I've been following Rossi and the Ecat for years now. Its a fraud.

If anyone cares I can talk more - I'm a physicist working on nuclear fusion energy. Basically there is no model for how it works. His demos are very sketchy and he has be promising to be ready to deliver a working system any day now for ~10 years.

Its an extension of the cold fusion stuff - which wasn't (originally) a fraud, just a mistake.

I guess there's nothing like a potential source of "free unlimited energy" to reel in foolish investors.

I guess there's nothing like a potential source of "free unlimited energy" to reel in foolish investors.

this company is actually doing something and on the way to fusion it is developing very useful money producing technologies
https://www.shinefusion.com/about/company
they have a process to convert electrical energy into neutrons that can be used for making medical isotopes and neutron imaging systems. to do things like look at high energy explosive systems like automobile airbag inflators to see if the propellant has voids etc inside a metal container.

I know about them. The problem is that sub-breakeven fusion is 10X-100X less efficient than spallation as a neutron source. Until you reach engineering breakeven its not useful. I looked at this a couple of years back, thinking about a sub-breakeven fusion reactor as a neutron source ADS (accelerator driven sub-critical reactors) but the numbers aren't even close to working.

The other problem is that D-T fusion is about 30X easier (in terms of Lawson triple product) than D-D, but to make the Tritium you need lots of neutrons - its barely doable even in an above-breakeven reactor, and again the numbers don't work for sub critical

https://www.fusionindustryassociation.o ... t/members/ gives list of fusion companies.

IMHO Commonwealth and Helion have some chance of success. The other tokamaks and stellarators maybe. The rest don't seem to have a clear path to economic breakeven and in most cases not even to scientific breakeven. Most are just rehashing old 1970s ideas that were demonstrated back then to not be viable.

I really like fusion and I want it to succeed - but its incredibly difficult.

Josef, what's the industry response to sourcing the tritium? I'm not in the energy space, so it's my very uneducated understanding that there is insufficient tritium available to seed a scalable fusion source (they would be self-sustaining with a Li breeder blanket after startup), while tritium sources are declining as nuclear reactors are shuttered. Basically it was explained to me once that a D-T reactor is unlikely because the feedstock to start one doesn't exist, but that might have been a dramatic overreaction.

I've had some customers in the fusion space who say it "has always been 10 years away for the past half a century" but seem confident that might actually be legitimate now within a decade.

IMO, accurately predicting technical progress 10 years into the future is a lot like predicting the detailed weather a month from now.

the reason I like them (and have invested in them) is that it appears they will have a profitable company even if they don't achieve fusion.. they have lots of ways to make $$ and their neutron imaging systems group is doing very well as the legacy nuclear reactors ( now the main source for this technology) go out of service I like investing is companies that can make a goe of it even if they don't achieve their ultimate goal.

D-T fusion produces neutrons. If the reactor design allows those neutrons to hit Lithium, the Lithium fissions into tritium and helium. So many fusion reactor designs surround and cool the reactor with liquid lithium.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeding_blanket
There are lots of additional details as with any engineering project, ,but that is the basic idea.

In an ideal world you make about 1.6X as much tritium as you consume, in real life you can't cover the entire surface of the reactor but in many designs its still possible to produce more tritium than the reactor consumes.

Some companies are proposing using other reactions but I don't see any of those as practical.

D-He3 is harder to ignite than D-T. Despite some claims there is no credible way to mine enough helium3 from the moon - the numbers are crazy. He3 can be made by allowing tritium to decay but that results in an even more difficult reaction to operate.

proton-Boron is insanely difficult to operate (1000X harder than D-T), almost provably impossible.

There could be an issue with the starting tritium, but the quantity required is pretty small. The giant ITER reactor is expected to use about 0.25 grams of Tritium per cycle, while the worlds production of tritium is > 1kg/year. Tritium production would need to drop drastically for there not to be enough to start a fusion reactor (but after that the reactor needs to be self suffiient in order to be practical)




Josef, what's the industry response to sourcing the tritium? I'm not in the energy space, so it's my very uneducated understanding that there is insufficient tritium available to seed a scalable fusion source (they would be self-sustaining with a Li breeder blanket after startup), while tritium sources are declining as nuclear reactors are shuttered. Basically it was explained to me once that a D-T reactor is unlikely because the feedstock to start one doesn't exist, but that might have been a dramatic overreaction.

I've had some customers in the fusion space who say it "has always been 10 years away for the past half a century" but seem confident that might actually be legitimate now within a decade.

Talk is cheap, delivering is not.


That's like saying they are going to build helicopters by building airplanes first. Those two things are so different that they really don't mesh.


Which ones?


Which means they have extra weight for heavy conductors and battery cooling.


ADS-B track?


Ah, that is clearly the key to making this all work.

Mike C.

I don't think Beta, which was being discussed, has anything to do with Tesla.

Beta is a smart operation. their aircraft is initially designed to be a VTOL but they have found along the way there is a good market for an Electric STOL and they can basically use the same airframe without the lift propellers as a STOL

they are following the market and changing as necessary to get to cash flow positive as soon as possible.

Great that they are following the money. But is there enough money to sustain a profitable business...

What problem are they solving?
What new capability are they introducing that will make consumers change their habits?

This feels a lot like ICON. A neat toy that some people will buy and enjoy, but not going to move the needle for the industry overall.

STOL is NOT an appropriate adjective for the current BETA model

80mph stall, 2,600' ground roll take off
4,000' minimum runway as currently running
looking to add protective trailing edge on fixed prop to use reverse

(as I recall, per conversation with demo pilot)

Unless the "S" stands for "slow".

Building a runway needing plane and a VTOL are so different that the strategy of doing one before the other is doomed even more so than the general failure rate these VTOL startups will face.

Mike C.