David Kirtley: prediction

Transcript context

…So at Helion, we’ve built seven systems. The first six were a series of prototypes that we built end to end that were focused on scaling the process of making these field-reversed configurations, compressing them to thermonuclear fusion conditions, and demonstrating that you can do fusion and then increasing the scale, increasing the temperature and the energy. The very first ones were named after beer. Actually, the most successful was the Inductive Plasmoid Accelerator, the IPA. And it was the first system that showed that the team could make these FRCs and hold onto them and understand some of the stability criteria, the heating criteria. And then we started increasing the field. Now, okay, great, we can hold onto one of these FRCs. We know how long and how to make them, but now can we squeeze on them and start doing fusion? Increasing in pressure and temperature. What we noticed is, you know, machine after machine, we always used Starbucks. We were in Redmond at the time, Redmond, Washington, and Starbucks cups sitting on top of the machine as the, this is the scale. They were too small to have a human really in the picture all the time, so the Starbucks cup was enough. And so then we switched to Tall, Grande, Venti. And then the biggest, Trenta, was the biggest system that came online in 2020. That was a system that showed 100 million degrees and was the first system that did deuterium and helium-3 fusion. In fact, as far as we know, the only bulk deuterium-helium-3 fusion that has been done and also showed the 100-million-degree fusion temperatures from an FRC. And throughout that time, the earliest work was government funded, government grants, SBIRs and other types of government grants. And actually the team involved, myself and the rest of the founding team, were really good at winning government programs, doing fundamental science, but moving very quickly. And there’s a lot of ways to think about how to iterate and how to build quickly. I want to talk about the teams first, and then we can talk about some of the technology. It uses to do that, but a lot of it is thinking about if your goal is to get the product, electricity, out to the world as soon as possible, then you should be looking at everything you do through that lens. And so that’s thinking about the materials you choose. You want to, at every turn, choose commonly available materials. If you have to wait for a supply chain for an ultra-rare material, it’s going to take you a lot more time. And so do everything you can to engineer a system that uses simple aluminum alloys, simple copper alloys. And if you have to use tungsten, and maybe you have to use tungsten in some of your systems, which is a hard-to-find alloy, make sure you’re using commonly available thicknesses of tungsten sheet. ys. And if you have to use tungsten, and maybe you have to use tungsten in some of your systems, which is a hard-to-find alloy, make sure you’re using commonly available thicknesses of tungsten sheet. You know, those kinds of engineering analyses and thought processes at every step. And that’s how we built these systems, from IPA to Venti up to Trenta, was always looking at how do we build systems that are easy to build and mass-produced? Because this is the other thing that I don’t know that early in my career I’d have predicted, is that by making a hundred of a thing, you can actually make it faster than if you go make one of a thing. And that’s because when you look at our fusion systems, we talked about these big magnets, and you could build one giant, big, complex, hard-to-make magnet that’s heavy and you have to move it around with a crane and requires very complex machining by ultra-rare CNCs, or you could then make that out of a composite of 100 smaller magnets. Each of those magnets now can be made on a simple machine. Each of these magnets can be picked up by a human, they’re light enough. They can be made and manufactured and mass-produced, and that’s what we did. And that was our whole design philosophy on these machines is, at every turn, how do we go faster? A classic one that still to this day I push the team on is, again, thinking about how do you move fast, eBay. We buy, and I don’t know that I’ve ever said this publicly… Oh boy, here we go. This is great.…

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