> I'm not an expert on the subject, but is there an obvious bottleneck that would prevent Helion from manufacturing an arbitrarily large number of generators that scales with demand?
No, nothing is obvious to anyone outside the company.
> I'd expect that they probably wouldn't focus on copying Orion exactly,
Hopefully their next model will come out before another billion dollars of investment goes down the drain.
> Opex also seems like a non-issue to me, given that the machines will be automated, the fuel will be cheap,
Yes, that could happen, but what it really means is that we don't have any idea what the opex is.
> My understanding is that exporting might not be a huge hurdle to get a green light for due to the low proliferation concerns,
I think the bigger concern there would be whether China would import it.
> But I also don't see a reason why the US couldn't be a highly lucrative market for Helion,
Well, the US hasn't been a highly lucrative market for power plants for 50 years. Maybe the advent of new, radically cheaper technology could change that, but I suspect it won't; the advent of new, radically cheaper energy in the late 18th century didn't turn China or Japan into a highly lucrative market for power plants, for essentially social or political rather than technical and economic reasons.
> We can't really make an apples-to-apples comparison between a mature technology in active high-volume production and a speculative future technology, but the latter in this case does seem to me to have a higher ceiling on its potential value over the long run.
Yes, I agree. But we weren't talking about the long run, but rather about currently existing companies that need to return money to their investors in the next ten or twenty years. Breakthroughs do happen, but rarely.
Yeah, there are lots of unknowns and valid reasons to be pessimistic or optimistic. I lean toward cautious optimism based on the information that is available, but of course no one knows the future until it happens.
Just to clarify, Orion is one site, not a particular generator model. Orion working would be the green light to build and ship more generators, not a sign that they'd need to go back to the drawing board on an "Orion v2".
re: opex, we do have some idea of what it will be. We know that deuterium is cheap, we know that fusion produces low waste, we know that extensive safety protocols to protect against meltdown are not required, we know that preventing theft of fissile materials is not a security concern, and we know that these machines are substantially automated. We may not have precise balance sheets, but it's also not entirely opaque or mysterious.
I'm not sure the examples of historical China and Japan apply. They didn't invent coal power and then decide not to use it (although Japan was nevertheless fairly quick to industrialize). Fusion as of now seems likely to reach commercialization first in the US, and there's currently a lot of demand for power here with insufficient supply to meet projected growth. It's a very different market from when we were actively shipping our high-power-consumption industries overseas.
I don't agree that breakthroughs happen "rarely". I mean, we wouldn't be here in this thread without the massive breakthrough of useful LLMs, which were considered sci-fi before ChatGPT's release less than three years ago; fusion had the breakthrough of ignition at NIF just a few days after that; and we're only in the position of considering solar and batteries as a competitive energy source due to many small breakthroughs that have occurred in recent history. Breakthroughs happen all the time, but we quickly forget their significance and let them become boring.
No, nothing is obvious to anyone outside the company.
> I'd expect that they probably wouldn't focus on copying Orion exactly,
Hopefully their next model will come out before another billion dollars of investment goes down the drain.
> Opex also seems like a non-issue to me, given that the machines will be automated, the fuel will be cheap,
Yes, that could happen, but what it really means is that we don't have any idea what the opex is.
> My understanding is that exporting might not be a huge hurdle to get a green light for due to the low proliferation concerns,
I think the bigger concern there would be whether China would import it.
> But I also don't see a reason why the US couldn't be a highly lucrative market for Helion,
Well, the US hasn't been a highly lucrative market for power plants for 50 years. Maybe the advent of new, radically cheaper technology could change that, but I suspect it won't; the advent of new, radically cheaper energy in the late 18th century didn't turn China or Japan into a highly lucrative market for power plants, for essentially social or political rather than technical and economic reasons.
> We can't really make an apples-to-apples comparison between a mature technology in active high-volume production and a speculative future technology, but the latter in this case does seem to me to have a higher ceiling on its potential value over the long run.
Yes, I agree. But we weren't talking about the long run, but rather about currently existing companies that need to return money to their investors in the next ten or twenty years. Breakthroughs do happen, but rarely.