Nucor and Helion to Develop 500 MW Fusion Power Plant by 2030

> David indicated a breakeven fusion machine would need about $35 million in funding. Seattle Business reports that Helion has raised the money and will complete this targeting breakeven machine this year.

> Nucor is making a direct investment of $35 million in Helion to accelerate fusion deployment in the United States.

Is fusion always $35 million away?

Their most recent scientific paper they published 3 months ago only says that scientific breakeven (Qsci > 1) is possible. Which has been claimed many times before pesky engineering challenges and unmodeled behavior starts to interfere. The paper actually mostly just rehashes their marketing so its impossible to judge how realistic their claims are. Regardless, they don't seem like they are close to any kind of actual prototype let alone one that can demonstrate scientific breakeven or the order of magnitude harder engineering breakeven.

Their claims seem very hard to believe to put it mildy.

In their defence, a lot of their past promises were explicitly conditional on receiving a level of funding which they did not receive until much more recently.

They still aren't making a 500 MW plant in 2030 though.

He's announced it was one year away each of the last 10 years. [1]

[1] https://futurism.com/video-elon-musk-promising-self-driving-...

During my first year of uni he already announced self driving car in three years.

That was in 2012

edit: 2013, https://www.extremetech.com/cars/166826-tesla-motors-will-pu...

1 year on Mars is 687 days. So 2 years on Mars is 3.7 years on Earth. So he's only slightly behind schedule. /s

He just overestimate capabilities of computer inside Tesla.

I'm now reading about Mercedes level 3 automated driving system.

For me looks like, Daimler selling under-priced more powerful hardware, because for Daimler it is spare project (they could earn money on others), and with few times more RAM/FLOPs, they achieve better result.

Plus, Daimler cheat rules, their conditions for usage automated system are significantly more limited than have Tesla.

Unfortunately, Tesla cannot sell cars under-priced, and Tesla by definition whole world system.

I'm not trying to advocate Musk, I'm Ukrainian and Musk said wrong things about Ukrainian war.

But I must admit, just half year ago, I don't know what could do recent AI on my own computer.

If you read the whole article it is something like, "yes we produce a huge amount of CO2, but we're investing in fusion energy to power our steel plants, so get off our backs for 7 years." Good luck to them though, steel plants are a great application for high power, continuous sources of energy that don't go away when the sun sets or the wind stops blowing.

Altman strikes again

By making deuterium fuse with itself.

They will have two types of reactors. First, large centralized reactors for DD fusion to make He3. These will be more expensive and challenging because of the neutron bombardment. The other for D-He3 fusion which will be for smaller sites and produces less neutron damage.

They will make the He-3 using D-D fusion reactors (which is not aneutronic) and waiting for collected tritium to decay into He-3 (12 years). In each shot, they have to remove the he3 and T to prevent them from reacting.

In the D-he3 reactors, they cannot fully prevent the side reactions of DD and DT. But they can minimize them by controlling the mixture of he3 and D in each shot and constantly extracting the T byproduct of D-he3. Basically, they will have high ratio of he3 to D ions so that all the D ions are likely to be used in D-he3 reactions. Removing and collecting the T in each shot removes the opportunity for D-T. It will probably work to an extent, but there will still be side reactions. The overall neutronicity will likely be in the 2-5 range in the D-He3 reactors.

For a skeptic's response I recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vUPhsFoniw

Excellent production quality, but I would have appreciated a bit more skepticism on the part of the host of Real Engineering.

In particular, adding tritium to a fusing deuterium plasma does not just make all of the fusion a-neutronic. It just makes some percentage of the fusion events a-neutronic. So you're "just" adding a fuel additive that "just" changes the emissions somewhat

Plus, apparently D-T fusion tends to release gamma rays -- I'm sure that will also be tricky to either convert into useful energy or shield against.

I'm all in favor of trying, and I wish them luck, but it all smacked of a last minute publicity event to try to reassure investors that they were just one last upgrade away from producing power.

I would suggest the (longer, dryer) fusion master class series by Dr. Matthew Moynihan

https://youtu.be/BGu0cxrWWCA?si=lozD5-5MT1d-WEp9

They wouldn't be the first company to spend $35M on marketing. They also don't specify the payment schedule, if they are supposed to give some of it in 5 years then there is a decent chance Helion won't exist once it is time to collect.

Nucor's net income for 2022 was $7.5 billion dollars. This isn't a meaningful investment.

Given the history of fusion announcements, I suspect the only thing people are willing to listen to is "we successfully delivered power from a fusion reactor fueled by $fuel to a paying customer in $place, and the only byproducts were $waste_product."

Helion likely will spend a portion of that $35 million purchasing steel for its reactors. This smells like a form of vendor financing.

> $35 million

Putting $35 million on the table to accomplish what has eluded us for so long and is supposed to sustain modernity for the next 1000 years is small enough to convince me that this is more promotion than promise. That's about about 1% of the cost of this steel mill, (https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2021/sep/17/us-steel-to-bu...) which is called a mini-mill in the link. Boxers have earned much more for a single fight; $35 million might buy a CEO for a year, but it is less than half the cost of a Hollywood film, of which we get a few each week, or of a 10-bedroom home on 5th Avenue.

Helion has never demonstrated that their technology actually works on any scale. Even if they magically made breakthroughs and were able to hypothetically build a prototype plant it would be almost impossible to solve the operational challenges to build a commercial scale plant in seven years. It would be far more challenging than building a nuclear plant for example. That ignores all the complexity of their D-He3 aneutronic fusion cycle; they probably cannot operate a commercial scale power plant (that would presumably use D-He3) without having first constructed D-D reactors.

The meme was that fusion was always 30 years away. This is obviously a lot closer, so if nothing else it doesn't deserve to be tarred with that brush.

I cannot find it via google (so perhaps I'm remembering it wrong), but DoE or NSF created in the seventies - as part of some larger report - what I thought was a fairly well known chart guesstimating the time needed to develop working fusion energy generation, based on how much money was spent on the endeavor. The idea being that to do it relatively quickly we'd have to spend a pretty extravagant amount of money on research and development, and as the amount of money spent decreased the timeline extended further into the future.

The unintended joke was/is that the U.S. has never spent anywhere close to the amount money the DoE estimated was needed to develop fusion power, so we haven't even tested the accuracy of the chart.

Additional resources for people who want to read or watch more on the subject:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=wK5v1Nw98xs

https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/10ohto9/livestream_...

/u/ValAslanyan is Improbable Matter and he gets into some interesting debates about Helion

https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/133ttne/can_we_talk...

https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/10g95m9/the_problem...

But more than half of the time the sun doesn't shine in my lovely country.

Microsoft disagrees with you: https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1705664458952151101

The "solar makes nuclear useless" line seems wrong. There are situations where solar isn't feasible (like in a spaceship or on a boat or submarine). There also may be space, reliability, and weather limitations that make solar less attractive. Finally, we're making solar panels very fast, but if we really go all-in, it will take a long time to build as many as we need. It's probably better to hedge our bets and build nuclear now.

Re: Helion, I'm skeptical that their fusion reactor will ever be commercially viable but am not an expert and would love to be wrong. There's tons of Helion skepticism on the internet you can find if you look around.

That's not how grid economics work. Transmission costs are large and rising, but that is more of a problem for intermittent sources.

Mistake, to underestimate scale effect. For example, in Ukraine use large enterprise fission reactors (mostly 900MWt or 1000MWt), and they are so effective, that could sell energy for less than half of solar cost.

Yes, we have some parts of country with small population density, but their share of energy consumption is also small, so they are not affect whole balance much.

I must admit, things are constantly change last months, so future could be very different. But just now, nuclear are cheapest in Ukrainian energy balance.