How Helion Fusion Works

A promising endeavor.

If the young people who rise to power, once the United States is done with public self-humiliation, are to have any chance to reverse decades of disastrous decisions, they’ll need a power source. As I described in Humanity’s Hope: Helion, if they actually get a direct drive fusion system operating that changes EVERYTHING.

For you non-physics nerds, hydrogen is typically one proton and one electron, but about one in five thousand are deuterium - one proton, election, and one neutron. Since deuterium is rare almost all diatomic hydrogen contains one atom of each type. Deuterium itself is a good fusion fuel, and if you fuse one deuterium/one hydrogen together, you get helium-3, which is also an excellent fusion fuel. Best of all, this fusion path doesn’t produce a lot of loose neutrons, which some of the other methods do. This means less radioactive junk to dispose of when a reactor is decommissioned.

Our current fossil fuel and fission power plants all produce power by boiling water, except for the relatively rare reactors that use molten metals or salts as a working fluid. They all need a lot of fresh water for cooling. The Helion system is, in contrast, just one step short of magic. There’s no thermal portion of the generating system, the fusion itself directly drives the production of electric current. They still need some cooling, but it’s more like an electrical substation, where cooling fins and fans keep heat under control, instead of a coal plant, with its enormous, thirsty cooling towers.

A gigawatt of continuously available power would cover about 2% of California’s hot summer day load. There are 8,760 hours in a year and a gigawatt costs around $250,000 per hour - or $2.2 billion per year.

Another application would be clean ammonia production - a megawatt is good for about 1,000 tons/year. A gigawatt plant would produce 1m tons/year, and average price per ton the last twenty years is about $600. A yield of $600 million annually isn’t as exciting as $2.2 billion, but this is our most common industrial chemical, 90% of it goes into fertilizer, without which we would we starve, and a third of it is now made using coal or petroleum coke, the absolutely worst possible source.

I can’t do desalination math in my head (yet) but available on demand fresh water for California’s heavily populated coast would leave the Sierra rain and snow for the Central Valley’s farmers. There’s a set of equations here that need attention - if you have a gigawatt plant, that would cover Oakland’s needs during the day, and it could be used to make fresh water at night. There’s some dizzying asset utilization math to do, generally a big ticket purchase like desalinators would be expected to run non-stop, but they may fit the economic model in this scenario.

The only thing really stopping us is our habit of clinging to the past …