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Comment by sidcool | Hacker News Reader

At what stage are we in actualising fusion energy as a feasible source? Is it:

1. Theory is in place. Need to work out some some physics.

2. Physics is solid. Engineering needs work.

The most basic physics (e.g. the actual reactions involved) is solved but how plasmas actually behave in practice is not well modeled. A lot of improvements in fusion efficiency come from tinkering with settings and seeing what works. A caveat that I am not an expert in fusion, and am getting this from the book "The Future of Fusion Energy".

Book review/summary of The Future of Fusion Energy:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-f...

Helion addresses that in their FAQ (https://www.helionenergy.com/faq/). TLDR, they have produced six working prototypes, the most recent which has been continuously running for 16 months. These haven’t produced net electricity yet, apparently due more to scale than to any unsolved scientific or engineering problems. Prototype 7, “Polaris”, is aimed to scale up the design to produce net electricity by 2024. This new hiring spree is to figure out how to mass produce it.

Wow, so start-up claims to have a fusion reactor demonstrator running for 16 months, while all the large projects are struggling with their firat prototypes. And we just believe said start-ups claims?

Achieving fusion is not that hard, lots of projects have working fusion. You can even do it yourself with a homebrew project costing about $1000. What's hard is getting more power out than you put in, which GP mentioned Helion has not done yet.

You don't have to believe it. Literally nothing in your life will change whether you choose to believe this bit of information or not. Either Helion will solve nuclear fusion, or turn out to be another failed startup, but in this instance, your personal beliefs will have no impact on which one happens. So you may as well suspend both belief and disbelief and just wait and see what the reality turns out to be.

Not true if you're in a position to work on the project. In that case, it matters how confident you are in their claims: if you believe them entirely then you might want to help, while if you disbelieve them then you won't bother.

From a physics perspective, there are multiple viable approaches. But AFAIK, they all have huge engineering/materials challenges.

Viable in the sense that fission power was viable before the Manhattan project - theoretically possible, but still an awful lot of experimental physics work left to do, not just engineering.

Fusion has been theoretically viable for decades, but we've never produced a sustainable fusion reaction that produces more energy than we put into it. We know it's possible because we can see the sun. But we haven't proved that any of our theoretical reactor designs can actually work.

The theory has been in place for about 70 years.

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