Do they really believe that, or are they just trying to look greener and make their carbon negative commitment look more real?
> “We wouldn’t enter into this agreement if we were not optimistic that engineering advances are gaining momentum,” said Microsoft President Brad Smith.
Why not? What's the downside for Microsoft, even if they think this probably won't happen by 2028? They even get paid "penalties" if Helion doesn't deliver.
Given the implications of this technology I wonder how much development is actually being done "in the open". And therefore how close to a breakthrough we are, whether a breakthrough has already occured and we are being fed delayed findings, and ultimately how a private organization like Microsoft would truly be able to access matured tech.
Whether by incentive or by coercion, it feels like the DOD and the DOE would want to have first access to any breakthroughs and also guard knowledge transfers (ie protect any program - commerical or government - from foreign state espionage).
The DOE is basically an entire national security organization centered around nuclear security, it seems unlikely they would be standing by watching R&D in fusion occur without a seat at the table.
Given climate change, if Helion works then it would be in the interest of the US for it to spread worldwide as quickly as possible. Especially since it uses a mostly-aneutronic reaction.
> Given climate change, if Helion works then it would be in the interest of the US for it to spread worldwide as quickly as possible. Especially since it uses a mostly-aneutronic reaction.
The US may want cheap energy to spread world wide. That doesn't necessarily mean the US wants fusion tech to spread world wide.
There's nothing scary about this. If it works it'll be very cheap, dispatchable power with no need for storage, curtailment, long-distance transmission, or demand management. It works just as well in any location, is massively scalable, and isn't really helpful for making bombs.
What makes you think this is going to be cheap?
There is a lot of high tech going into this, costs for a fusion device would likely eclipse that of an EUV stepper (if we are talking small scale devices), for plants the size of ITER that's a whole nother level.
Fission was supposed to be super cheap too, but construction costs rendered that a fantasy.
Construction costs for fission are largely bloated due to safety, activist and political concerns that span the realm of pragmatic and necessary to pure fantasy as well.
Aneutronic fusion would (hopefully) bypass a lot of that.
Sure but I think climate change trumps that by a wide margin. Plus, our most acute geopolitical foe gets most of its revenue by selling fossil fuels, so it'd work out nicely to steal all their customers.
And it's not like the US controls who gets energy right now, or would be able to for more than a short time. China is already attempting to copy the Helion reactor; if it works then efforts like that will ramp up worldwide.
That really depends on how fast they can capitalize on doing so. Whilst it's nice to think America would share such tech willingly, I'd offer the reality that if it's not generating a revenue, it's not being given away.
Helion plans to build a factory churning out twenty 50MW reactors per day, capable of producing dispatchable electricity for about $0.01/kWh. If they achieve that then revenue won't be a problem.
> Whilst it's nice to think America would share such tech willingly, I'd offer the reality that if it's not generating a revenue, it's not being given away.
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On the contrary, I think as long as it's generating revenue, it's not going to be given away. Remember that UNIX was popularized only because AT&T were under anti-trust sanctions and couldn't sell it.
Are most fusion reactor designs a national security concern? I am not a nuclear physicist but from my rudimentary understanding of most modern approaches I don’t see how they would help with bad stuff (other than creating material for a dirty bomb through waste perhaps)
Energy independence would upend a lot of international trade markets and therefore geopolitical stability in some areas. If you don't need Saudi Arabia for oil, why do you care what happens there?
The USA is already largely energy independent. We import very little oil from Saudi Arabia. But if the price of fusion power gets low enough (questionable) then that would obviously have a huge impact on international trade.
It is in the interest of global stability that we absolutely decimate Saudi Arabia, as well as Russia. Other oil producing nations suck too, but they mostly suck internally, whereas KSA and Russia are oil-funded international terrorist regimes.
And the NRC regulates civilian nuclear reactors. Recently, the NRC commissioners unanimously decided to regulate fusion reactors like particle accelerators rather than like fission reactors, which is very favorable to rapidly building out fusion reactors once they become available.
My impression is that Gates (and other tech billionaires) have been investing in fusion for a decade, so he probably knows or has leverage/access to people who know what’s going on, ergo Microsoft does too.
There is expertise in DOE and DOD, but there is an also a lot of private capital being invested in companies that don’t need to talk themselves up much. People in the industry generally know who most of the players are; that’s how you or your technical peers/friends get a job after all.
I don’t see a particular need for there to have been a top secret breakthrough to explain this deal.
From what I can gather a lot of Improbable Matter's critisism is based on misunderstandings or flawed understanding of Helion's specific approach. But yes, it's a good watch if you don't blindly trust his conclusions.
> On December 13, 2022, the United States Department of Energy announced that NIF had exceeded the previously elusive Q ≥ 1 milestone on December 5, 2022. This was achieved by producing 3.15 MJ after delivering 2.05 MJ to the target, for an equivalent Q of 1.54.
No.. just no. Don't watch anything by Thunderf00t. It has been too many times now that he has clearly put out just the lowest effort thing he can make to "debunk" some topic. Doesn't matter. People will view his videos anyway. I think "debunking" channels are inherently problematic because they attract viewers who like to feel smart, but don't actually want to deeply understand a topic. The conclusion is already pre-determined. The topic has to be debunked.
Improbable Matters video is.. OK. He raises some valid concerns. I think he was genuinely trying to understand and critisize the technology honostly. Though it seems he misunderstands some key facts. I've never seen that kind of honesty with Thunderf00t.
Gates might also be the most enthusiastic person about fast breeder reactors as he has put a lot of effort and money into SMRs, breed-and-burn fuel cycles, and making up the for the high cost of a three-stage heat transfer system by using the intermediate coolant to store energy ahead of time.
Microsoft Bets That Fusion Power Is Closer Than Many Think
"Bet" implies a potential for loss. This is a couch-cushion spare change level "bet". Microsoft probably spends more on printer ink every month than they stand to lose on this bet.
They're going to get ~$50M worth of power. Either they're going to overpay for Fusion or overpay for energy from some other source if Helion can't deliver and has to pay for it via penalty.
It's not really much of a risk for MSFT.
But it's a great headline for Helion to pass on to clueless people.
> Helion’s deal with Microsoft is to get 50 megawatts online,
Looking at solar costs https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/capital-costs... 50MW in solar would cost 50-100M and I can't imagine this could be much more expensive or it wouldn't be competitive at all. Microsoft annual operating expenses for 2022 were $114.887B so about a 1-2000 times more.
Given that Helios hasn’t demonstrated production of any amount of energy from fusion, this is probably just bullshit, like the United “order” for supersonic jets from Boom a few months ago. Similarly, Boom has not even flown a prototype yet.
I'm not sure why you're so negative on a business model that has worked for tech startups for decades now. Many businesses have started by promising to fix a problem experienced by a larger entity. Along with product guidance, the startup often gets capital in the form of investment. The larger company gets a low-risk attempt to solve their problem with the possibility of upside in the case of a larger than expected success.
The larger company's involvement feels closer to nepotism.
If Helion actually pulls off productive fusion, Microsoft will buy the power regardless. Same with Boom, if their jet really is efficient, United would buy one no matter what because it makes business sense. Signaling like this feels more like a marketing campaign to investors rather than a signal of potential.
Helios is building real facilities. Maybe it won't work, but it's not just drafting CAD templates — they are deploying capital into physical reactors. That's not bullshit.
Not only that but the reactor they're building now is their seventh. They kept their previous reactor under vacuum for 16 months, did thousands of fusion pulses, and achieved 100 million degree plasma temperatures.
The Safire plasma has self-containing magnetic fields and does not require artificial magnet infrastructure. Safire plasma can stay "lit" at under 240 watts of power input almost indefinitely.
I don't see the fusion argument, but I can see the AI argument at least temporarily making lives worse. What is the argument that fusion power would? It would definitely destabilize countries like Saudi Arabia, but otherwise seems like a win. Even still you have to have petroleum products for most anything and everything.
In my model I don't segment people by countries. I segment them by classes -- peasants and aristocrats. So actually, I wouldn't worry about Saudian aristocrats because I'm sure they will prosper as long as they plan accordingly.
Wide adoption of longevity tech is necessary to prevent population collapse. AI also doesn’t seem like it’s going to stay cooped up for long, there’s a solid chance that open source projects beat OpenAI to the punch as well if scaling is no longer productive beyond this point
I’m amazed you haven’t heard of this before now. The entire West has had a fertility rate below replacement for decades and now even China has joined the party and India is going to be there really soon. The way Africa is developing they probably only have a few decades left. If we don’t find a way to turn this around then all of our golden years are going to spent desperately trying to prevent the global economy from collapsing.
I guess I read "population collapsing" overly dramatically - the reduction of the fertility rate is a good thing, as the population size has overshot what is deemed to be sustainable for at least half a century now, so we'll have to reduce it at least by half anyway, one way or another. (And economic collapse has been pretty much baked in at this point, you can thank the boomers for that : the first generation to be aware of these issues, but chose to be selfish instead.)
And I still don't see how more longevity would help (aside from helping to kick the can further while our situation worsens even more) - women have a fixed number of gametes they acquire before birth - increasing their longevity is not going to postpone menopause !
Furthermore, so far extra longevity and a better quality of life (and especially education of women, as already theorized by Malthus) has been correlated with a reduction in fertility rate - again, something that is typically seen as a good thing !
No, a good thing would be at the least holding steady at replacement levels (2.1). Where we’re at and the rest are heading, we’re seriously fucked. If you don’t think so then answer this:
how are we going to get fertility rates back up to replacement or higher once all countries have dropped below?
Everything you can think of off the top of your head has already been tried and failed.
By longevity tech I mean we need some scifi level inventions like extending lifespan and healthspan by >50% so we can move the retirement age to 120 or higher while we work on the other solutions like perfecting cloning, artificial wombs, or creating artificial eggs, or the really hard sociological problem of getting people to reproduce when they don’t want to.
Saying we need to reduce our population by 50% is ghoulish and shortsighted, it’s like saying you need to reduce your number of limbs by 50% to lose weight. It’s about as much a solution as suicide.
There will be no rapid transition. Even if Helion's design actually works (and it might not), the plants will be expensive to construct. It would take decades to scale up production.
Fusion releases energy when producing items lighter than iron. It requires energy to create atoms heavier than iron via fusion. It would cost huge amounts of money to produce an ounce of silver or gold that way.
Regardless of energy density, creating gold in a fusion reactor will still be more expensive than digging it out of the ground. We are far from exhausting that natural resource.
Seeing as the only known way the universe makes the stable isotope of gold is through colliding neutron stars, I doubt you can do that with fusion either.
> “We wouldn’t enter into this agreement if we were not optimistic that engineering advances are gaining momentum,” said Microsoft President Brad Smith.
Why not? What's the downside for Microsoft, even if they think this probably won't happen by 2028? They even get paid "penalties" if Helion doesn't deliver.