Helion begins work on Washington nuclear fusion plant

Here there's realistically no way to continue electricity production so the assets will likely be chopped up and sold, if possible. Nobody owns anyone anything and Microsoft doesn't have to pay a dime. They won't get their power of course, but there's no downside for them.

These types articles where a PPA contract is confused with an investment is really common, mostly for nuclear and renewables, but that doesn't make them any more true. Microsoft hasn't invested anything, likely because they know this is (pardon the pun) hot air.

Using a particle accelerator (decelerator?) in reverse. I'm an investor in Tri-Alpha Energy, and they have tested a direct converter with the claimed 90+% efficiency.

What they're trying to do is known physics but very hard engineering.

They're also trying for aneutronic fusion, using helium-3. If the plant generates large volumes of neutrons, it chews up the first wall between the reaction and the outside. It also makes what it hits radioactive, so there's a waste problem. Aneutronic fusion uses reactions that (mostly) generate alphas and betas. This is, again, known physics but very hard engineering.

If they can get a demo machine going which solves either problem, that would be a huge advance. So far, that does not seem to have happened.

There are other startups in this space. It's probably the way commercial fusion power will eventually be done. Not via the tokamaks, like ITER.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_generator

[3] https://spectrum.ieee.org/aneutronic-fusion

> Energy is captured by direct energy conversion that uses the expansion of the plasma to induce a current in the magnetic compression- and acceleration – coils. Separately it translates high-energy fusion products, such as alpha particles directly into a voltage. 3He produced by D–D fusion carries 0.82 MeV of energy. Tritium byproducts carry 1.01 MeV, while the proton produces 3.02 MeV.

> This approach eliminates the need for steam turbines, cooling towers, and their associated energy losses. According to the company, this process also allows the recovery of a significant part of the input energy at a round-trip efficiency of over 95%.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion_Energy

Tbh, I very much doubt that this is a realistic path in the coming decade (but would love to be proven wrong). AFAIK no experimental reactor has yet generated any net electrical power at all, let alone with any big (ie dozens to hundreds of) MW MHD generators. Getting even one of these aspects working would be a major advance, let alone doing both at once.

It's the electromagnetic plasma equivalent of a reciprocating internal combustion engine.

X-ray emission is strongly dependent on electron temperature. One of the important aspects of Helion's scheme is the electron temperature is much lower than the ion temperature. Not only does this greatly reduce x-ray emission, it reduces plasma pressure at a given ion temperature vs. a plasma where the ions and electrons are in thermal equilibrium, thereby increasing the ion density and fusion rate. The pulses in Helion's scheme end (and the plasma energy is recovered) before the electrons can heat up.

Pro tip: it's not. It's because there is millions of man-hours of regulatory burden attached to every decision, to every bolt, to every instrument or valve installed.

There is a reason for all that regulatory burden, of course. It's the release of long lived and deadly radiation from a meltdown. If it wasn't for that regulation building a nuke plant would actually be quite inexpensive, relative to current costs- On the scale of a hydro dam.

Fusion has none of those costs because it has none of the same dangers. It's a wildly different problem with wildly different cost basis. The expensive part is research. Once that's done that cost is gone.

Then become a regular (but favored) customer, as the supply side becomes truly net profitable.