What is with all of these cynical comments? Helion is an awesome company, their technology is real, and this is cool.
>oh no this might not work!
Do you guys not understand that you’re posting on the forum of a venture capital firm/startup accelerator?
Like most of the world, it suffers from extreme tribalism and group think.
I miss the former positive HN. And the positive world. sigh
But then it attracted too many people that would just emulate the KPI in order to get funded, and instead of letting it crash and rise from the ashes, we lowered the interest rates and bailed out a bunch of "too big to fail" banks in 2008, pretty much guaranteeing viability of shitty investments. Oh, and when people started calling it out in 2012 with Occupy Wall Street, they were redirected using the centuries-old divide-and-conquer techniques.
So now it's a shell of former self. Founders try to create something that looks like a great company. VCs pour money in, hoping to resell to the next fool. Founders are now more like figureheads than idea-driven people. Most big successes (Uber, AirBnb) could be attributed more to regulatory capture than a revolutional way of doing something.
Smart people understand it very well and it doesn't make you very optimistic. You can pretend well enough to convince an average layperson, but deep inside you know the game is fake, and it kinda builds up. Notably, game-changers that are appreciated by users (rather than speculative investors) now mostly come from China (e.g. TikTok), because the vibe there (with all the downsides) is now closer to the "good old SV" than the current SV.
But legitimately, there is a strong cynical bubble in the zeitgeist now, and it’s dangerous.
There are a few things this cynicism says.
1. “People suck and are terrible.” 2. “People are stupid.” 3. “We can’t change anything.” 4. “Great calamity is going to happen and we are powerless to stop it.”
This is a lie. The world doesn’t suck, it’s much better than it used to be, people aren’t terrible - if people were more bad than good on average we’d still be hitting each other with clubs and going Conan on people. We aren’t stupid - it’s just that the stupid people are louder. And while the possibilities for great calamity exist, they are not guaranteed.
This may be more emergent than anything else, but trust your neighbors, treat people nicely, and you - yes individually each of you - need to start trying to make the world better.
Nobody is going to do it for us. I know what it’s like to feel bleak, trust me I do - but that’s just a call to action. It’s not “techno optimism” we need - it’s optimism, there are radical solutions that don’t use a single transistor.
I strongly doubt this attitude ever changed. It's always been
- first comments are dismissive gut reactions
- a bit later some nuanced/positive comments arrive
- depending on mood and luck, one or the other kind floats to the top
I’m specifically not going to post examples because that will invite the same old conversations to be rehashed, and any one example is useless anyways. People will claim confirmation bias and they may even be right.
However, none of that has anything to do with fusion tech, so I remain hopeful about that!
You can have a look! https://hackermoods.com/
(I only did a quick search)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/healthy-surf/
It turned out to be a lie and a scam, so now people are more skeptical.
Needless to say, the world doesn't exactly lend itself to positivity about yet another fucking startup promising you fusion powered dog feeders.
However when it comes to startups dealing with biology or physics you’re literally battling the laws of nature. You can’t just hustle out of it. I’ve been laughing at the type of biotech companies that get funded by SV (nano diamonds for cancer detection? Gut Micro biome sequencing?) and it’s looking like similar story with fusion.
In this case if you want real reasons why Helion looks suspect check out this good summary of all the issues with their approach and promise: https://youtu.be/3vUPhsFoniw
I won’t get my life against someone figuring out fusion in the next two decades but I wouldn’t bet money towards it either.
The criticisms raised in the video are fair, and also the first youtube comment has an interesting point:
> Why would he allow this reckless behavior? Why would he himself be standing right there with them next to the device while it was in operation? Then I watched the video more closely again - he never takes the grid potential higher than 6kV. There was no fusion and no x-rays that could penetrate the wall of the vessel or the glass window. It was a ruse. You need to have a potential difference on the grids of AT LEAST 30kV to even begin seeing any fusion reactions at all. He knows enough physics to be aware of all of this. He was therefore deliberately allowing them, and the credulous audience, to believe they were actually doing fusion reactions when nothing of the sort was happening at all - they were merely staring at a pretty glowing pink cool deuterium plasma in a bottle. I believe this to be very suspicious behavior from a CEO of a commercial nuclear fusion company.
Will every startup be successful? Of course not! But as a whole, technology continues to March forward and improve.
Yes, SV funds incredibly stupid biotechs. It also passes over really good biotechs. I think it's because honest founders are likely to do good work, and won't pitch with a $$ ask that doesn't make sense, and SV equity raises don't make sense for such capital intensive activities.
Helion can be a cool company with real tech, and this deal a marketing play, both possibly true.
This guideline needs to be revised: It is extremely easy to be a cynic compared to being an optimist, and the rewards for being such a cynic are mismatched, as per piloto_ciego's outline on the advantages that being a pessimist/cynic has over being an optimist.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35892166
The ever-increasing levels of dread coming from HN is a deadly combination of Neo-Luddism & doomerism that I'm an avid crucifier of.
Give us some substance. Dismissing critics as cynics doesn't tell me anything as a layman. A good exchange between a booster and a debunker adds something to the discussion.
Sure, but people here realize there is a difference between hand waving away the complexity of a potential software implementation and hand waving away how you are going to overcome the strong nuclear force.
How do you know? Have you seen it? The website itself is very sketchy, full of unrealistic claims and very vague explanations, it reads like a fanfic. Of course do people not buy this, it just smells too hard of scam.
There is certainly nothing about what Helion is willing to say about the technology that inspires confidence, and many glaring problems with their approach.
A healthy dose of skepticism is absolutely warranted.
"Microsoft's CEO Says No Raises for Full-Time Employees This Year" and then in the article [1]:
Satya Nadella, whose salary ballooned to $55 million last year, wrote to employees: “As a senior leadership team, we don’t take this decision lightly."
More and more of this, ad infinitum.
It's really hard to be excited about tech when your told your job is soon to be replaced with little recourse, "CDC data shows U.S. teen girls ‘in crisis’ with unprecedented rise in suicidal behavior", AI might kill humanity within 5 years etc.
I'm keeping an open mind about it all and the future, but there is also a thing called toxic positivity and I think this is what's creating the cynicism. There's not enough actual healthy critical debate and skepticism about tech and where it's taking us and it's role in causing the issues mentioned above. It's just rich people getting richer at the moment. So I can't say I blame people for being cynical, even though it's not very healthy or constructive.
[1] https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-no-raises-full-time-ceo-satya-...
Anyway, we have the math and experimental evidence now to show that fusion reactors work, and it's just a scaling problem. Sure, it may cost a billion dollars, but Elon Musk could pay that 100 times over. Not only that, but science has become distracted by expensive projects, to the point that it would pour another billion into a particle accelerator rather than fund 1000 research projects for $1 million each. So the main thing stopping us is that financial barrier between the status quo and scalable progress for everyone. And the power of choice in the hands of the wealthy to deny us the catalyst (money) to overcome that barrier.
I thought that life was a meritocracy until the Dot Bomb, Great Recession and concentration of wealth post-pandemic revealed that a few key players pull all of the strings. The amounts of money we're used to dealing with are largely meaningless. So our life's work at countless dead-end jobs is just a rounding error for the wealthy.
Cynical comments could be seen as the outward projection of the jealousy we feel having to go to a job every day instead of doing meaningful deep work on projects like this. And sure, fusion might deliver 1 cent/kWh electricity. But it only costs 10 cents now. So it will not trigger a material improvement in quality of life like we might expect. Meanwhile a fusion plant might make another billion dollars for its owner, which is a material improvement. This is how injustice works as the primary commodity throughout history, and why seemingly egalitarian tech like fusion could and should be looked at with healthy skepticism. Because the people pursuing it would do more for us by taking on the real challenges like ending subjugation and empowering others (through education, automation, UBI, etc), but for all their wealth, they're fixated on egocentric solutions which may never materialize.
In a world where the NRC does not exists maybe this makes sense, but that's (thankfully) not the world we have.
Clearly not yet.
In this thread people are arguing that the problem is too hard.
It does lately feel to me like a culture shift.
Meanwhile I’m using GitHub copilot to help me write code to uses some of openAIs products in my existing SaaS offering.
There is a constant stream of waymos driving past my house (with nobody in them) and I’m playing Skyrim in VR.
What technology are you talking about that didn’t pan out?
The numbers don’t seem out of this world to me, and it’s probably smarter money than what we are throwing at ITER given time to market.
By the time any actual work can be done at ITER, won't the technology have progressed beyond they design they are trying to test?
Helion isn’t vaporware.
(A la the scene in The Titanic: "You're money won't do me any good at the bottom of the ocean.")
Why not just say "Microsoft commits some money for us to research if Fusion will be possible in ways we can think of"?
I doubt that (unless you have some source for it which I missed, in which case sorry). It seems really unlikely that Helion would commit to a contract with penalty clauses if they didn't get money before they got fusion working.
Once (if) they have commercial fusion working they're golden, it will be trivial to raise money on excellent terms, and as such they won't need income from this contract. If this contract only gave them money at that point it wouldn't be worth very much to them.
If the contract gave them money now though... well right now it's hard to raise money. Taking a loan out could make sense. Getting the option to repay that loan by providing services could make sense. And what is a contract where you get paid now on the condition that you pay back more at the end (either in dollars in energy) if not a loan?
Besides, it's a loan which serves as great PR for both companies.
I doubt that if somebody can get fusion to work at a competitive price, scale, stability etc. that they would lack buyers.
Helion gets continued funding from Microsoft (maybe increasingly expensive at this stage as they scale the tech up and operationalize it). Microsoft gets good PR, a likely profitable investment, and eventually cheap electricity as a bonus.
I believe Sam Altman has most of his personal net worth (to tune of few hundred million) invested in Helion, and no doubt brokered this deal, so it can also be seen as a doubling-down by Microsoft of their relationship with and commitment to OpenAI/Altman.
Given that there is substantial demand for electricity, why would this be a concern?
But it's exactly the real scenario at play. However Microsoft is calling dibs on the energy that will be generated if fusion turns out to be not vaporware
Wasn't OpenAI one of those investments? That investment seems to have paid off.
Of course, fusion is far more clean than coal or gas and less environmentally destructive, aside from the mining of materials required, than say hydro power plants. But from what I can tell, the primary contributor to damaging the climate and environment is consumption, as a process. I currently see no end result where fusion does not drastically increase consumption, which means more use of non-clean materials and processes.
So I guess the question is: will the benefits of fusion offset the increase in consumption?
An analogous situation is electric cars. Electric cars, eventually over the lifetime of use (not immediately), save emissions over combustion engine cars. However, building a single mile of road is something like 10x or 100x (I forget the exact multiplier, but it's at least an order of magnitude and maybe greater) the emissions of a car (electric or combustion). So given the idea that electric cars actually bolster if not increase the love and use of cars, then that has a downstream effect of more roads being built and maintained, which is far more polluting than the cars themselves.
So you need to look at things as a system. I'm not arguing for anything but looking to understand things. I think fusion is obviously something we should do. What I'm wondering is how do we get people to realize it isn't a one-stop shop for staving off even more environmental change.
Once we have a viable alternative to hydrocarbons at scale, carbon/methane/ high GWP gases will need to be priced appropriately (e.g. taxed in a way to incentivize reduced consumption).
Therefore, short term the impact is going to be minimal/negligible. There are no plants yet, no approved plans to build any, no validated designs for any, etc. The first few plants are going to be very research/prototype focused and won't produce any impressive amounts of energy relative to what is needed and what is coming online every year in other forms. Best case, we'll see some early adoption in the late 2030's early 2040s with some proof of concept reactors coming online maybe in the next five to ten years already. Several companies are claiming that they are doing that; including Helion. That would be optimistic but it could happen. But I'd be surprised if it hits more than a few percent of global supply before middle of the century. And even that would be a lot.
Getting most coal, gas, and other fossil fuels offline by the 2050s would be the main challenge and a bit of a stretch goal according to some. I think fusion will be too late for to play a major role for that either way. If fusion starts working as advertised, it will likely be the second half of this century. It's main role will be to drive cost down and replace more expensive nuclear reactors.
I'm actually optimistic about the 2050 timeline here mainly because I think the fossil fuel industry is heading for an investment and cost cliff much faster than they are hoping and mainly because that is driven by the pricing of and investment in renewables. They are being to optimistic how long they can remain profitable and too pessimistic about how much further renewables are going to come down in cost. Once they hit that cliff, a lot of remaining supply will be deprecated and taken offline as fast as they can replace it with something vastly cheaper. They'll be bleeding cash all the way. Also, investment is ramping up and shifting from one to the other faster than they hope. So, I take most current projections that seem overly pessimistic and conservative with a grain of salt.
Either way fusion won't be that important for getting rid of fossil fuels. But if it works and is cheap enough there will be a role for it beyond the 2050 timeline.
By then, we should be pretty far done tackling climate change. Mostly via renewables and maybe a bit of nuclear here and there and lots of cheap and scalable storage. There are so many proven battery chemistries and other solutions for this now that I consider that as pretty much guaranteed to happen. A mix of short term, mid term, and long term storage coming online by the tens of twh per year in a few decades. The grid will be very different than it is today with lots of private and de-centralized generation (almost exclusively renewables) and storage, micro grids, etc.
Assuming the financial penalties are a significant fraction (i.e they are, say, greater than 5%) of the agreement value, I would interpret it as a more serious / confident commitment and expression of intent and viability, than just a contract that’s hope + way to support.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/10/23717332/microsoft-nuclea...
Elsewhere, i saw that Helion already raised billions.
So what's in it for Helion? If they can make it happen, and build a sustained fusion system, they will surely be able to sell the energy/systems once ready, and don't really need to sell it at discounted rates now. I could imagine a deal with Microsoft is good for marketing, but seems way too soon for that isn't it?
United will purchase 15 of Boom’s ‘Overture’ airliners, once Overture meets United’s demanding safety, operating and sustainability requirements, with an option for 35 more aircraft. Slated to carry passengers in 2029, the net-zero carbon aircraft will fly on 100% sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).
Let me tell you where the problem is.
If there is no PENALTY for United or Microsoft to get out of the deal, and/or no upfront payment, it's simply a completely empty statement.
Let me give you an example.
Here, on HN, today, I solemnly declare that I am available to sign a deal with Helion to purchase 50 MW of power generation, for 10 years, generated by their 1st power plant, starting in 2028.
We can pre agree on the price, yes. Let's say $40 per MWh [1]. This is 50 MW * 24 * 365 = 438,000 MWh / year, or ~$16M/year. (correct me if this math is completely wrong). Fantastic!
Oh, by the way: nothing will happen to me if I walk away from this deal. I am not giving any upfront payment. Nothing. Just my word.
See you in 2028. Or not.
p.s. happy to be proven wrong, if Microsoft of Helion (or Boom) are kind enough to provide more details about this "agreement".
Besides this, I wish them all the best. Just don't try to sell me this PR BS, please.
[0]: https://boomsupersonic.com/united
[1]: https://www.nuenergen.com/solutions/smart-grid/price-point
It probably has something to do with co-location at a Microsoft Azure data center, several of which or being permitted or under construction in Washington State.
I am not totally fond of how that seems to work out, as they are offsetting production elsewhere, and the grid there could already be cleaner than where they are consuming. But perhaps somewhere along the way things like that are accounted for?
Not a take over, but likely an investment (or planned series of investments) in Helion by Microsoft that'll give them an ownership stake and help fund Helion's continued development up to and including the pilot plant whose output Microsoft will be buying. Quite similar to Microsoft's investment in OpenAI... investor + customer + good P-R.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/05/helion-series-e/?guccounte...
One positive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bDXXWQxK38
One critical: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vUPhsFoniw
Worst case - a nice bit of PR for Fusion, Helion and MS.
Best case - in a few years provides funds to help Helion rapidly scale up, MS - assuming exclusivity - with increasingly low-cost climate-friendly electricity for their data centres that their competitors cannot access. Carbon capture becomes something other than an oil industry excuse, and the human race's bacon is saved.
Who knows what they will come up next!