the big question is as to whether fusion is 20 years off as ususal or 5 years off.
One fusion company, Helion has signed a purchase power agreement with microsoft to provide one of their facilities in Washington state with electricity from their fusion plant for .01@kwh. That contract stipulates the due date as 2028
They might fail. but the fact that the contract was signed suggests high confidence in that the will succeed in relatively short order.
I didn’t see any of that in this article. The guy who wrote didn’t seem to know. I think he’s from the other side of the pond.
“One fusion company, Helion has signed a purchase power agreement with microsoft to provide one of their facilities in Washington state with electricity from their fusion plant for .01@kwh. That contract stipulates the due date as 2028”
No one in the media has seen the contract and Helion has not released details. $0.01 is a target but they would be losing money at that price.
NRC hasno licensing process for fusion reactors. Even under the NRC Standard Nuclear Plant licensing it still takes years to get the licenses.
If they could produce cheap electricity there is a ready market for that at higher prices without having a contact that could penalize them if they fail to deliver.
It seems to me that this type of contact would only be negotiated if Microsoft invested in the company.
I happened to be in Washington State in May of this year, and stopped at a Mexican restaurant/tequila bar.
there was a large group of people who had taken over the bar They were really excited and partying really hard, probably ran up a 10k + bar tab.
anyway I thought they were a strange group of people from the girls with multi colored hair, guys with guages, but super expensive clothes, to the conservatively dressed engineering types.
Being nosey I listened while trying to figure out who they were and what company they worked for.
I heard things like magnetic field plasma compression helium 3 deuterium.
I saw a bunch of them go outside for a smoke break so I decided to ask them wtf.
I walked up to them and said did you know there is a working fusion generator only about 8 light minutes away (they must have thought I said 8 miles) as their mouths all dropped open.
Turns out they were from Helion and while they would not tell me why they were celebrating I think I have a pretty good idea.
they did tell me how their stuff worked and how it was tech spun off from the U of W and how they were going to change the world.
I got the feeling that they believed it