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The problems with Helion Energy - a response to Real Engineering

Improbable Matter · 912.4K views · 2023-01-19 · 7:17

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Overview

A short, humorous critique of Helion Energy's fusion approach, framed as a response to a Real Engineering video. It covers low reactivity, neutron production, bremsstrahlung losses and diagnostics.

On Hacker News

HN cites it as a skeptical rebuttal to Helion's promises, usually in threads on fusion power and Helion's Microsoft deal.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2023–2024

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What people said

PBnFlash · 2024-02 · Criticism

There are probably a lot of optimizations in the silicone and software to find. It's not necessarily obvious what corners can get cut or where, the tradeoffs of tapping out new chips is worth it. Yet Another Matrix Multiplication Chip is not going to set the world on fire. Nvidia has that market pretty well captured. But perhaps it turns out that subnets can be trained independently or swapped with semantically equivalent but qualitatively different ones. The routing network would effectively "Standardize" and could in principle be well enough understood to "hand optimize" the routing network into hardware. Or maybe back propagation has some novel physical analogue that can be exploited in scales we can access. The real question is if Altman is capable of finding the right path in the notoriously dead end filled field of chip design. His backing of helion [1] didn't bode well in my view. But with enough R&D maybe he will flail into something useful trillions is enough for a lot of flailing. [1] [VIDEO] Edit: more derisive link

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torginus · 2023-11 · Criticism

I just realized it's THAT Helion. Their fusion experiments are not without controversy. Here's a video on explaining how it works: [LINK] And here's a video explaining what's wrong with the scheme: [VIDEO] But the TLDW version is that environment required for fusing He3 with deuterium also leads to deuterium fusing with itself, a reaction that creates neutron radiation that irradiates its environment.

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deelowe · 2023-08 · Criticism

[VIDEO] Be careful with real engineering. Many speculate he's doing paid content between this and spinlaunch.

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Sources

Video by Improbable Matter, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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