people have been asking me to look at the private company helion energy ever since it was profiled by a YouTube channel called real engineering I'm not sure whether I can convince anyone of anything since I only have a bunch of boring charts and no fancy 3D Graphics so there we go besides I already discussed many of the challenges in my technical how Fusion Works Series so I will pull some clips out of there in that video real engineering claimed that helion Energy's Trenta machine is quote a closely guarded secret for years end quote even though
the company have put up results on their own YouTube channel and reported them to the public agencies that they were originally funded by helion is reportedly using the field reverse configuration or FRC approach to Fusion FRC machines have been built extensively since the 1960s so this is absolutely nothing new even though CEO David kirtley said quote it's a real unique version of Fusion fuel that helion and very few others do end quote the first challenge for helion Is that they plan on using the deuterium helium-3 reaction this is a much less reactive fuel mix than
deuterium tritium which is the reaction in most other approaches as I said previously suppose we achieved good power output from a deuterium tritium reactor the tritium is a problem because it's hard to make and it gives off neutrons so we decide to replace the fuel with a deuterium helium-3 mix instead this will absolutely clobber our power output when running at the same temperatures before we could claw back some of that power if we up the temperature or density but of course this increases the physics and Engineering challenges note that in this case some neutrons will
still be produced as deuterium nuclei would fuse with each other in this plot on the x-axis is the temperature in millions of degrees and on the y-axis is the reactivity I assumed that any commercial reactor would Target at least 300 million degrees but helium seems to be satisfied to have reached 100 million at this temperature they are 1 000 times less reactive than they could be if they went with a tritium option or 5000 times less reactive than machine like jet at its operational temperatures it is therefore extremely doubtful to me that they will ever
generate energy gain but hey maybe venture capitalist funding gives you some sort of magic that will overcome this lower reactivity somehow I did have a chuckle at how real engineering is wrong in their explanation of neutrons in the deuterium tritium reaction as if breeding tritium somehow loses the energy carried by the neutron also the wording implying the tokamax can only use deuterium tritium was wrong they could and sometimes do have helium-3 Fusion it's just that the plan in future is to use tritium for the previously stated reactivity reasons the other problem with deuterium helium-3 is
the extreme amount of radiation which would be put out now granted this reaction itself doesn't involve any radioactive materials whatsoever however if you have a mix of these two isotopes at thermonuclear temperatures pairs of deuterium nuclei will react with themselves and release neutrons this is a fact to which the real engineering video completely ignores as if you could have a Stern talk to the deuterium nuclei and order them to only react with helium and not with each other statistically the chance that two deuteriums react is half of deuterium helium-3 and only half of the former
reactions will produce a neutron directly this means at equal reactivity one Neutron is released for every four deuterium helium-3 reactions however if you look back at the plot I showed before at 100 million degrees the deuterium deuterium reactivity is seven times higher than deuterium helium-3 you are therefore going to get a lot of neutrons when trying to actually produce electrical power a neutron is about 10 times more deadly than a similar gamma ray and unlike gamma rays the neutrons will make other things radioactive after the machine is Switched Off as I said previously you must
physically have roughly a meter of dense material around your Fusion reactor because the neutrons are not charged they are not slowed down unless they interact with a nucleus directly you must therefore put enough atoms in their way to stop them when a neutron is absorbed by any element other than lithium or beryllium it will typically turn the stable nucleus into a heavier radioactive one if the phosphorus in your DNA absorbs a neutron it will turn into an unstable isotope which will then Decay by means of beta emission and become a sulfur atom I hope I
don't need to say this but both of these things are very bad for your DNA helium do not have a meter of solid material around their reactor to attenuate neutrons if the Trenton machine as pictured were to be producing power plant levels of energy it would be like the exploded Chernobyl reactor number four this problem is absolutely non-negotiable if you are producing Fusion Energy from deuterium helium-3 you are generating a lot of corresponding neutrons and making everything Radioactive even at higher plasma temperatures where the balance of these two reactions I talked about is more favorable
towards the helium one you would still be at dangerous Neutron levels even if everything goes as planned they will need a nuclear-rated facility radiation shielding a tritium separation plant which at ETA is probably about the size of helion's entire building and a lot of other infrastructure and what about that Innovative way they generate electricity from the plasma itself well as I said previously the problem is that accelerating charges emit photons by a process called bramstralin or breaking radiation in German this is not noticeable for the kind of speeds we experience in everyday life but it
is significant for the kind of motion required for nuclear reactions a plasma is constantly radiating away energy by bramstral with everything from radio waves to x-rays once they are omitted that the photons usually though not always leave the plasma and energy is lost so again quite a bit of the energy will be lost as heat and the energy gain in the plasma reaction itself would have to be large to compensate I'm also skeptical about their claim that particle gyro radii are larger than predicted by Theory there have been many plasma physics experiments and observations which
confirm the size of the gyro radius more likely they are seeing losses due to particle drifts and turbulence which I have described in another video I have reservations about exactly how they know the plasma conditions they have achieved a casual check doesn't show many actual peer-reviewed papers by them just so you know any publicly funded experiment spends a lot of time and effort debating designing documenting and running the Diagnostics which determine plasma properties I guess you have to combine therapy with Diagnostics to get the really big bucks though anyway that was just me complaining helium
are totally going to prove me wrong in the future space year 2021 when they prove Commercial Energy gain in a 50 megawatt system I know because it says so in this totally uncritical article [Music]
