Microsoft Bets That Fusion Power Is Closer Than Many Think
wsj.comDo 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.
> are they just trying to look greener
Absolutely not! They’re also trying to look cutting edge.
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.
* The safety is massively different than fission because there is no 'run away' reaction. If you turn off the power, fusion will stop. Fission will keep going once started, and can be very dangerous if the cooling system fails.
* I do believe the fusion paths Helios is using emit neutrons, which is a big safety concern. Not only is neutron radiation directly deadly to humans, it's also a challenge to maintain containment. Neutrons are not magnetic, so matter must be used as a shield. Most materials that absorb a neutron will itself become radioactive. I'm unsure about the number of neutrons Helios is emitting, or will emit as they scale up.
Their combined D-D/D-He3 reaction will emit 6% of its energy as neutron radiation, compared to 80% for D-T. Mostly they'll be lower-energy neutrons, and it's only a 50MW reactor. They don't plan to make it bigger, just to make lots of them.
They're considering doing the D-D reaction in a separate reactor to produce the He3. The D-He3 reaction is purely aneutronic, and while some D-D will still happen, they can tune it so it doesn't happen much. That would mean very little neutron radiation at the power plants.
> The D-He3 reaction is purely aneutronic, and while some D-D will still happen, they can tune it so it doesn't happen much. That would mean very little neutron radiation at the power plants.
Yea. I'm just very curious as to what these numbers look like in practice. Neutrons are essentially waste emissions with their plan, but physics and engineering constrains will determine how much they can tune out D-D reactions.
> very curious as to what these numbers look like in practice
At their stated "optimum" temperature of 200 million kelvin[0] or ~17 keV, the selectivity of the two cross-sections (D-H3/D-D) is about 0.7[1].
Let x = the fraction of D (we'll generously assume no T contamination, so the remainder 1-x is He3), plug in the reaction energies[2], and rearrange.
Graph is here: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=plot+y+%3D+1.225+x%5E2%...
The top line is total non-neutron power, and the bottom line is neutron power. The horizontal axis is the fraction of D in the mix, and the vertical axis is proportional to power.
It might help compare the relative tradeoffs if you zoom in on the rising slope of the power curve, and normalize both curves to 1: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=plot%3A+y%3D1%2F3.9503+...
[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-buy-power-nucle...
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RxDT-DD-DHe3.jpg
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#Criteria_and_ca...
In fact, even for D-T fusion the NRC recently decided to regulate reactors like accelerators instead of like fission reactors.
Also, we never mass-produced fission reactors. Helion wants to build a factory making twenty 50MW reactors per day, shippable by rail.
When it becomes clear that fusion can displace coal those safety, activist and political concerns will immediately pop up again
And any country that chooses to keep using a dirty, unhealthy, more expensive, 250-year-old energy supply over helium-3 fusion will rapidly fall behind.
Ok but that's a different story.
Just look at what's going on with solar https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1656323112349179907
Yes in theory it should be easy to shut these people up with fusion but historically it hasn't been.
You are describing a scenario that's very scary for any economy that depends on fossil energy sources to some extent.
Do you really not see the geostrategic advantage in being able to control who gets "free" energy and who doesn't?
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.
I wonder if there's already a paper, or a fictional book, about what happens if someone invents something that makes fossil fuels obsolete within, say, a year. The OPEC countries would suddenly be faced with losing one of their biggest income streams. It would be interesting to speculate...
Of course there are different levels of obsolence, all the petrol cars won't disappear, unless someone invents a magic liquid to replace petrol/diesel with something that works identically but without the pollution.
You still need fossil fuels for the chemical industry, transportation, etc.
Even if electricity becomes cheap (we can already do that with wind and solar) changing everything else is a huge task.
Well you need hydrocarbons, but cheap scalable fusion would make it a lot easier to source the hydrogen from water, the carbon from ambient CO2, and mush them together.
Transportation is already in the process of shifting. EV cars and trains, obviously, are the present. EV cargo vans are "days away" from the present (especially looking at things like Walmart's massive uptake in EV logistics, but also Amazon and UPS and FedEx's various deals). EV semitrucks are "months away" from the present. Air and sea have the longest lead times and are indeed the furthest behind, but are seeing a lot of pressure to explore cheaper alternatives (and are talking about very interesting electrification ideas and are seeing prototypes and early adopters).
I heard a rumor once, and it may be more fictional speculation than reality, that OPEC shows most of the signs of a "going out of business" sale. That they know the market window is shrinking and are doing their best to make the most of it in an "everything must go" fashion.
(The rumor suggested that's why there was a weird sudden drop in oil and gas prices several years back and then prices nearly "flatlined" for a few years there rather than sticking to a slow inflation-locked climb as it had been. The rumor was that OPEC had started to liquidate its reserves as fast as possible without crashing the market.)
If that was the case, one would hope that OPEC members were also smart enough to plan for after the "going out of business sale" and smartly socking away the money into long term investments. (Further speculation: given the real estate booms in UAE and Qatar, especially, and attempts to spin some of those cities as world tourism destinations there may even be evidence that that is what they have been trying to do.)
> Of course there are different levels of obsolence, all the petrol cars won't disappear, unless someone invents a magic liquid to replace petrol/diesel with something that works identically but without the pollution.
I don't think it will need "magic", I think the feedback loops between supply-side and demand-side economics can handle it all on their own, and possibly (probably, IMO) surprisingly quickly once things start to snowball: gas pumps are already low margin "loss leaders" for convenience stores and supermarkets. As prices get higher the usefulness as "loss leaders" shrinks. As EVs spread, demand drops which could drop prices (temporarily) but that also lowers the usefulness as a "loss leader". Any such price drops are almost guaranteed to be temporary because as demand drops, production should drop. Production is capital heavy and much of production once it shuts down, in theory shuts down for good (especially if demand isn't expected to go back up) because the costs for restarts become increasingly too expensive. As the usefulness for gas as a "loss leader" drops below certain thresholds, consumer gas pumps start to disappear. As gas pumps start to disappear, demand for EVs increases, furthering the drop in demand for gas, exacerbating the disappearance of gas pumps. Eventually, as that cycle snowballs, ICE range anxiety returns with a vengeance and petrol cars become museum pieces too expensive to drive.
Because it is a feedback snowball, it could happen seemingly abruptly, almost like magic.
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. reply
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.
Oh you mean when the DOJ used to trial Anti-Trust suits? I can't recall the last time they acted on a monopoly.
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?
Isn't that in everyone's interest besides KSA?
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.
Disruption outside of the government eye is common, I wouldn’t be surprised. Those organizations focus on nuclear weapons tech.
DOE also covers domestic nuclear power generation
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_...
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.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/20/nuclear-fusion-will-not-be-r...
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.
Worth watching about Helion:
The response by Improbable Matter is also interesting in its own right https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vUPhsFoniw
Then you should also read this comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/10g95m9/comment/j67...
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.
Thunderf00t, YouTubes own cynic also made a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3VGDCa9fZg
We know we can achieve fusion, but as far as I'm informed we still don't know that we can take more energy out than we put in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor
> 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.
Agreed - I had no idea they were skipping the steam/turbine stuff. This is a compelling concept because it looks like it could actually scale.
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.
Is that why they keep developing stuff with Electron?
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.
It's a power purchase agreement.
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.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/10/microsoft-agrees-to-buy-powe...
> 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.
Putting gas into my car is a good idea, but putting gas into my dog isn’t quite so reasonable.
Helion gets to survive 5 more years, Microsoft risks nothing, they both get good PR for associating themselves with one another.
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.
https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/ending-trenta-operatio...
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.
Here is some raw video of plasma in a Safire chamber vaporizing a tungsten rod https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y46wMAHnsI
We just need to redefine fusion and we have it.
Sounds like someone has been talking to the base model
If we get fusion power and ai and longevity up in next 10-20 years it's going to be nightmare for ordinary people. Yeah, nightmare, not paradise.
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
What population collapse ? And why would longevity-extending techniques help ?
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_union_ter...
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.
> how are we going to get fertility rates back up to replacement or higher once all countries have dropped below?
Some of this is contingent on issues that can already be resolved through policy (e.g. work-life balance, affordability, daycare). AI could help but it's redundant.
Even if there were a decline in population globally for a few decades, it will be working backwards from 10+ billion. Who cares?
The things you mentioned have been tried in several wealthy countries and they don’t work. Even if they did, they require a lot of societal wealth to implement and once the global population starts declining so will the economic output and consequently tax revenues, that’s a 1-2 punch for living standards which will also fall. Our economy is 100% dependent on healthy young people which means no kids, no economy. If fertility rates get stuck at 1 or below 1 then the population will halve with each generation and the only thing that will stop it “naturally” is the complete collapse of global civilization and a return to tiny feudal states ruled by probably religious fundamentalist warlords where 99.9% of people are subsistence farmers. Even if you like that outcome for some demented reason consider that there will still be the rusting leftovers of our technology for the idiot barbarians to play with.
> If fertility rates get stuck at 1 or below
There's no reason to believe they would be "stuck" into perpetuity.
Right now, young people comparatively want fewer kids than the previous generation. That's owing to both life stresses (as they say it) and cultural shift, neither of which are written in stone. The fertility rate has stagnated with prosperity, but the U.S. was also quite developed by the end of the world wars, and we then had the boomers.
> they require a lot of societal wealth
Scandinavian countries aren't particularly wealthy compared to the U.S., Germany, France, Japan and others.
You must mean total wealth rather than per capita because most scandinavian countries are more wealthy than Germany, France and Japan per capita and are quite close to the US. They’re all below replacement rate and headed lower anyways.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(no...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and...
A rapid transition would necessitate the need for legislative/policy changes. People aren't going to complacently waddle in "nightmares".
Workers already feel priced out of the housing market, just add it to the pile.
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.
Not fully automated luxury space communism?
Still working out the kinks in the requirements spec.
Fusion is not just another way to power our lightbulbs it's a completely different kind of energy.
Two unique properties of energy density like Fusion.
1. The ability to hit 10% of the speed of light in space 2. The ability to create fundamental elements like gold, silver etc.
Another good example of the fact that there are no scarcity of resources only scarcity of knowledge. Resources are created not found.
Edit: Why am I being downvoted?
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.
I am not talking about tomorrow. I am talking about the potential of what you can do with the energy density.
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.
Again yes, but that's not the point. The point is you can't do that with any other energy source.
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.
Well you can.
However, the gold standard is no more.