Le projet de fusion USA de Helion

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Le projet de fusion USA de Helion

Message par energy_isere » 26 nov. 2021, 14:36

Qu'est-ce que la fusion nucléaire à l’hélium 3, sur laquelle planche la start-up américaine Helion ?

L’hélium 3, voici l’ingrédient miracle que prévoit d’utiliser la start-up américaine Helion Energy, qui a levé 440 millions d’euros début novembre, afin de construire un démonstrateur de fusion nucléaire d’ici à 2024. Un programme ambitieux. Nombre de défis technologiques subsistent.

Nathan Mann 26 Novembre 2021 Usine Nouvelle

Les sommes mises sur la table ont fait l’effet d’un choc. Le 5 novembre, la discrète start-up américaine Helion Energy a annoncé une levée de fonds monstre, à hauteur de 500 millions de dollars (à peu près 440 millions d’euros) pour développer son projet de réacteur basé sur la fusion nucléaire à l’hélium 3, dont elle promet un démonstrateur dès 2024. Mieux, les mêmes investisseurs – menés par le prestigieux cofondateur d’OpenAI et ancien président du Y Combinator Sam Altman – se sont déjà engagés à débourser 1,7 milliard de dollars supplémentaires (environ 1,5 milliard d’euros) si certaines étapes prédéfinies, mais non dévoilées, sont atteintes.

[...abonnés]
https://www.usinenouvelle.com/editorial ... n.N1162397
La start-up Helion promet une fusion efficace (et un carburant miraculeux) dès 2024
Le vrai graal énergétique pourrait être l'hélium 3.
Repéré par Thomas Burgel sur New Atlas

09/11/2021 Korii

La fusion, cet insaisissable graal énergétique propre et infini dont l'avenir environnemental de la planète pourrait dépendre, n'a jamais semblé si proche. Du moins, à en croire la start-up américaine Helion: annonçant une importante levée de fonds, elle a déclaré être en mesure d'atteindre une production nette d'électricité dès 2024.

Si les expériences scientifiques comme ITER avancent à leur rythme de projet international, les plus petites structures cherchant à exploiter le principe de la fusion nucléaire à des fins commerciales sont nombreuses, et parfois prometteuses. En juillet 2021, Helion annonçait déjà avoir réussi à atteindre 100 millions de degrés Celsius avec son prototype de réacteur de sixième génération, nommé Trenta.

C'est sur cette base que la jeune pousse a levé 500 millions de dollars (430 millions d'euros) auprès d'investisseurs de renom tels Sam Altman, patron d'Open AI et de Y Combinator, le co-fondateur de Facebook Dustin Moskovitz, le fonds d'investissement de Peter Thiel, Mithril Capital, ou celui de l'ex-patron d'eBay Jeff Skoll, Capricorn Investment Group.

Cette manne servira à la construction d'un réacteur de septième génération, nommé Polaris: si celui-ci fonctionne comme prévu et atteint les divers objectifs qui lui sont fixés, Helion pourrait toucher 1,7 milliard de dollars de plus pour financer son aventure.

Hélium 3

Comme l'explique New Atlas, l'approche de la fusion par Helion est originale. Plutôt que d'essayer de produire de l'électricité en faisant tourner des turbines grâce à la chaleur générée par la réaction au cœur d'un tokamak, elle se sert du phénomène électromagnétique se produisant lorsque le plasma constitué d'atomes de deutérium et d'hélium 3, les carburants de son choix, finissent par se mêler sous la pression et après une forte accélération.

Si Trenta est capable d'effectuer une pulsion de fusion toutes les dix minutes, Helion promet que Polaris pourra le faire toutes les soixante secondes, ce qui devrait permettre au réacteur expérimental de produire plus d'électricité qu'il n'en consomme, et ce dès 2024. Nous sommes encore loin de l'abondance, mais ce serait une première au monde.

Mais comme le précise également New Atlas, cette production d'électricité n'est pas le but premier d'Helion. En fracassant des atomes de deutérium, sa machine est surtout conçue pour produire en masse de l'hélium 3, un carburant miraculeux dont, est-il expliqué par le site, «15 à 20 tonnes suffiraient pour alimenter pour un an chaque foyer américain».

L'idée, à terme, n'est pas de bâtir de vastes installations, mais de réussir à concevoir et construire de nombreux petits réacteurs, de la taille d'un container, capables chacun de produire suffisamment d'hélium 3 pour alimenter quelques milliers de foyers –ou de très voraces data centers, qui pourraient constituer ses premiers clients.

Le tout, promet encore Helion, se fera sans aucun impact pour l'environnement et, surtout, à un prix qu'elle annonce record: environ 10 dollars par MWh.

Nous sommes certes encore loin de cette vision fantasmatique. Notons en outre que le caractère commercial de la jeune firme, en concurrence notamment avec le projet SPARC du MIT et de Commonwealth Fusion Systems, la pousse naturellement à promettre monts et merveilles pour attirer les capitaux. Reste que l'avenir que dessine Helion est pour le moins séduisant.
https://korii.slate.fr/tech/energie-fus ... ur-polaris

Vision fantasmatique en effet. 2024 c'est demain ......

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Re: Le projet de fusion USA de Helion

Message par energy_isere » 26 nov. 2021, 14:43

en Anglais dans Forbes.
Helion Energy Raises $500 Million On The Fusion Power Of Stars

James Conca Nov 9, 2021

Helion, a clean energy company that seeks to usher in a new era of plentiful, zero-carbon electricity from fusion, just announced the close of its Series E raise of $500 million. The round was led by Sam Altman, whose involvement in the company as investor and chairman dates back to 2015. Existing investors, including Dustin Moskovitz, Mithril Capital and Capricorn Investment Group also participated in the round. The funding includes the opportunity for an additional $1.7 billion dollars tied to Helion reaching key performance milestones.

The capital will be used to complete the construction of Polaris, Helion’s seventh generation fusion generator, the world’s first fusion electricity demonstration facility. Building on the achievements of Helion’s pulsed non-ignition fusion technology and the performance of its six predecessors, Polaris is expected to be the first fusion device capable of demonstrating net electricity production. Helion plans to reach this milestone in 2024, paving the way for future fusion power plants.

“This funding ensures that Helion will be the first organization to generate electricity from fusion,” said Dr. David Kirtley, Founder and CEO of Helion Energy. "Our 6th prototype demonstrated that we can reach this pivotal milestone. In just a few years we will show that the world can count on fusion to be the zero-carbon energy source that we desperately need."

Earlier this year, Helion became the first private fusion company to heat a fusion plasma to 100,000,000°C, a critical milestone on the path to commercial electricity from fusion. This was followed by Helion breaking ground in July 2021 for the Polaris facility in Everett, Washington, an event in which Helion’s leadership, Governor Jay Inslee and other Washington state elected officials participated.

“I’m delighted to be investing more in Helion, which is by far the most promising approach to fusion I’ve ever seen,” said Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and former President of Y Combinator, who now serves as Helion’s executive chairman. “With a tiny fraction of the money spent on other fusion efforts, and the culture of a startup, this team has a clear path to net electricity. If Helion is successful, we can avert climate disaster and provide a much better quality of life for people.”

Image

Fusion is the process of building up simple atoms into larger more complex ones, in most cases fusing hydrogen into helium. It releases a lot of energy, and occurs every day in our Sun as well as almost every other star in the Universe. The trick for humans is to harness it on Earth for producing clean abundant energy.

Traditional solar arrays capture the Sun’s fusion energy after it’s worked its way from the core to the surface and then traveled through 93 million miles of space and become hopelessly dispersed. Helion’s fusion energy will only travel a few feet before it’s captured.

Fusion is the opposite of fission, which is the process of breaking apart atoms. Both release energy under the right conditions. For fission, the bigger the atom, the more energy is released. For fusion, the opposite is true - the smaller the atoms used, the more energy that is released.

For this reason, most efforts towards fusion concentrate on fusing hydrogen or helium, the smallest of atoms, to release the most energy. Helion fuses deuterium (hydrogen-2) and helion (helium-3) to produce helium-4 (the common isotope of He) and a proton, with an energy of over 18 million electron volts:

2H + 3He → 4He + 1p 18.4 MeV

The appeal of 3He fusion stems from the aneutronic nature of its reaction products, that is, the fusion of 3He atoms releases large amounts of energy without releasing neutrons which can cause some of the surrounding materials to become radioactive. There are some minor side reactions, that can produce tritium (3H) and a neutron, but the resulting waste is low level and quite tiny.

3He itself is non-radioactive. The lone high-energy by-product, the proton, can be contained by means of electric and magnetic fields. The momentum energy of this proton (created in the fusion process) will interact with the containing electromagnetic field, resulting in direct net electricity generation. Potential conversion efficiencies of 95% may be possible, as there is no need to convert the proton energy to heat in order to drive a turbine, alhough Helion estimates that realistic restrictions on physical expansion ratio and resistive circuit elements limit practical efficiencies to 85%.

The 18.4 MeV corresponds to about 493 MWh for every three grams or so of 3He. 52.5 kilograms of 3He would produce about the same power as a traditional 1,000 MW power plant. The amount of 3He fuel needed to power the residential sector of America would be about 20 tons per year.

But 3He is not abundant on Earth and we have been planning on getting it from the Moon, at great cost.

Instead, Helion’s approach is to make their own 3He by creating deuterium-deuterium fusion that creates 3He + a neutron and 3H + a proton. They separate the 3He for use as fusion fuel and store the 3H long enough for it to decay to 3He, which occurs in 12 years.

One of the other challenges of fusion is the temperature required to produce significant amounts of power from an ionized gas (plasma). Depending on the type of fusion, the temperatures are in the millions of degrees.

Think of the Sun.

These high-temperatures are largely a non-negotiable requirement for fusion because at lower temperatures, no matter how much fuel you put into the reactor, the amount of fusion power produced will be vanishingly small simply because fusion reactions are not likely to occur at lower temperatures. So Helion’s success at heating their fusion plasma to 100,000,000°C is a major achievement.

There is a lot of misunderstanding about the set-up of fusion reactors. One might think that a million-degree core would be a real hazard if something went wrong. But even at a million degrees, the material in the core doesn’t even have the mass of a dollar bill, so there is no danger from this temperature even if something does go wrong.

And unlike fission reactors, there is no decay heat since there is little radioactivity in the fuel. There is no solid fuel or core to melt down. It’s just hydrogen and helium.

Helion’s fusion does not produce any long-lived radioactive waste. The process can produce tritium, which is commonly used in commercial applications such as wristwatches and exit signs. Tritium’s half-life is only 12 years and poses no human health or environmental hazard.

And as tritium decays, it turns into 3He, which Helion uses as fusion fuel, thus recycling 100% of its byproduct materials over time.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca ... 26f5c66ce8

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Re: Le projet de fusion USA de Helion

Message par alga » 27 nov. 2021, 14:09

Merci pour l'article. En ce passant de caloporteur et donc de turbine (mais j'ai pas bien compris comment) cette solution pourrait être facilement mise en œuvre dans l'espace, sur la Lune, Mars où tout autres corps céleste.

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Re: Le projet de fusion USA de Helion

Message par energy_isere » 13 mai 2023, 11:00

Microsoft to buy power from Helion fusion plant

11 May 2023

Global technology company Microsoft has signed an agreement with fusion energy developer Helion Energy for the provision of electricity from its first fusion power plant. Constellation Energy will serve as the power marketer and will manage transmission for the project.

Helion is developing a cost-effective, zero-carbon electrical power plant using its patented pulsed, non-ignition fusion technology. Helion says its fusion power plant will provide "flexible, scalable, baseload power that is affordable, providing the world a new path to full decarbonisation of electricity generation".

It says its first power plant is expected to be online by 2028 and will target power generation of 50 MWe or greater after a one-year ramp up period.

The company noted the planned operational date for this first of its kind facility is "significantly sooner than typical projections for deployment of commercial fusion power".

Helion says its approach to fusion energy differs in three main ways from other approaches. Firstly, it uses a pulsed fusion system, which helps overcome the hardest physics challenges, keeps its fusion device smaller than other approaches, and allows it to adjust the power output based on need. Secondly, its system is built to directly recover electricity, while other fusion systems heat water to create steam to turn a turbine which loses a lot of energy in the process. Thirdly, it uses deuterium and helium-3 as fuel, which helps keep its system small and efficient.

The company has previously built six working prototypes and in June 2021 became the first private fusion company to reach 100-million-degree plasma temperatures with its sixth fusion generator prototype, Trenta. Helion is currently building its seventh prototype, Polaris, in Everett, Washington, which it expects will demonstrate the ability to produce electricity in 2024.

"This collaboration represents a significant milestone for Helion and the fusion industry as a whole," said Helion CEO David Kirtley. "We are grateful for the support of a visionary company like Microsoft. We still have a lot of work to do, but we are confident in our ability to deliver the world's first fusion power facility."

"We are optimistic that fusion energy can be an important technology to help the world transition to clean energy," said Brad Smith, Vice Chair and President at Microsoft, which aims to be carbon-negative by 2030. "Helion's announcement supports our own long-term clean energy goals and will advance the market to establish a new, efficient method for bringing more clean energy to the grid, faster."

"Constellation is committed to innovation and supporting next-generation clean energy technologies to combat the climate crisis, and fusion would be a game-changer," said Constellation Chief Commercial Officer Jim McHugh. "Combined with our hourly carbon-free energy matching solution, Helion and Microsoft are helping to build a future where carbon-free energy is the standard."

In March 2022, Constellation announced a five-year collaboration with Microsoft on the development of an energy matching technology to match a customer's power needs with local carbon-free energy sources. The real-time, data-driven carbon accounting solution will use hour-by-hour regional tracking giving customers clearer and more accurate data on their emissions impact and help to achieve zero-carbon goals, the company said. In addition, Microsoft will purchase a portion of its clean energy supply from Constellation over five years.

In September last year, Microsoft Canada said it would procure Clean Energy Credits sourced from Ontario Power Generation's carbon-free hydro and nuclear assets as part of Microsoft's efforts to power its datacentres with carbon-free energy. The strategic partnership, which is aimed at tackling climate change and driving sustainable growth across Ontario, will see the two companies work together on a series of initiatives focused on delivering innovative clean energy solutions and digital skilling programmes.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Arti ... sion-plant

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Re: Le projet de fusion USA de Helion

Message par energy_isere » 16 mai 2023, 09:10

Tiens, Sam Altman de OpenAI a investi 375 millions de dollars dans Helion

source : https://www.boursorama.com/actualite-ec ... 42bf169891

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