It may be a valid criticism today, but no one will be complaining about AI's environmental impact after those first few plants go live and mass production begins within the next decade. Knock on wood.
But solar energy is.
Helion's strategy is to directly convert the hot plasma's expansion into electrical energy by, basically, pushing against a powerful magnetic field. This is potentially higher efficiency than steam engines (because it's working at a higher temperature) and potentially higher power density and reliability. So it could at least theoretically get to be cheaper than steam engines. But I think it's more likely to be far more expensive for the next several decades.
If Helion delivers Orion on anywhere close to the target timeline, it seems like they'd be primed to kick off mass production and start shipping units all over the country with minimal regulatory hurdles. With sufficiently high productive capacity, it would effectively make all other forms of power generation obsolete at utility scale. Solar would still great for small/decentralized use cases, but there wouldn't be as much reason for a power company to build new solar plants if they had the option to fill the same real estate with a bunch of Helion machines.
That being said, I'm not not optimistic about steam-based fusion power. It would be less revolutionary, but from what I understand would still be a huge advancement. My read is that it would effectively obsolete fission power and plausibly fossil fuel power as well, if not also grid-scale renewables. It would be like having SMRs with higher efficiency and no major proliferation or meltdown concerns that amplify costs. High neutron output and steam conversion add costs and complexity, but if CFS panned out and Helion didn't, I'd hardly turn my nose at that.
I could also see a world where multiple forms of fusion power pan out, and it turns out to be economical for Helion to sell tritium to other vendors like CFS rather than storing it for 12 years until it decays to He3. Maybe we'd even have colocated plants in a certain ratio where Helion provides on-site tritium generation in the exact volume needed for a D-T reactor.
Helion's latest funding round was US$425 million, bringing total funding to over a billion, on a US$5 billion valuation. To give that money back to their investors, assuming a 40% profit margin, they'd need to sell something like 100 copies of Orion at US$30 million each, totaling 5 gigawatts. For the investors to consider them successful, it would need to be more like 2000 copies of Orion, totaling 100 gigawatts.
That's a completely plausible market size (although it's not just "all over the country", because the country they're in only has 1161 GW of generation capacity and is barely building any), so their NRE costs to date are not an impossible burden. It really depends on four things:
1. Can they hit such a low price target as US$30 million per 50-megawatt power plant? Can they ship anything for US$30 million a pop?
2. Will they be allowed to sell to China, where the customers are?
3. Will solar energy get cheaper still, forcing them to an even lower price point?
4. Will opex of the resulting reactors be manageable?
