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Comment by jablongo | Hacker News Reader

It seems like the ranking of likely success in the next 10 years is

1. Commonwealth (tokamak w/ high temp superconducting magnets)

2. Helion (field reversed configuration, magnetic-inertial, pulsed) ....

?. Wendelstein (stellarator)

Maybe stellarators will be the common design in 2060 once fabrication tech has improved, but for the near future I think its going to be one of the first two.

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It'll be really funny if we get a commercial fusion device before ITER has even been turned on.

I'm sure they developed some really useful technology in the process of building the thing, but I suspect they would have made more progress faster if they had taken a more iterative approach.

this discounts the likelihood that other breakthroughs are correlated with ITER in some way.

The first transistor in Silicon Valley wasn’t made by Shockley.

How isolated are the paths it could have taken? One major outdated choice ITER took is cold magnets, rather than "warm". Could they have switched this point in an iterative project?

I doubt Helion will work. By their own paper using simplified model their device allows theoretically for Q no more than 2 (2 times energy produced versus energy spent). They claim with their like 90% efficient capture they still get net energy gain. But typically reality way messier than model and I will be surprised if they archive Q=1.

Tokamaks main problem is plasma instabilities. While Commonwealth may archive high Q briefly, nobody knows how plasma will behave at those conditions and long operations may not be possible.

Stellarators on the other hand do not have plasma stability problems. So my bet is on those.

If the goal is viable commercial operation, Helion has vast benefits over the other approaches when it comes to the economics of turning the fusion energy into electricity.

All approaches have huge hurdles to overcome. Helion may have bigger challenges on the Q side, but all-in-all I think the probabilities of being viable ends up similar.

All other fusion power plants are thermal power plants. I suspect all thermal power plants will end up being economically unviable in the world of renewables, for various reasons. They’re just too bulky and slow, and require special consideration wrt cooling. It’s one of the reasons why gas power is king these days.

If we think really far ahead, the scaling of thermal power plants is limited by the heat they put out. It ends up contributing to global warming just from the thermal forcing they apply to the environment. The effect of the ones we have today are already surprisingly significant. Helion is a path to being able to produce a huge amount of energy with fairly limited impact on the environment (eventually limited by the thermal energy they dump, but perhaps they can use thermal radiation panels that dump the waste heat energy directly to space)

They've already demonstrated very high efficiency recovery of the plasma energy that they inject when the plasma is compressed. The additional plasma energy from fusion products would be recovered just the same way.

Proxima Fusion builds a stellator. As far as I remember they were founded by wendelsteinians.

They are the only fusion startup I know of that was faster than their own timeline in the last year.

4. Acceleron (muon catalyzed)

There's huge advantages to muon catalyzed if they can get it to work. Plants would be orders of magnitude smaller and cheaper to build.

[0] https://www.acceleron.energy/

Good list, I'm also keeping an eye on Tri Alpha Energy and First Light Fusion. TAE recently announced [1] initiating a field reversed configuration with no plasma injectors, only neutral beam injection, which is a pretty big deal in simplifying the design.

[1] https://tae.com/tae-technologies-delivers-fusion-breakthroug...

Thea Energy is working on a stellarator that doesn't require the complex shaping coils that W-7X is using. I'd put them above Helion and below CFS, but in a couple years they might take the top spot.

what about general fusion?

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

Aren’t they running out of money?

They had to abandon their first approach because it didn't work in at least three different ways. And now they've had layoffs because additional funding didn't show up.

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