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Comment by moh_maya | Hacker News Reader

From [0] ‘ This is a binding agreement that has financial penalties if we can’t build a fusion system,” Helion founder and CEO David Kirtley tells The Verge. “We’ve committed to be able to build a system and sell it commercially to [Microsoft].”

Assuming the financial penalties are a significant fraction (i.e they are, say, greater than 5%) of the agreement value, I would interpret it as a more serious / confident commitment and expression of intent and viability, than just a contract that’s hope + way to support.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/10/23717332/microsoft-nuclea...

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If they can't build a fusion system, aren't they sort of bust anyway?

They'd likely have some IP that could be of value to creditors.

What’s an IP in this context please ?

Intellectual Property - so there might be trade secrets, patents, etc developed in the course of research. Even if the business goes bust, they might have learned valuable lessons.

Intellectual property. Patents, primarily, but also internal know-how and private research.

It's like taking an idea hostage. If you fail to pull it off, you make sure that nobody else has the chance to try it without first paying you for that privilege. It's supposed to help somehow.

Bookmarked.

They definitely have valuable IP already: whatever slide deck/demo reel/kompromat they used to pull this nonsense off is clearly worth its weight in unobtanium.

this is needlessly cynical, no?

It is very needlessly cynical. Helion has a number of very clever ideas, integrated in a way that has impressed me over the years. I would not dismiss them out of hand.

If they are really only 5 years from producing sellable power they are already capable of a science demo that would render this sort of vapid publicity stunt pointless. I’ve set a reminder to check back in 5 years, if the cynicism was genuinely needless I’ll apologize.

I suggest you do a deep dive into the physics behind their design. It's quite clever. They are able to evade some of the practical showstopping issues that face most other fusion approaches.

This announcement has nothing to do with physics. As stated, it's just an agreement for Microsoft to buy electricity, and not obviously an agreement to do so at any particular price. And why make this move now? Is Helion afraid that no one would buy their electricity? It's literally the most fungible commodity ever and we're heading into an era of unprecedented demand for charging EVs. Anyone offering reliable, environmentally friendly in 2028 will have no problem selling all they can produce. And why pick a specific customer at all? That's a weird way to sell bulk electricity, which is distributed by grids that cover millions of consumers. I could see Microsoft needing to make such an agreement before Constellation might be willing to finance new transmission from the grid to a remote Azure data center, but nothing in this announcement suggests that's the case. The only plausible explanation for this move is financial--Helion is going to leverage Microsoft's name to lure investment--and/or some sort of carbon credit/greenwashing play by Constellation & Microsoft.

So, you wanted to form an opinion on them without looking at the physics? Really?

Your complaining there just looks like frantic unhinged negativism.

at the point you're worrying about paying creditors off with your IP, you're... bust.

Microsoft would have a claim as a creditor. It's more than nothing, but it is a paper promise.

Maybe they will just fissile out...

Isn't their plan B being an economical way of generating helium-3? Their power generation plan sounds dubious but the helium-3 production might make some sense.

Who is a major consumer of ³He? Medical imaging?

If they could build a fusion system, are they in any danger of not having customers to the point that they're selling futures now?

It’s a sliding scale in the end. You can have a fusion system that barely breaks even, or only slightly breaks even, and then is still more expensive than traditional energy sources after factoring in fixed costs and maintenance.

For example, a DT fusion reactor based on ITER would be two orders of magnitude larger (in volume and mass) than a fission reactor of the same power output. It might "work" in some technical sense, but be completely economically impractical.

Even then, are there no sales possible? I'd think that a borderline fusion reactor would be commercially viable if only for research. You could probably sell a dozen of those around the world. But unless something really weird's going on with the physics, a borderline system is just the mark 1, and everyone expects mark 2 to be more efficient.

So it sounds like Microsoft have committed to buy the first system when it's ready. Without investing anything now? So i guess they get a good discount on that.

Elsewhere, i saw that Helion already raised billions.

So what's in it for Helion? If they can make it happen, and build a sustained fusion system, they will surely be able to sell the energy/systems once ready, and don't really need to sell it at discounted rates now. I could imagine a deal with Microsoft is good for marketing, but seems way too soon for that isn't it?

Manufactured FOMO to sucker in more investors.

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