Microsoft signs up to buy electricity produced by fusion, perhaps in 2028 Fusion upstart Helion Energy has named Microsoft as its first customer, and claims the software giant should be able to use electricity made by mashing together helium atoms from 2028. Which may come as a surprise to many, given that nuclear fusion – outside of stars and incredibly destructive bombs – remains largely …
And they'll be happy to pay you once you deliver a working one. COD.
As someone noted above, this is not a risk. Microsoft has just promised to buy a little (for them) electricity at a reasonable price in the future, should it be available. Unless the price of electricity drops enormously by then, they're not taking on any risk.
We have more than one nuclear engineer running around, can't we do both?
Besides, even if they made it work this year it will take years of testing as well as designing and building a commercial scale fusion reactor. They probably wouldn't realistically get one online for 20 years. They can build breeder reactors now, and start whittling away at all that reactor waste laying around doing nothing. And, by the time they can build enough fusion reactors to make a difference, our waste from the old reactors should be used up. We'll probably have to run both breeders and fusion at the same time for a while just to deal with the existing waste.
Good on Helion for trying to get to fusion in a different way.
Who knows ? Maybe theirs is the start down the path to hypermatter reactors . . . and turbolasers, and active shields, and swashbuckling nerf herders sassily saying "I know" to princesses (let's not go too deep there, though).
Aneutronic fusion like Helion's would be far better to put into practice. The electricity is directly captured (via alpha particles) rather than making steam to drive a turbine which adds an additional layer of inefficiency. Theoretically aneutronic reactors could be scaled down and down in size as technology improves. Maybe not to where they could fit in a DeLorean, but steam turbines require scale for efficiency so that sort of fusion reactor will never be smaller than utility scale.
The problem with aneutronic fusion is that it requires even higher temperatures (especially for reactions that don't require He3) but they say the first 100 million degrees is the hardest.
Interesting. I note that with fusors, the last research I saw suggested they were near breakeven (where it produces as much power as it consumes) with a large desktop model, with models suggesting scaling it up should have generated net power output. The first scaleup was going to cost $3 million, and second about $10 million.
This is not a fusor, it's using magnetic constriction; from what I've read that has shown promise too. Will it work? I don't know if they are in the pure R&D stage (still figuring out the possible ways of having it run for more than a few minutes) versus engineering (whether the current prototypes can run for an extended time or not, they know what materials and techniques must be used in a later prototype and ultimately production to have it keep running.)
LLNL and the like are essentially researching a large-scale reactor, they draw a large amount of power, charging up very high capacity capacitors, release a large burst of power to get a quick even larger burst out. Fusor and I think Helion are smaller-scale designs, they run at lower temps (still high, 100 million degrees plus, this is not some claim of cold fusion...), are much smaller, produce less power but take less power to fire up as well. And of course cost would be much lower, just as with a conventional nuclear power plant some 1GW plant would cost more than a 50MW one.
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