A New Way to Achieve Nuclear Fusion: Helion
Real Engineering
The images you are seeing right now are a closely guarded secret for years. Trenta Helion's sixth generation nuclear fusion generator is unlike any other using a novel approach to achieve nuclear fusion, adapting knowledge developed for...
A New Way to Achieve Nuclear Fusion: Helion
Real Engineering
The images you are seeing right now are a closely guarded secret for years. Trenta
Helion's sixth generation nuclear fusion generator is unlike any other using a novel
approach to achieve nuclear fusion, adapting knowledge developed for ion propulsion
in space. The generator forms two mirrored rings of plasma on either end of a reactor
and in a tenth of a thousandth of a second they fire them at each other sequentially,
activating powerful magnets to squeeze and compress the rings towards the center
where they collide, converting kinetic energy of the ions traveling at 300 kilometers per
second into thermal energy. The plasma generation happens right here interestingly
enough so over here we're standing in front of what is called the diverter; this is what
happens after the reaction. Here, we 're forming our plasma. This is our formation
section. Here, we initially inject our neutral gas so the gas is ejected from a flow
manifold, a fuel manifold, and then we puff in gas in a neutral gas that's just at room
temperature. Fusion is a truly innovative concept with tokamak reactors like the
massive eater reactor being built in France. Fusion reactions are creating new particles:
deuterium fusing together with helium3 to form helium4 and an extra hydrogen; and
both of those two particles are very high temperature now. They're born inside the
fusion plasma applying pressure back on magnetic fields.
Helion is skipping steps one through four and going straight to moving a magnetic field
around copper wires generating electricity directly from the magnetic field. Tokamak
reactors are going to face the exact same issues as nuclear fission energy they will be
too expensive and won't be able to compete with cheaper forms of electricity. Helium3
was theorized in the early days of fusion as being the best fusion fuel because of its
rarity. There have not been a lot of approaches that have used few of the rare gasfusion
fuel. Trenta was the first system we know about that did bulk helium deuterium helium
3 fusion for a power generation application. Helion has two pathways to create helium3
for their primary fusion energy reaction. Helion is building Polaris their seventh
generation system the goal is that it will demonstrate electricity production for the first
time come online in 2024. The deuterium3 reaction does require higher temperatures
and this does pose an engineering challenge.
There were some exciting things that we learned on Twitter that were unexpected. We
were really worried early that the timing accuracy of merging these two high-speed
plus-plus systems was over a million miles an hour, compressing them working on
getting their alignment. The fusion plasma interacts with the vacuum chamber a little
bit more than what we thought as well, and so there's some engineering iteration that
has to happen as we discover the advanced physics of fusion. Polaris is their seventh-
generation system and its 25 percent bigger precisely because of the lessons learned
from Trenta: the physics of fusion is a new frontier. Polaris will also be the first
generation to begin capturing electricity but that's a lot easier said than done and will
need the very latest electronics to work quickly enough under Trenta. The polaris
system holds an astounding amount of energy but the total capacity of this capacitor
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