Helion bags $425M in fresh funding despite fusion power still being a distant dream Fusion energy startup Helion has yet to prove it can generate electricity, but that hasn't stopped investors from dumping another $425 million into the venture. Helion, whose board is chaired by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, announced an "oversubscribed and upsized" Series F funding round yesterday. With the addition of $425 million …
It is pretty rare to see startups doing basic research that takes a long time to pay off, instead of being a "me too" in the hot field of the day like AI that's guaranteed to attract investment dollars. People constantly complain that no one does any basic research anymore, but when someone tries they are peddling snake oil because they haven't been able to progress quite as quickly as promised. They are adhering to their timeline a lot better than Musk has with autonomous driving, that's for sure!
And who cares if they are "burning money" at the moment rather than deuterium? It isn't your money, it isn't even adjacent to your money. If guys like Sam Altman want to do something you think is a waste of money, why should you care? Would you rather he close down Helion and use the savings to build the next OpenAI datacenter a little larger instead?
If Helion's approach works it will be far superior to the "big science" approach pushed by the Tokamak style reactors like ITER - viable much smaller in scale and with direct energy capture rather than providing heat for a giant steam engine. Maybe it doesn't work, but you'd rather no one even tries if you don't approve of the backers?
Fusion is pop science, and any buzz about fusion gives politicians an excuse to not invest in established nuclear power.
The only innovative nuclear power company that I believe might actually produce something usable is Copenhagen Atomics with their Molten Salt Thorium reactor.
Otherwise the power plants like Hinkley C are large investments that will pay off for 100 years with low-carbon electricity. We need more of these.
No, we're laughing at Sam Altman, who has enver produced anything but snake oil.
I am curious about from where all this money comes, though, and if it could be put to a different, perhaps more beneficial use, like feeding hungry people or housing people without homes. But that doesn't get headlines or shift money from one techbro pocket to another.
I'm reminded of the beginning of the second episode of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the galaxy, lies a small, unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-million miles is an utterly insignificant blue-green planet whose ape-descended lifeforms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has, or had, a problem which was this: Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper... which is odd, because on the whole, it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy... And so the problem remained. And lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable - even the ones with digital watches. . .Substitute your favorite item for digital watch.
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