avalanche.energy

46 pointsnynx49 comments

I recently met someone who works here, and I'm extremely skeptical of it. My impression was that it wasn't an outright scam (they have at least a few real employees), but that they were wildly out of their depth.

The founders are ex-blue origin mechanical engineers, and I think they've fallen into the classic engineers trap of thinking that problems out of their areas of domain expertise are "simple". The real kicker for me was that they had only just hired their first physicist after working on the project for several months.

Obviously I'm potentially falling into the same trap -- I don't work on fusion, and it's easy to be a skeptic. But that was my impression.

I worked at a company like this (chasing novel high efficiency small-scale energy production) for a while and it was a lot of fun. Just my friends and I working very hard to build something impossible with other people's money. Countless hours in the lab failing over and over again, but learning at a tremendous pace and feeling like we were getting closer than anyone else would believe. There was much stress as our nutjob CEO portrayed increasingly fanciful mistruths to a revolving door of investors.

I wish the folks at Avalanche Energy the best, even if I think their business proposition is... dubious.

If you'd like to try building a Nuclear Fusor at home, rejoice, for Makezine has instructions for you! It probably will consume more energy than you can recoup from it, however.

https://makezine.com/projects/nuclear-fusor/

"Time Required: >16 Hours Difficulty: Hard"

Warnings:

"Glass vacuum chambers can implode. Do not operate the vacuum system without safety goggles. Reminder: High voltage and current can injure or kill. Fusors may generate harmful radiation. Do not attempt to build or operate this fusor unless you understand the risks and are capable of safely using high voltage and vacuum equipment. Do not run this device at more than 12kV rectifier input."

Gave me a chuckle. I'd call that comprehensive without being overbearing as to the risks of the project for a competent maker. Kudos to makezine.

This website is incredibly sparse on information. Location: Seattle, no address. Zero info about the team, any affiliations, scientific advisory board. No references to papers, nor patents.

Even Theranos is more convincing than this.

No information about what it is or how they build it or how it's different from the thousands of other teams trying to do fusion right now.

But they have a flashy website!

Unfortunately "being utter horseshit" is not a flaggable offense.

In fact, Theranos could come be back to the market with a 2.0 machine. And they would still be more convincing than this.

It sounds like they're trying to build a device with a distribution of ions in velocity space which is very far from the equilibrium Gaussian-type distribution ('Maxwellian'). This is difficult because there will be about a million collisions for every fusion reaction that happens, and collisions tend to redistribute velocities toward the equilibrium. Collisions between unlike particles (different species of ions, or ions vs electrons) will also cause diffusion in physical space. This could cause ions to leave the chamber much more quickly.

This is the key observation that isn't obvious about fusion. The capture cross-section is smaller than the scattering cross-section, so essentially any beam design is doomed to fail.

I'm an experimental physicist who recently looked hard at jumping into the fusion game. My approximate conclusion is that anything that doesn't involve some form of adiabatically heated plasma is extremely unlikely to work.

Fusion is an efficiency and engineering problem: how can you ensure that each particle gets enough energetic collisions to have a prayer of fusing before it loses energy?

Hey, no fair -- you sound like you actually know what you're talking about...

I dug into the background, and found this article: https://www.geekwire.com/2022/blue-origin-vets-unveil-startu...

The punchline is

> The startup has raised a $5 million seed round, secured a Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) International Patent, and recently emerged from stealth mode. A few weeks ago, Langtry and Riordan generated their first neutrons via fusion.

But there is also nugget of information that gives some hint on the technology:

> While researching the field, Langtry came across a graduate thesis from a Lockheed Martin researcher named Tom McGuire. It included open source code for simulations for an electrostatic fusion reactor. The idea became the seed for Avalanche Energy’s technology.

Notably Lockheed Martin themselves have also made noises about fusion power:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8486335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20484100 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8458371 (there should be another thread for this article that I can't find?)

This is both good and bad thing; on one hand, the concept might not be completely bogus if LM has been researching it too. But on the other hand, if LM with their billions together with McGuire who seems like a pretty smart fellow haven't figured how to make it work, then this startup is having quite an uphill battle ahead of them.

I think this might be the PCT application in question (same name as the founder, and about fusion): https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO20... Discusses an "orbital confinement fusion reaction."

(They might be overstating things with "secured a Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) International Patent." No such thing as a PCT patent. PCT's are just notice under a set of treaties that you might file an application in any of the 193 WIPO member states. No one ever has asserted a "PCT Patent." That said, PCT applications are examined, but the result is only advisory and countries often reach a different result when the examine the national phase filings.)

Isn't that the definition of venture capital, though? Throwing only $5 million on an area like fusion power w/ _huge_ upside should be cheap.

https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/10_MCGUIRE.pdf

This website is full of "we want to" and "we plan to" statements. Something like this would of course be extraordinarily useful but it smacks of free energy scams.

This seems obviously fake, since there's no proof. Can someone steelman a good argument for why this could be feasible?

Also, if you had achieved true fusion (more energy emitted than put in), wouldn't the more profitable thing to do is replace power plants? Why does it need to be portable?

I mean, a fool and his money are soon parted. This is so obviously either an outright scam or just otherwise not what it claims to be.

If you could truly get "fusion power you can hold in your hand", that has even a decent amount of power output above input, you would basically solve 95% of the problems of humanity. In that case, I'd expect something a little more momentous than a brochureware website.

If you actually had a fusion device that could be carried around in a suitcase, you wouldn't need to make claims about it, you could just show it.

It's like the monthly new cure for cancer. It's not even a "scam", just yawn. Show me some produced energy or even output anywhere close to input. If you had that you'd change the world and wouldn't need to sell it.

As usual, extraordinary claims require... well, proof.

Edit: I really hope this startup snake oil shit doesn't come to fusion power. Maybe they'll have an NFT too.

Taking bets on the crypto angle. Reminds me of this project, https://arrowair.com/, which is about some sort of open source VTOL aircraft, and the first thing they built was ... something on Ethereum.

On the other hand, that gives me the idea to pitch clean cold fusion energy to power quantum computing that generates a quantum encrypted infinite denominational new currency based on NFTs.

The solution to all our problems! Where can I invest?

Assuming this isn't an outright scam; I notice they make no claims about input power.

They claim 5KW of electrical power out, but make no mention of how much power went in, or how much waste heat it generated.

I'm sure it's a coincidence that their graphics make it look like the "arc reactor" from the Iron Man movies.

Well, if it works, it'll be cool... some free advice: in the "magnetic confinement fusion" diagram, what they've labelled "plasma" is actually the toroidal vacuum chamber and the "toroidal vacuum chamber" is actually the blanket, in that particular reactor design. In their defense, I suppose the diagram is easy to misinterpret.

All I can say, if they have a working system, just make power and sell the power.

Seems every time something like this comes up they can`t produce power and sell it for money, but they want you to invest money in them. If they are anything why not just self-invest.

>We offer a magic device that solves all energy problems. It only has one small issue

>The issue is that it doesn't exist and we don't know how to build it, we just made a good looking site

Is this a variant of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_electrostatic_confine...

Yes, I would say it is.

This is something I have been wished it existed since Back to the Future’s Mr Fusion. I don’t think it’s possible to build it. My understanding (as a layman) is that you either need energies which melt all solid matter, or you either need impossibly high precision, to a point where you can play snooker with individual atoms. But that level of control also requires high energy, and you are back to square one

Can it be embedded into someone's chest?

Asking for a friend...

I wouldn't call them a scam, but a far fetched utopian dreamers. No one (with his sane mind) would put money w/o an MVP (minimum viable product in the startup jargon). It looks fancy, site looks futuristic. I love Iron Man btw. But that is that.

Fascinating! Wonder what the major differentiator between this and say the Nuclear Battery proposal is for commercial users. Easier use for space (partially saying this because the founding team seems to be Blue Origin)?

As another datapoint, their careers page is advertising an opening for a "Fusion Space Systems Architect":

https://www.avalanche.energy/careers.html

A few more speculations here https://fusor.net/board/viewtopic.php?p=94672

Beyond the fact that novel fusion technologies tend to fail badly: A fusion system you can hold in your hands is something that will generally expose you to a whole lot of neutrons.

This is a nice website, with a useful comparison of fusion technologies, pro and con, including their own. I didn’t see any red flags.

There must be papers and parents somewhere.

The red flag is that it is quite implausible that anything like this will be successful any century soon.

Thats a bold statement, a lot can happen in a century.

Any clue what one of these might cost?

I think most I’d probably pay is somewhere between $2-3k

That’s patently ridiculous. A device that can put out a steady 5kw at nearly zero cost generates >15k worth of electric bill offset annually in California. That would make it worth at least 15k*MTBF…

It’s be less elsewhere, but there’s nowhere that this amount of electricity would be worth so little that $2k makes any sense.

That said, this smells like total Theranos level baloney, so it’ll never happen.

Let's pretend this is real and a magic box that sits in a corner and outputs 5 kW of power (with ignorable fuel cost), and lasts 10 years.

First of all, they can simply put it in a corner and sell the power. Wholesale generation prices vary but around 5 ct/kWh is a good approximation. That would be 25 cents per hour, $6/day, ~2.2k per year. They could probably sell it for at least $20k.

But this can replace grid power. So now they can sell it at least for the price of a solar + battery setup, plus coolness factor surcharge, plus the fact that you can rely on it year-round unlike solar, so you don't need a grid connection at all. Another application where they can probably make at least $20k but probably more from each unit.

Now, let's go further. Electric cars. You'd probably need multiple units and a small battery for peak power demand, but let's ask this way... how much extra do you think people would pay for a truck that magically refuels itself, for free? I'd totally see two of those being a $50-100k upgrade for electric cars. Or a truck that doesn't need batteries and powers your house when parked.

That's just the absolute no-brainer mass market applications. Now imagine anything that is remote or has other difficulties in getting power. Cell towers, scientific or military outposts, spaceships...

That doesn’t matter. If they can produce it for around $1k then let capitalism race to the bottom and bring the price down to $2-3k.

Electricity will become super cheap, so those prices you quoted will drop to pennys per day.

What they can produce it for only matters as a lower limit on the price.

If they can produce it for $1k, and are the only ones who can due to patents, they'll still sell it for whatever the market will bear. Potentially rather choosing to sell 1M units for 100k each instead of 100M units for $1900 each (although I expect too drastic attempts at artificial scarcity would cause the government to expropriate them).

Either way they'd be guaranteed absolutely mad profits if they managed to create this, which is why some people will be willing to throw money at them fully expecting that it's most likely bullshit just because they don't want to miss the opportunity in the unlikely case that it's not.

The vapourware product or the whole scam-ish company?

Press 'X' to doubt.

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