Launch HN: Maritime Fusion (YC W25) – Fusion Reactors for Ships
Hey HN, we’re Justin and Jason, co-founders of Maritime Fusion (https://maritimefusion.com/). We’re working on putting fusion reactors on ships—specifically, large container ships and defence applications. Should be easy!
Yes, we know: fusion has been the energy source of the future…and it always will be. But high-temperature superconductors (HTS) have changed the game for magnetic confinement, and we believe we’ll witness Q > 1 within a few (say 3) years. That’s huge.
(Side note: Q is the ratio of input power divided by output power. Q> 1 means the reactor is producing more power than it consumes, achieving ‘breakeven.’)
However, getting to breakeven is just the first daunting challenge. Making the first-of-a-kind (FOAK) reactors cost-competitive on the grid? That might be even harder than achieving breakeven.
That’s why we’re taking this soon-to-be breakthrough in fusion and applying it to the first market we believe makes sense: ships.
Instead of targeting 24/7 baseload grid electricity—where fusion has to compete with solar, wind, batteries, and natural gas—we’re focusing on large commercial shipping (>10,000 TEU) and mobile military vessels to provide ship-to-shore power capability.
Why ships? They don’t have great alternatives—the shipping industry is desperate to decarbonize. Hydrogen and ammonia are being explored, but come with serious downsides: low energy density, flammability, leaks, and massive infrastructure challenges. Fusion will provide a high-energy-density, long-range solution without the same infrastructure challenges—once it works, of course!
One common question is, why not fission? Fission works technically, but not practically. Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) could power ships, but licensing fission reactors on land is already brutally hard and expensive—doing it for vessels moving between international ports with enriched uranium is nearly impossible. Public perception is another major barrier: if we’re deploying thousands of nuclear reactors globally, they need to be meltdown-proof. Fusion is the only way to guarantee that. Regulation also isn’t as bad. While fusion won’t be a walk in the park to license, the NRC has declared a distinct framework for it—more like particle accelerators and hospitals than nuclear power plants. That’s a game-changer.
Instead of a 500+ MW grid-scale reactor, our system is 25 MWe, designed for ship propulsion. Our tokamak is roughly JET-sized, but with HTS magnets (8-9T) and higher plasma current (~10MA). The first-wall power flux is down from multi-MW/m² to nearly 500 kW/m²—still tough, but not nightmare mode. The materials challenges associated with the first wall and nuclear activation of the structures is greatly reduced. Also, ships don’t require 90% uptime like grid power plants. Downtime for maintenance is part of normal operations, making this a far more forgiving early application of fusion, unlike the grid where every down hour is lost revenue.
Jason and I come from SpaceX and Tesla, where we solved hard engineering problems at scale. My background is nuclear engineering (NC State, BS) and plasma physics (Columbia University, MS). We’ve been busy during our time in YC making technical progress on our reactor design, and are in the process of assembling a team of engineers who can pull this off.
This is a ridiculously hard problem, of course. But we think it’s the right hard problem—one that’s actually solvable (and worth solving!) with today’s tech if applied correctly. Eventually the cheaper and more robust SOAK and NOAK (second-of-a-kind and nth-of-a-kind) reactors will arrive in the coming decades (2050-2060) and then we'll pivot to decarbonising the grid and saving the world (we'll need to change our name), but until then we'll be out in the ocean!
Would love to hear your thoughts—whether you’re deep into plasma physics and engineering, skeptical-but–curious, or convinced it will never work . Ask us anything!
Greybeard former fusion founder here. Wishing you guys all the luck in the world! Email in profile in case you wish to chat.
For all the naysayers, as a fusion startup, targeting the marine market is a good move. They aren't even the first fusion startup to do so; IIRC Rostoker's group got their first major funding from the NRL. The marine market pays a premium for not having to refuel, and historically emerging energy technologies have early commercialization in ships. This was true for fission in the 50s and for photovoltaic solar in the 70s/80s.
Now, sure, they have to make power to be able to sell it. But to build a reactor, you have to raise funds, and in order to raise funds you have to show that you can make money if you are successful at making power. Explicitly aiming at a market that might actually pay for overpriced power shows their investors that there may be a valid business case. That doesn't make fusion happen any easier, but you don't make any reactions without first building a reactor.
You know, I'm sure these guys could work somewhere getting paid to get more people to click on stuff. Instead they are taking a risk to do something that might be important. Make no mistake: fusion founder is a tough gig. There is no established off-ramp, and many fusion founders find that it's a job that can easily eat your career. I hope their plan B is in order, as well as their prenups and/or wills. They are going off to fight a dragon that's eaten a lot of other people's careers, relationships and sanity.
As an aside, it's nice to see someone working on a tokamak actually not being overly optimistic about wall heat flux. It's like somebody actually paid attention to Stacey or something ;)
Thank you very much !!! Really appreciate this :)
> I'm sure these guys could work somewhere getting paid to get more people to click on stuff.
That, right there, that is what makes me go: You know what, go for it. Best of luck, go make something, go try something.
You're absolutely right. So much talent is wasted on getting people to click an ad, stay on a page just a few minutes longer, watch the next video. So much time, so much money thrown into the dumpster fire of social media, ad tech and stupid "but as-a-service" solutions. It's better for everyone if the funds are directed towards something that might actually make the world a better place.
Not just that, but fusion will never happen if no one tries their hands on it because everyone says it can’t be done.
Can you elaborate on the use of photovoltaics in shipping? After a few searches, I haven’t been able to find anything that suggests the marine industry was an important sector for its development.
Also, I feel extremely confident predicting that the commercial maritime industry will never ever pay a premium for a particular fuel source. There may eventually be some applications where fusion is most efficient, but fusion reactors aren’t going to make their debut in cargo ships.
I suspect they're referring to the use of PV cells in lighthouses, Light-Buoys, Wireless Relay Stations, LORAN (pre GPS marine navigation) stations, etc.
Economics at the time restricted their limited use to mountainous areas, deserts, isolated areas, remote island outcrops, etc.
I saw PV use in the 1970s in remote Austalian rail operations to power signal boxes and repeaters .. the higher costs offset the equally high costs of maintaining a fueled generator in a remote location.
Marine shipping wasn't, to the best of my recollection, directly using PV's shipboard as they already had massive engines driving propulsion and it was trivial to bled off a little torque for a electrical generator.
Sailboat owners were early adopters of photovoltaics in order to avoid having to run generators. Some newer merchant ships have installed photovoltaics to supply part of the hotel load and maybe save a tiny amount of fuel, but that's a newer development and probably more of a "greenwashing" thing.
Addendum:
I should have addressed this in my peer comment, from the Launch HN header above
Is a bit odd from my PoV as it skipped over methanol .. the "green" fuel of choice in shipping today, with supply contracts already inked and signed, ships built, and more in pipeline.DNV GL welcomes Lindanger to fleet – world’s first methanol fuelled ocean-going vessel (2016)
~ https://www.dnv.com/news/dnv-gl-welcomes-lindanger-to-fleet-...Methanol as fuel heads for the mainstream in shipping (2023) - https://www.dnv.com/expert-story/maritime-impact/Methanol-as...
Also - https://www.methanol.org/marine-fuel/ and https://www.methanex.com/about-methanol/marine-fuel/
Here is latest (2025) bio methanol project from China [1], at $150/barrel of oil equivalent
And its not even true e-methanol which will be $200-$300boe
[1] https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Va0XYtSXQJLVrOZsW5obXA
(if u have any actual contact with the maritime industry would love to connect and chat)
My background is more mining, exploration geophysics, and global mineral resources. I have an interest in related production projects, eg: marine transport is part of mining and we (Australia) have several green methanol projects ~300K tonne per annum coming up this year, entering a global market of some 330 million tonne of general marine fuel.
PV energy capability per unit surface area is low enough that it's impractical for large-scale propulsion.
Marine PV has seen use on pleasure craft (particularly sailboats) for auxiliary power needs (electronics, nav, lighting, pumps, light cooking/heating), and for drone craft (there was a startup out of Alameda, CA, producing what seemed to be aimed as US Naval marine survey craft a few years ago, largely wind-powered but with electronics and back-up propulsion powered by solar arrays, see: <https://newatlas.com/marine/72-ft-autonomous-saildrone-map-s...>.
Wind-capture remains the most viable alternative to fuel-based marine transport, and "windjammers" remained in commercial operation through the 1950s particularly on very-long-haul routes, though ultimately even that niche was captured by oil-powered propulsion. See: <https://omeka2.hrvh.org/exhibits/show/a-new-age-of-sail/last...>.
Containerisation probably accelerated and/or solidified that decline as this permitted not only far more efficient loading and unloading, but requires clear decks and permits vastly larger ships and concommitantly greater crew efficiencies (crewing is almost entirely independent of ship size and capacity, so a larger and faster ship (factors which also trend together given hull speed and its relationship to length) is virtually always vastly more efficient than a smaller one, despite possibly greater total fuel consumption. Fuel use itself per unit cargo is also lower for larger shipping.
Current ship-size constraints are largely determined by harbour and canal dimensions (hence ship dimensions defined by <location>max, e.g., Panamax, Suezmax, Chinamax, Batimax (Baltic Sea, not Baltimore Harbour), etc. I'm fond of the designation "Handy Size", which calls to mind "fun sized" though I'm told there's little relation. Maximum length capable of sustaining large seas (waves) without keel breakage is another marine engineering consideration which has limited ships to ~1,200 ft / 660m maximum length. At larger sizes ships are simply too susceptible to coming apart in heavy conditions.
Ships in general are constrained by the smallest viable dimensions of a port of call or route, and larger ships have fewer viable available ports or routes, though the busiest of such tend also to favour larger hull dimensions.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_ship#Size_categories>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handysize>
No naysayer here, just curious:
- What does this bring to the table beyond marine fission power?
- Why do they think they can make it cheaper than military fission marine power?
There is at least the possibility that fusion power could eventually be viable for privately owned civilian merchant ships. Fission power is a non-starter in that market due to concerns (valid or not) over security, terrorism, proliferation, and meltdowns. Even if someone builds a new fission powered merchant ship it would be useless because many nations wouldn't allow it to enter their ports.
Military fission power plants were never optimized for cost. They have always been hand built in tiny numbers with a focus on safety, durability, and maximal output.
Aren't the products of fusion equally radioactive? I get that we all have the idea of helium being the main product, but don't you get a lot of tritium out of the process? It's not quite proliferation, but it's not non-radioactive either.
Yes, tritium is radioactive but it has to be recycled and reused to continuously fuel the reactor. Every part of a fusion reactor is designed to minimise the retention of tritium, the actual radioactive waste will be materials activated by neutron radiation (neutrons are captured by nuclei, transmute the element into a radioactive one which then decays to a stable isotope emitting more radiation).
A small fusion reactor, being a powerful neutron source, will be a great risk for proliferation. It should be able to breed plutonium for nuclear weapons as much as it can breed tritium.
Which is why in "fusion" bombs the majority of energy still comes from fission. The fusion reaction is a neutron source to boost the efficiency of the fission reaction. A pure fusion bomb, if one could ever trigger such a thing without fission, would not be very efficient.
For "boosted fission" and early thermonuclear bomb designs yes, but not so for the more evolved thermonuclear designs. Navajo (Operation Redwing, 1956) was 95% fusion, Tsar bomba (1961) was 97% fusion, Housatonic (Operation Dominic, 1962) was 99.9% fusion.
My understanding is that the tritium is bred in the reactor and then consumed in the reaction. But most designs do have some amount of radioactive waste, including structural parts and reactor walls that suffer huge amounts of neutron activation.
Their plain hinges on having net positive fusion in the first place, something that still remains a fantasy even in the largest reactors on land. I think those questions already take so much good faith that you couldn't possibly be a naysayer.
"Downtime for maintenance is part of normal operations, making this a far more forgiving early application of fusion, unlike the grid where every down hour is lost revenue."
Planned maintenance, sure, but unplanned maintenance means the same lost revenue, plus you're stuck floating in the middle of the pacific ocean, possibly in need of parts or debugging expertise that only exists half a planet away or, for that matter, food. It's certainly a good idea to find a niche to make market entry easier, but I would guess that reliability requirements are actually higher for ships than for microgrids. Find some isolated town or island running off flaky diesel generators on shipped-in fuel and negotiate a reasonable SLA.
This ignores, of course, the bigger problem: making fusion work at all at Q > 1. If it were me, I'd work on solving that before worrying too much about optimizing market entry. So far every single fusion effort has failed to clear that hurdle, and any effort on the other parts is wasted if you can't actually make power.
The first ocean-going steamships still had sails - it took many years for steam power to fully displace sail. Presumably a new maritime power system, like fusion, would follow a similar pattern.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steamboat#Sea-_and_Ocean-going
There is something very compelling about a fusion-powered ship also having sails.
Let's be realistic, it would have a diesel engine as a plan B.
But if you like sails: my pet hypothetical technology is wind-driven hydrogen tankers (or tankers for some other e-fuel derived from hydrogen) that sail out empty, then cruise around wherever there is plenty of wind. They'd have a turbine/generator setup driven by the water passing by and use the energy harvested there for filling the tank. Cruise around as long as it takes to nearly fill the tank then return to port (and fill the rest on the way back). There's a lot of oceans where systems like that could cruise around on. (same concept could also be used for desalonation, there it would not only be about energy but also about avoiding local brine concentrations)
Interesting concept. Let's run the numbers...
The largest Q-Max-class gas tanker is 345 meters long [1]. Let's say you manage to fit 3 giant Siemens wind turbines on it, with 100m long blades [2]. It's a bit cramped but let's say you have extenders on the side to make room for all 3 of them. And also let's say you found a way to prevent the ship from tipping over when the wind is strong. By deploying floaters on the side or whatever. Not unsurmountable.
Each of those wind turbine has a rated power of 14.7 MW [2]. Let's say that you found a place where the wind blows super strong (but not too strong) and steady all the time. It's possible, since you are a mobile ship, after all. Let's say that you have a way for the ship to keep in the same place despite the strong and steady wind pushing you constantly. Using engines is going to lower your efficiency, so let's say we found another way.
So, now your ship is generating 45MW constantly. According to ChatGPT, this is 32 kg of hydrogen per second, taking hydrolysis losses into account.
Tanker capacity is 18 620 000 kg of liquid hydrogen. It will take 581 000 seconds to fill up. 9697 minutes, 161 hours, or 6.7 days. Much shorter than I thought... Did I miss something?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-Max [2] https://www.offshorewind.biz/2024/04/22/first-siemens-gamesa...
You have it reverse wind turbines need mooring, stay upright and so on. That's highly impractical. No, you build a fast-going sail vessel (using big traction kites, because it's not the 19th century anymore) and power the generator from much smaller turbine blades in the water. Hydrogenerator is the term established in recreational boating.
I sure would not expect any returns in days, more like months or years. But if we (humanity) could just solve the purely man-made problem of piracy (or would it technically be salvage?), I believe that a robotic fleet of cruising hydrogenerators could be a huge contribution to our energy needs.
The main issue is that prevailing winds have a direction, and there's not a continuous open ocean path other than the Southern Ocean which is harsh even by the standards of oceans. Sure you can steer along trade winds in the Atlantic or Pacific but there's quite some efficiency loss.
(Give climate change another decade or so and the Arctic Ocean maybe becomes an option, although by then we'll have bigger fish to fry, or perhaps poach).
Sailing technology has gone beyond "we can go downwind, yay!" for quite a while now...
Certainly of course, but not while delivering maximum continuous energy from a kite to a turbine.
Boats go considerably faster, as in overcoming more water drag, going crosswind than going downwind. I suppose that adding extra drag with a hydrogenerator will change the maths of that relationship, but certainly not so much that it would be prohibitively wasteful to not specialize a hydrogenerator carrier to downwind-only. (if the downwind-only setup can be competitive at all, not sure I'd take that as a given)
It strikes me that having the turbine and hydrolysis plant fixed in place, and having ships visit those sites to refuel, is probably an easier setup than mobile turbines.
But I think your maths is wrong somewhere. Hydrogen supplies 33MWh/tonne, and you've stated the ship capacity as 18620 tonnes. 18620/(33*24) gives a generation time of 23 days, even before we allow for hydrolysis overheads.
Marine hydrogen isn't a terrible idea though. Tank weight and bulk is prohibitive for aviation, but less so for shipping.
There are only so many windy places to affix turbines to. There's a lot of ocean to cruise on.
The mobile hydrolyser (not a boat to solve shipping in a quasi perpetuum mobile away, but an energy harvester that focuses on just that) would solve mooring: the "lateral lift" of the boat would take care of that, just how your plain old America's Cup boat isn't just slowly dragged downwind. It would solve linkup: a serious cost component in not all too conveniently located off shore wind installations is the grid connection. And it would solve intermittency: hydrogen is inconvenient compared to hydrocarbons, but it's super convenient compared to getting even more electricity at a time demand on your grid is already satisfied to saturation.
(GP's math is likely wrong, but the assumption that you could somehow cram multiple turbines from the bigger end of market offerings on a boat and call it a day seems so far off to me that I never really looked at the numbers)
Ugh, turns out I suck at math too. At least attempting it before coffee.
The ship's capacity in MWh is 18620t x 33MWh/t = 614460MWh.
At 45MW generating capacity, an electric hydrolyser at 80% efficiency delivers hydrogen at a rate of 36MW. That will unfortunately take about 70 years to fill the ship to its maximum capacity.
On a more positive note, 36MW is still a heck of a lot of power, plenty enough to run a mid-sized cruise liner or warship. So a marine generating station with three of these turbines could, for example, refuel a liner once a month, and then that liner have enough fuel to cruise for a month, and so on.
This would require a fuel tank with a more reasonable 750 tonne capacity. That's still several times more than the Shuttle, but not beyond the realms of feasibility - and a stronger, heavier tank allows higher pressures / smaller volumes.
I am totally mesmerized by the idea of a floating hydrolizing platform , where ships can dock and load hydrogen fuel ( not sure what form suits best ).
Must start some economics of it. Also marine environment is very unforgiving...
Platforms are does-not-scale hard though: they require mooring and every bit of ocean floor is different. Drilling platforms come in multiple "species", as different as spiders, fish and birds. Roaming hydrolysers on the other hand would be one design fits any ocean. You'd want to build lots of them, more Model T than Death Star. And where a stationary platform would have to be able to brace a hurricane, the roaming unit would just go to a neighboring sea with a friendlier forecast. Or ride along on the edge, if power throughput has enough headroom.
It is. But if we can handle maritime oil and gas rigs, which load/unload to tankers, hydrogen isn't MUCH worse.
It wouldn't be floating exactly though. Moored and piled into the sea bed, sitting above the waves like rigs and wind turbines.
Or bunker oil.
But yes, fuel-based powerplant, likely as part of a hybrid drive running electric motors powering propellers themselves.
Marine propulsion is already pretty optimised for efficiency (turn on engine, set to cruise power, maintain for 14 days, little acceleration, starts, stops, and/or hills), so a hybrid setup would work pretty effectively.
The far greater challenges are Q>1 and reliable fusion within a ship's structure.
sails on modern cargo ships is a thing (see pyxis ocean)
So your approach to fusion is "the same CFS but stay at roughly the size of the SPARC prototype instead of scaling up"?
When you say "Q > 1 within a few (say 3) years" are you talking about your own reactors, or others? For that matter, are you trying to partner with CFS and license their technology or are you intending on starting "from scratch" (from whatever is publicly available)?
If that timeline is for fusion in general, what do you think your timeline looks like? Assuming adequate access to funding how soon can you build a Q>1 reactor? How soon after that can you actually go to market and sell a reactor?
---
On an unrelated note, I'm curious what you think of the current approaches to commercial fusion being attempted. Are Tokamaks the only game in town in your mind? Or do the various other approaches also being tried out right now have a good shot (MIF/Zpinches/etc)? Any particular approaches you think are particularly likely to succeed.
This being ycombinator and a startup I'm obligated to say that I don't ask this question because I think it impacts your commercial viability much, the greatest risks in fusion definitely aren't the competitors. I ask it just because I'm curious what people willing to start a fusion company think of the competitors.
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Ships make a ton of sense to me as an early market. An 11 figure market (according to my own napkin calculations awhile back) where power is much more expensive than on land. At the same time it's never struck me that the hardest part of building a fusion company is finding a market.
Our device is larger than SPARC (~3m major radius) and less power (100MW fusion), hence the confidence in being able to solve the steady-state (repeated inductive pulses) engineering challenges.
We won’t be the first to Q>1, I’m super excited for SPARC to achieve that and will be prepared with champagne.
We’re targeting early 2030’s for our reactor, we’re going straight for the full thing no sub scale reactor in between (we do have a plan for milestone-ing it out in a meaningful way)
I’ve worked on a few alternative approaches earlier in my career (FRC at Princeton, dense plasma focus at LPP Fusion) … I think all fusion approaches are worth looking at, but I’m placing my chips on the tokamak. If I were to pick a runner up, the stellerator.
I'm just going to put this here. Someone please make this a reality.
### *"Tokamak Sailor"* (To the tune of "Drunken Sailor")
*(Verse 1)* What shall we do with a tokamak sailor? What shall we do with a tokamak sailor? What shall we do with a tokamak sailor? Early in the mornin'!
*(Chorus)* *Ho, ho! Fire up the plasma!* *Ho, ho! Fire up the plasma!* *Ho, ho! Fire up the plasma!* *Fusion in the mornin'!*
*(Verse 2)* Raise the coils and heat up the torus! Raise the coils and heat up the torus! Raise the coils and heat up the torus! Early in the mornin'!
(Chorus repeats)
*(Verse 3)* Confine the plasma, don't let it scatter! Confine the plasma, don't let it scatter! Confine the plasma, don’t let it scatter! Early in the mornin'!
(Chorus repeats)
*(Verse 4)* Sail with the power of fusion glory! Sail with the power of fusion glory! Sail with the power of fusion glory! Early in the mornin'!
(Final Chorus, extra loud!) *Ho, ho! Fire up the plasma!* *Ho, ho! Fire up the plasma!* *Ho, ho! Fire up the plasma!* *Fusion in the mornin'!*
Now all aboard the reactor ship, lads! Keep that plasma hot, and may the tides be ever in our favor!
Suno could do this, even with a reference melody :)
Lol - on it
Re Q>1, isn't that just the reaction making more power as heat than you put in and you need something like Q>5 to use the heat to make steam to make electricity to run the thing? (as in wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor)
Correct. Energy generation >1 is targeted for 2030. So it fits "fusion is 5 years away" trope.
Fusion used to always be 30 years away, more recently 15 years.
Less science personal company has, shorter the due date.
How much design on an actual reactor can you do already if the whole technology isn't even demonstrated yet? How many changes are you prepared to do based on the results of the current scientific reactors?
We can get pretty far along! From magnetic system design, vacuum vessel, RF heating system, cryogenic system, tritium fueling, etc we can start making a ton of progress today. The main things we still need to learn that can influence the design is advanced divertor scenarios and what are best material choices for plasma facing components (PFC's).
How certain is it that a tokamak is even able to be run in a stable manner? What if it turns out that a stellarator would be better? Or is that already validated by now?
The stellarator design makes more sense to me as well and speaking of it, those guys will build a stellarator on land:
https://www.proximafusion.com/press-news/proxima-fusion-and-...
Problems are still many, though (Paper:)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092037962...
Saw that this morning as well, it's awesome. I do think long term especially for grid applications stellarators could be great... note that their design is ~2.7GW I believe. We're talking gigantic traditional power plant size, which the world needs, but the first generation of these facilities will cost multi billions of dollars. Also with the stellarator, doing non planar HTS coils and the associated manufacturing challenge is a very very hard problem.
Well, definitely good luck with your approach as well!
I guess the biggest hurdle will be stable operation, without having to replace too many broken parts too often?
Tokamak requires regular shutdown as far as I understood and that is quite a lot of heat stress for all the parts I believe, along with the radiation etc.
(But I lack the background to really debate on the pro vs cons of tokamak vs stellarator, I just have opinions here)
This feels a bit like launching a startup that offers services based on fully working quantum computing, depending on others to provide their fully working quantum computer.
Or a startup based on using cryogenic hibernation chambers on ships to provide shift-changes, or ultra-low-cost travel... after someone else finishes inventing them.
Thank you for putting it this way.
I watched people scam VCs with drone tech, and Theranos, and other things.
Can people please do any amount of critical thinking around this sort of stuff? It steals funding from serious efforts and pollutes the pool.
What is special in this approach compared to literal decades in the field?
What is special about these young dudes compared to better-funded ventures that haven't pulled it off yet and who have been working on it longer?
What is the difference between "yeah we can do design work look at all this stuff (that's the easy 60-80% of the problem space)" versus "we can actually solve the remaining work that's got everybody so screwed up"?
This feels like a scam y'all, knowingly or not.
Seriously, why people are falling on this scam??
> and we believe we’ll witness Q > 1 within a few (say 3) years. That’s huge.
I think it fits squarely in the "requires extraordinary evidence" bucket - what makes you so bold ?
Also, what's you intermediate plans between :
2025 -> Post on HN
2028 -> Q>1 achieved (by you ? by someone else ?)
???? -> ????
20xx -> a ship goes to sea powered by a fusion reactor
???? -> ????
2060 -> fusion is so easy, let's use it for baseload
Sorry if I sound stark, but I'm already burnt out and fed up with the "breakthroughs" on batteries that never materialize - I have a very low tolerance threshold for startups promising fusion for next week ;)
If you're on to something, more power to you - we need that yesterday.
Also, what's you intermediate plans between :
2025 -> Post on HN
2028 -> Q>1 achieved (by you ? by someone else ?)
CFS plans Q>1 for 2027 with a tokamak design. If they succeed then there will be plenty of VC for similar designs. I'd place my bets that CFS succeeds with Q>1. And I think the real problem will be the energy flux and neutron handling and thus much more a material sciences problem than a plasma physics problem. Thus the idea to look for a niche that has lower power needs is a very clever one. My bet would be rather on Maritime Fusion than Helion. But nevertheless, CFS will be likely first at Q>1 however there is always space for another competitor.
Exactly this !!
Let's also be really explicit... CFS is targeting Q>1 by 2027 for nuclear fusion via the SPARC reactor, but not Q>1 for electrical generation. The latter is slated for sometime in the early 2030s via the subsequent ARC reactor.
All of this is driven by HTS. Fusion reactors (generically) scale to the inverse^4 of magnetic field strength. HTS doubled the achievable magnetic field strength of electromagnets, which means that ITER-like performance can be achieved in university-scale reactors at comercially-viable, lower costs.
Dr. Dennis Whyte (MIT Nuclear Eng Prof) gave a great seminar at Berkeley that covered some technical nuances. It's mandatory watching if you want to geek out and understand the fusion hype: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY6U4wB-oYM
> that ITER-like performance can be achieved in university-scale reactors at comercially-viable, lower costs
Are they going to upgrade it or it’s already obsolete before it was even finished?
“Obsolete” probably isn’t the right word but they’re continuing as usual on ITER.. they’re aiming for 5.5T compared to >9T field strength on ARC. There’s still a ton of science to be learned, so it makes sense to keep pushing ahead but it’s clear any eventual commercial design will use HTS magnets instead of the NbSn ones in ITER.
I'd be ready to bet that the boring, international, big gouvernement funded ITER will be the only place to reach anything meaningful, long before the hip VC-backed startups ship anything.
Source : I generally don't believe VC-backup startups anymore, but that says more about me than about them (thankfully, sometimes they do stuff, like, 140 chars and useful tools for Russian trolls.)
But let's see how it goes !
Do you believe MIT? They used to run the Alcator C-Mod, which had the highest magnetic field of any tokamak in the world, did preliminary work with the new superconductors, and based on all that they designed ARC before they spun off a company to actually build it.
I'll believe whoever first powers a light bulb from fusion.
I can completely imagine that it goes through stages like
Half a century of painful research at universities -> decades to build multiple prototypes -> years to build a POC -> decades to industrialize the POC -> years to connect the POC to the grid -> ???? -> light bulb moment -> ???? -> profit
I'm not sure we much further than the beginning of step 2. Indeed, (sorry to say that), I'd trust an MIT startup to do that more than a YC startup. But real life will serve as evidence.
Is that QPlasma>1 or QTotal>1?
Batteries are steadily improving, at least in the cost factor. We haven't seen any 2x leaps in density from sulfur or solid state or aluminum air.
But LFP and Sodium Ion are making undeniable progress in cheap usable EV batteries that don't require nickel or cobalt.
> cheap usable EV batteries
I know this is going to sound harsh, but I will personnally consider EV batteries "cheap" only when they pass the very scientific "my mom can use the EV exactly like shes uses her car, and she does not notice" test:
* on one charge, drive 10-50km daily for 350 days in a year
* on one charge, drive 1000km in one go for the holidays
* it must be less than 10kE at a local car dealership
* it can be plugged in your garage
* if you forgot to charge it, you can stop every 10km to recharge in 10m
I know: "it's harsh" ! "We should change our car usage" ! "My mom should live differently to accomodate the technology", etc... Go tell that to my mom.
Still, that's the goal post I've been having for 20y, and 10y ago people where writing headlines about "breakthroughs" that would make this possible any time now. And it's not. So I'm burnt out, kinda.
If you fix your goalposts for long enough, cohort effects will move around them.
I'm not sure how old your mom is, but 1000km drives aren't something most people want to be doing past 75 ish. And newer cohorts adapt their lifestyles and expectations to available technology, whether that's charging time, on-demand rental for the occasionally needed longer distance EVs, and so on.
Although I can't help thinking that hybrids are a better fit for this common usage pattern - given a choice between hauling the dead weight of a rarely-used gasoline engine, or the dead weight of the 80% of battery capacity you hardly ever use, the gas engine is cheaper and less demanding of rare metals.
It's a shame that weight considerations mean "rent 80% extra range in a removable module for occasional use" isn't a practical option. You could almost have a 10kWh/50km light EV with a gasoline generator or extra battery in a hitch trailer, but the trade-offs don't quite work.
> And newer cohorts adapt their lifestyles and expectations to available technology, whether that's charging time, on-demand rental for the occasionally needed longer distance EVs, and so on.
Alternatively, they will keep living their life exactly the way they have so far, and refuse to use the "new" technology until it has caught up with the "old" one.
"Regulations" could in theory help, if it served as enough of an incentive for car makers to pay some serious R&D and get the "new" tech on par with the old one.
Problem is, in practice, though, the option to "not care about the regulation and elect right wing people until it's dropped" is easier than paying chemist and physicists.
And selling my mom a 2t SUV is much better for the shareholders.
So, never mind. At some point, one "game changing revolutionary breakthrough" will actually break through something and change some game.
Or, my mum will die of old age, bitching about those stupid pseudo "cars" that their grand kids can't use to visit her because the battery is too small.
(No, wait, HN tells my mum will actually not die, thanks to some "game changing AI-powered breakthrough in biotech")
Dude, get a PHEV.
I'm not sure I'm seeing the relevance here. Incremental advances in battery tech (or even futuristic step-change prospects like lithium-air batteries) won't solve intercontinental shipping.
The HN battery checklist needs to be reworked for fusion power. Arguably, even though people think it’s trolling to use the checklist, I’ve found it surprisingly educational each time.
Sounds interesting, could you post that checklist?
And one for fusion
----------------------------------
Dear Nuclear Fusion Power Claimant
Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary nuclear fusion power technology. Your new technology claims to solve humanity's energy problems, produce unlimited clean energy, and is just months away from commercialization. Unfortunately, your technology will likely fail, because:
[ ] it requires materials that cannot be produced at any scale.
[ ] its energy gain (Q factor) is still substantially less than 1.
[ ] its plasma instabilities modes are completely unknown.
[ ] its plasma modeling behavior relies exclusively on numerical simulations.
[ ] it cannot sustain required plasma confinement criteria
[ ] it cannot handle the neutron flux without rapid degradation of components.
[ ] it requires magnetic fields stronger than currently achievable
[ ] it consumes more energy in cooling systems than it produces.
[ ] your claimed breakthrough violates fundamental physics.
[ ] the same approach was tried in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and abandoned each time for good reason
[ ] by the time it ships, renewable energy plus storage will be far cheaper.
[ ] your timeline has been "5 years away" for the past 50 years.
[ ] your claims are lies.
Sincerely, The Energy Research Community
This one I presume:
----------------------------------------------------------------
Dear battery technology claimant,
Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because:
[ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale.
[ ] it will be too expensive for users.
[ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles.
[ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels.
[ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures.
[ ] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable.
[ ] it has too short of a lifetime.
[ ] its charge rate is too slow.
[ ] its materials are too toxic.
[ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode.
[ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care.
[ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn't work then.
[ ] by this time it ships li-ion advances will match it.
[ ] your claims are lies
> Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world.
As a corroboration, current hotness in cell phones is existing lithium ion tech with new silicon-carbon anodes.
flashbacks to slashdot
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28025969
Ah interesting!
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
If you are fantasizing the implementation of an imaginary future technology, why not fusion power for SPACE ships?
You still need somewhere for the heat to go, and that's a lot easier if you're on top of water instead of nothing.
Although, a good radiator on a spacecraft still seems trivially easy compared to having a working fusion reactor in the first place.
Because nobody predict so large grow of space industry, which could make fusion profitable.
Second problem, for space weight is so expensive, that it made fission viable, and solve proliferation problem (very little risk, somebody will steal materials from Moon or beyond).
Controlled by a quantum computer, obviously.
"First-wall power flux" - am I right in thinking that means the heat energy the innermost wall has to contain? Half a megawatt per square meter? Good lord. You're not making it out of 3/4" plywood then.
Maintenance isn't just about downtime though right? This is gonna have to be supported by your crews traveling globally with trade secret, exotic parts. Not even on the top ten hardest things about this of course.
It's an exciting bet for sure, so good luck - if it works, you're taking a big bite out of a really nasty carbon source.
I think your timeline is at best optimistic. I would personally like to see fixed land based fusion power work before we start trying to build them into moving vessels.
Your claim that the shipping industry is "desperate to decarbonize" also needs a citation. From what I've seen shippers top three concerns are "how to minimize costs", "how to reduce costs", and "how to save money". Can you make this system cheaper to operate than heavy fuel oil? If not it is unlikely to gain traction.
> Your claim that the shipping industry is "desperate to decarbonize" also needs a citation.
If anything, I think the shipping industry will be the last to de-carbonize, in the same way it's been the refuge of burning dirty fuels and NOx emissions.
Nearly 40% of shipping volume worldwide is moving fossil fuels (coal, oil, gaz). The easiest way to reduce drastically shipping emission is reducing usage of fossil fuels...
https://www.ics-shipping.org/resource/shippings-role-in-the-...
That's... not what's being discussed, though?
We're talking about whether the shipping industry will choose to improve how their ships operate, but you're talking about new powerplants on land would remove the need to even have those/as-many ships at all.
> before we start trying to build them into moving vessels
Why wait, though? I agree that the timeline - the whole project! - seems extraordinarily optimistic, but I don't see why development of potential maritime applications should create any obstacle to the simultaneous development of grid power applications.
Lots of potential complications when building something on a vessel and failure is more likely to be deadly, if for example it fails because the ship is being battered too much by a storm. Plus there is the complicating factors with needing to miniaturize the equipment enough to fit in the available space.
That all sounds reasonable. Sometimes the economic problems are harder to solve than the technical ones, though, and that's what interests me about this proposal. I have had a bearish outlook on fusion power in recent years, because utility-scale grid power is the most competitive market there is, and the cost of solar & batteries have been dropping so fast that it's not clear there would be any economic justification for a fusion power plant even if we knew how to build one. An intermediate market, willing to pay much more money for far less power, where renewables cannot compete, seems like it might be just the thing fusion needs to transition out of research and into practical use - even if it does take more engineering to cope with the rigors of the sea.
To be fair, a small fusion reactor actually producing power day in, day out - would be a ridiculously huge success. Before worrying about reliability in a storm or miniaturizing (to the point of that being irrelevant). There will THEN be this challenge of reliability and size but achieving the first step would release a sea of additional funding.
> One common question is, why not fission? Fission works technically, but not practically. Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) could power ships, but licensing fission reactors on land is already brutally hard and expensive—doing it for vessels moving between international ports with enriched uranium is nearly impossible
What makes you think that licensing a fusion reactor will be easier? Safely handling tritium is fantastically more complicated that the fuel of a fission power plant.
Also, do you plan on breeding your fuel aboard the ship? If no, how do you plan to produce, store the tritium and refuel the ship? If yes, I'd like to know how you are planning to host the massive chemical plant to purify coolant, recycle unburt fuel, separate isotopes, detriatiate water and refuel that comes with your tokamak.
Safely handling tritium is fantastically more complicated that the fuel of a fission power plant - I disagree with this, especially when considering the infinitely long HLW with fission fuel. Handling Tritium isn't easy but it's much more manageable.
Tritium breeding: we will have a FLiBe blanket and breed tritium, but we won't be processing and pulling out the Tritium on board, that will happen on land, so at port you drain the Tritiated FLiBe and replace it with Li-6 enriched FLiBe. There's a few companies working on the Tritium fuel cycle technology that are making great progress.
> infinitely long HLW with fission fuel
You don't have to process high level wastes on your ship, but you do with tritium. Even if you don't plant to extract the tritium from the blanket modules, you do need to recycle the unburnt fuel (the burn-up fraction is at best a few percent).
Tritium is radioactive hydrogen: it's a gas that explodes in air at low concetrations, it reacts with organic compunds, it has high mobility in pretty much any material, by decaying it produces Helium bubbles that can embrittle metals, its β radiation crack glasses etc.
unless you're the US Navy...
[flagged]
Dumb layperson question: my understanding of confined plasma fusion from a while ago was that the energy flux across the enclosing boundary can not be handled by known materials without melting down. Is this still true? Not sure if you can share but would be curious to know what the "bottleneck" material is in your design as far as withstanding high temperatures/other extreme conditions goes.
Certainly the plasma could melt the wall if it were allowed to touch it, but by shaping the magnetic fields that confine the plasma, the plasma can be made to stay away from the wall (not perfectly, but well enough). This is how many fusion experiments operate today. The walls are made of tungsten and other materials that can handle heat, so even if (when) the plasma hits the wall, the melting isn't too severe.
Some "plasma touches wall" events are more severe than others. Sometimes it's even intentional. A "limited" plasma deliberately touches a part of the wall called the "limiter", and the limiter is used to bound the shape of the plasma. (Contrast with a "diverted" plasma; search both terms for more details.) On the other hand, one type of event where it's very much unintentional is called a vertical displacement event, in which the plasma, well, vertically displaces itself until it hits a wall and melts it. These suck but are planned for and handled.
If you're counting neutrons in that "energy flux", they'll just go through the wall (mostly); this is how tokamaks are supposed to make electricity, ie the neutrons go through the wall and hit a "blanket" that's much better at absorbing neutrons, and the blanket will heat up and the heat will be converted to electricity.
> If you're counting neutrons in that "energy flux", they'll just go through the wall (mostly); this is how tokamaks are supposed to make electricity, ie the neutrons go through the wall and hit a "blanket" that's much better at absorbing neutrons, and the blanket will heat up and the heat will be converted to electricity.
Yes! This is what I was wondering about. Presumably you would want more energy out than you use to run the reactor, and if that amount of neutron flux would melt the wall it would not be a workable design. Glad to know if this is not true.
YC26 featuring Mokkatok - fusion for third wave coffee shops. You heard it here first
What kind of a blanket are you using and how thick is it? Seems like that would be the determining factor for size and cost.
Whether solid or liquid blankets, these guys seem clueless. How about the neutron shield? Gonna breed tritium as well? How long do they suspect reactor components can last w/o all the heat and neutron radiation?
Why specifically target maritime? Getting a stationary reactor to 25MWe at all would be an incredible feat in itself.
True there would be other land based uses for a 25MWe fusion reactor, the thing is it will be quite expensive and hard to compete on $/kWh against other energy sources... it's easier to compete in maritime / there aren't as good alternatives.
> we’re focusing on large commercial shipping (>10,000 TEU) and mobile military vessels to provide ship-to-shore power capability
I can't tell for sure what this means, if it's propulsion or a temporary ship to shore power plant. I suppose this gives them the latitude to target both. Or perhaps the idea is to get exposure to maritime shipping investors.
A mobile power plant might be useful for deep sea mining, or meeting seasonal energy demands for major cities.
Unlike what the nuclear Navy does today which is directly mechanically link the steam turbine to the propeller... we have the turbine spin a generator that creates a high voltage electric bus, which can than power a motor for propulsion. But you can 'easily' swap out the motor and tap off that HV bus for any other electrical load. Agree with all those other potential applications for mobile power at sea, there's a ton! Even disaster relief after hurricanes sort of thing, if the grid goes down we sail over and support.
> nuclear Navy does today which is directly mechanically link the steam turbine to the propeller
Not exactly, but very close to true. As I hear, newest Virginia class of US submarines are planned to be all-electric, but rumors said, they are extremely expensive, so all currently commissioned ones have close to classic propulsion system.
Probably because on-land there are better way to get the same output and it doesn't require unproven technology.
Maritime makes sense from that point of view. However, this point of view ignores that fusion is hard for us right now.
I bet it's a case of someone not understading this field properly and thinking that just throwing money at it will solve everything.
It seems like if you can get the reactor working then you're floating right on top of all the fuel you could ever want, provided you're doing hydrogen fusion.
Fusion fuel is so compact, there's really no need for that. To get an idea of it, deuterium is less than 0.1% of the hydrogen in water, and there's enough in your morning shower to provide all your energy needs for a year.
Nuclear aircraft carriers go thirty years without refueling, and fusion could easily do the same.
Mounting a fusion reactor (largely automated - these ships have a skeleton crew) on every big ship seems ambitious enough, why would you...sure, why not, package an automated deuterium fuel refinement facility in a box on the ship too. In another ten years you'll be getting them in Christmas crackers.
where can I read about fully-automated, ship-stable, ~zero maintenance deuterium sea-water extraction systems?
YC32
Hot stuff. Both literally and figuratively. An energy breakthrough is really required to get the world back on track. My thesis is that the longer it takes for us to get on the fusion train the more craziness we will see in the world. Wish you all the best and will follow your journey.
> An energy breakthrough is really required to get the world back on track
Not really, the energy technologies we've needed have been around for about half a century, with quite reasonable economics (albeit less and less so, as the time pressure increases), especially compared to the alternative. The problems that need to be solved are political and economic, not technical.
> The problems that need to be solved are political and economic, not technical.
You're saying the technical problems involved in fusion power have already been solved. They haven't.
He's talking about problems with the world, not with fusion power. We don't need a magic bullet to make all our problems disappear, we just need to apply the resources we have in a consistent and correct manner.
> You're saying the technical problems involved in fusion power have already been solved
Nope, try reading it again.
> Fission works technically, but not practically. Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) could power ships
It's not like they “could”, they do actually power more than a hundred vessels worldwide (mostly submarines, but also aircraft carriers and icebreakers (the russians have 8 of those)) ;).
> Our tokamak is
Use of the present tense here is interesting. Do they have a tokamak?
They have 3d renderings of one. So, in VC-speak, yes.
What's going on in your business plan that would be different if we replaced "future tokamak" with:
- compact CPP-violating antimatter reactor
- super-efficient MHD turbine
- perpetual motion engine
- magic box which will be invented in 5 years
No, really, I want to know what you would do differently in each of these situations.
> perpetual motion engine
[with apologies to OP] "Hey HN, we’re just Ian and Jay's son, co-founders of Maritime Perpetual Motion (https://maritimeperpetualmot.io/n). We’re working on pitching perpetual motion reactors to VCs—specifically, large well-capitalised funds and Angel Investor applications. Should be easy!
Yes, we know: perpetual motion has been the energy source of the future for centuries…and it always will be. But high-temperature superconductors (HTS) have changed the game for magnetic bearings, and we believe we’ll witness someone else achieving Q > 1 within a few (say 3) years. That’s huge.
(Side note: Q is the ratio of input power divided by output power. Q> 1 means the machine is producing more power than it consumes, achieving ‘perpetuity.’)
However, getting to perpetuity is just the first daunting challenge. Making the first-of-a-kind (FOAK) machines cost-competitive on the grid? That might be even harder.
That’s why we’re taking this hopefully-soon-to-be breakthrough in perpetual motion and applying it to the first market we believe makes sense: extracting money from VCs.
Instead of targeting 24/7 baseload grid electricity—where perpetual motion has to compete with real things which really exist and actually work, like solar, wind, batteries, and natural gas—we’re focusing on large commercial funds (>10,000 $) and mobile individual investors to provide wallet-to-wallet capital transfer capability.
Why VCs? They don’t have great alternatives—the crypto industry is old-hat, hydrogen and ammonia are being explored but come with serious downsides that can only be handwaved away for so long: low energy density, flammability, leaks, and massive infrastructure challenges. AI is running out its welcome, and nobody cares about the Hyperloop. It's time to return to the overbalanced wheel and friends for another 'go round' - see what I did there? Perpetual motion will provide a high-density, long-term solution without the same infrastructure challenges—once it works, of course! wink wink.
One common question is, why not zero-point energy? Zero point energy works fictitiously, but not practically. Small Modular Blackholes (SMBs) could produce power, but licensing is brutally hard and expensive—doing it internationally with enriched antimatter is nearly impossible. Public perception is another major barrier: if we’re deploying thousands of machines globally, they need to be meltdown-proof. Perpetual Motion is the only way to guarantee that. Regulation also isn’t as bad. While perpetual motion won’t be a walk in the park to license, the NRC has declared a distinct framework for it—more like FTL drives and teleporters than nuclear power plants. That’s a game-changer.
Instead of a 500+ MW grid-scale reactor, our system is 25 MWe, designed for, ummm, ... ship propulsion! Our tokamakebelieve is roughly, uhh, jet-engine-sized, but with Room Temperature Superconductor magnets (8-9T) and higher azimuth current (~10MA). The first-wall power flux capacitor is down from multi-MW/m² to nearly 500 kW/m²—still tough, but not nightmare mode. The materials challenges associated with the first wall and nuclear activation of the Bremsstrahlung structures is greatly reduced. Also, ships don’t require 90% uptime for some reason, probably, making this a far more forgiving early application of perpetual motion; the famously profitable and high-margin global shipping industry.
Jay's son and I come from Fintech and Theranos, where we solved hard marketing hype problems at scale. My background is BS engineering (NC State, BS) and VX physics[1] (Prager University, MS). We’ve been busy during our time in YC making progress on our elevator-pitch design, and are in the process of assembling a team of business development managers and LinkedIn rockstars who can pull this off.
We sell this as a ridiculously hard problem, of course (because VCs wouldn't invest in anything else). But we think extracting money for old rope is the right hard problem—one that’s actually solvable (and for us, worth solving!) with today’s tech if applied correctly. Eventually the cheaper and more robust SOAK and NOAK (second-of-a-kind and nth-of-a-kind) machines 'will arrive' in the coming decades (2050-2060) wink wink, and then we'll pivot to decapitalising the taxpayer and hypewashing saving the world (we'll need to change our name by then to keep the cash flowing), but until then we'll be out mining the ocean for precious metals using our perpetual Magneto Hydro Drive!
Would love to hear your thoughts—whether you’re deep into troll-physics and engineering, skeptical-but–gullible, or just have a trust fund and nothing to do with it. Ask us anything!"
[1] r/VXjunkies
How about first getting fusion to work for reality before getting it working for maritime.
I hope this doesn't sound aggressive, but I'm a little confused. What specifically are you launching today?
The NS Savannah (fission powered) was unable to enter some ports because the local governments did not allow nuclear powered vessels in their waters.
Do you think that a fusion powered vessel will be allowed in?
Yes
Could you explain why its a yes?
At a guess.
Fusion is being regulated like particle accelerators, not like fission reactors.
The Fusion Industry Association has more information on this.
https://www.fusionindustryassociation.org/policy/fusion-regu...
Any port that lets in a LNG ship or similar is likely to allow the much lower risk of a fusion ship coming in.
> we’re taking this soon-to-be breakthrough in fusion and applying it
Is this a parody? Performance art? Outright scam?
How does one "apply" a thing that does not exist and has been "coming soon" for decades?
What is next? Of course, my full-service woolly mammoth wash. They are promised to be cloned soon. No, i am not going to solve that problem, just assume someone else will! I am just accepting VC money for my mammoth wash.
Very cool. If you could also make a smaller one with ~3kw output that fits on a locomotive frame you'd literally have the entire freight rail industry the world over as customers.
Would you though? A lot of freight lines in europe are already electric, wouldn't it be much more efficient to have a stationary high-power reactor than carrying around a smaller one on each locomotive?
That might be balanced somewhat by not needing to maintain thousands of miles of caternary wire.
I think maintaining thousands of miles of wire and one large powerplant would be cheaper than maintaining thousands of small mobile reactors, but that's just speculation of course. And most of the wire has to already be there anyways for passenger transport, I think, because many rail lines are used by cargo and people. Unless every train should have a reactor?
Once we have cheap miniaturized fusion reactors, that work stable - we won't need so much electric wiring anymore, true.
Unfortunately, so far exactly 0 working fusion reactors have been build, so currently, I would not demolish electric lines just yet.
The underlying technology does not exist in a production form, to the extent that it's not clear which basic reactor design option is going to be the future. So we can't know what the maintenance burden from a fisson rector is, much less one mounted on a train. Don't plan on tearing down those overhead cables just yet.
In europe sure, in the US most of freight rail isn't and companies operating those rail roads don't want to spend money on eletrifying railroads.
Currently they're trying to gas light us that hydrogen-hybrid locomotives are the futures (why not use diesel-hybrid locomotives that already exist is a mistery)
trains in the US have electric motors that actually make the wheels turn.
The issue with the US is the distances trains have to go. Mostly short distance trains will be(are?) fully electric but long distance and frieght is diesel series hybrid engines.
Sorry, I wasn't clear in my comment. I was talking about trains that can use grid or diesel engine to power those electric motors.
And hydrogen comment was about this: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/articles/usdot-announc... . My tinfoil hat theory is that every carbon-fuel company pushing for hydrogen knowing well it's energy density isn't enough, so the experiment will fail, and they're going back to diesel saying that green tech isn't ready.
I'm still confused, but that's ok. I spoke to why we don't use electric trains in the US, because the distances are too far and the terrain is too varied. The rockies, the cascades, just to get imports from west to east. No matter what, the power plant will have to be on the freight trains in the US. In the US, all freight trains are electric series hybrids, with diesel power plants.
I doubt hydrogen will ever go, because people like me will say "Hindenburg, but already on the ground where it can do the most damage, plus moving at 50-80MPH"
I get that, but US freight doesn't want to eletrify railnetwork at all. From my understading this is because even where it's totatly doable, but financially not feasable for various reasons (IIRC one of them are double stacked containers?).
4.5MW of power for GE 6000 locomotive (might be incorrect but it comports with other comments here), and i routinely see freight trains with 3 or more locomotives (i've seen way more than 3, but i don't have a picture or anything). In the midwest, where it's flat, trains can be miles long. I've counted over 250 on a single train before. and that's 4+ locomotives, so >18,000,000 watts.
I guess they could keep freight trains real short so they're single engine, but that's still 4 and a half million watts stall. Each one can move itself plus at least 10,000 tonnes (i don't know the conversions, nor care, it's a lot of mass) The world record is 82,000 tonnes, 4.5 miles long, 682 cars, 8 locomotives - in Australia, with american locomotives, hauling iron ore.
I have to ask, are you from or in the US?
GE does make a battery powered locomotive, designed to be used for regenerative braking, it can run at full power by itself for a half hour or so https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabtec_FLXDrive 3,200,000 watts.
3kW output? I think you mean 5MW output... large electric locomotives are in 2.5 to 3.5MW continuos power. Some diesel-electric huge ones are even larger, like 5MW.
Yeah must’ve meant MW.. I’ve got more than one 3KW generator at my house and they can barely run my AC much less a locomotive.
Yes, I meant MW
Why is that sounding like hydrogen trains all over again.
Radiation shielding scales poorly in the downwards direction.
I meant MW :P
I think my induction hob is roughly 3kW. Why don't we all just put a nuclear reactor in our basement at that point? You people are all dreaming.
What is your plan in case a ship-sized fusion power plant turns out to be impossible, for example if you build one on land and much bigger and much heavier than your target on sea and it just doesn't work, or if you find out before you build it that it won't work, for example when you are running simulations on your design?
“One common question is, why not fission?”
US Nimitz and Ford class aircraft carriers are fission powered along with several submarines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Nuclear-powered_ships...
Devils advocate, a few countries wont let them dock.
This cannot work: the power balance doesn't close for a 25 MWe tokamak. Otherwise people would have made plans to build one already. Tokamaks want to be big for physics reasons, way before economics reasons. This is part of why DEMO is so big. If ARC could be any smaller it would be.
Is there a limit to how big before the effect falls off, or will we see twenty gigawatt net power output mega-tokamaks with rings five stories tall?
Fission seems to like to be big too but for different mostly logistical reasons. It makes all the nasty and hard aspects a lot easier if you do a lot of it on one site rather than a little on many sites, and it avoids having to ship nasty fissile material around too much.
Tokamaks seem to require very precise alignment of the confinement magnets. Is this going to be a lot harder on a rolling, heaving, vibrating ship?
I really fail to see how the stated credentials here add up to a team that can achieve fusion on ships. I hope you’re able to hoover up enough VC money to find people who have the appropriate backgrounds to do this.
Seems like a cool idea its just odd to hear about it before the underlying tech is done.
Do you have a reason to be more optimistic than the average punter?
it's a fair point... sometimes announcing early is about securing mindshare and attracting talent, even if the final product is still a ways off. maybe they're trying to get ahead of potential competitors? or perhaps gauge public interest before committing further resources.
Yeah there have been a few good instances of this in the past.
Like Billy G selling DOS before he owned it.
But the lead time on such a business proposition has to be pretty short right? Like less than a decade?
So if I was founding a startup in the fusion space, I would either have a solution for Fusion less than 2 years away, or know someone with an unannounced promising solution in the fusion space.
> Like Billy G selling DOS before he owned it
DOS actually existed. It just had a different owner.
I'm sorry, but it looks like a scam. The "maritime" addition looks like it's designed to filter out investors gullible enough not to ask too many questions.
This is not unprecedented, Ulstein THOR is the same concept. They're building a nuclear-powered ship with a reactor type that has never really been proven in practice. With unclear use-cases ("recharge battery-powered ships at sea and Antarctic cruises").
Why not build a demonstrator reactor first? _ANY_ energy positive fusion reactor is going to be a HUGE deal.
“…where we solved hard engineering problems at scale.”
But were those solutions good solutions to those problems? I’ve seen enough evidence to be reluctant to point blank take this as a positive background. If you could be more specific about which problems that could go a long way to validating your credentials in another high-risk industry where catastrophic failure has large repercussions.
MagicLeap vibes all over again.
why not inertial confinement? Z-machine at Sandia has been already for 20 years generating fusion conditions. Livermore NIF got that "break-even" in the recent years, and with solid-state lasers the efficiency would at least order of magnitude better than the old lasers the NIF was using. And the only real Q>>1 fusion we've got working so far - H-bombs - is inertial confinement. So, in some sense inertial confinement is "just" an engineering problem of efficiently "taming"/reproducing at smaller scale the H-bomb with lasers or Z-pinch (or both at the same time, plus the magnetic compression that NIF added to the lasers to get that "break-even") whereis, as far as i see, any Tokamak (or any other magnetic confinement) is still yet to demonstrate any similar results.
Sorry for being so naive but I need to ask: What is the difference between a startup dedicated to making "Fusion Reactors for Maritime Ships" and a startup dedicated to making "Anti-Gravity devices for Airplanes"? Since you're talking about applying a non existing technology to a specific market, swing for the fences and go all in.
It's so weird how so many people on HN think fusion is magic technology at the level of antigravity.
One is theoretically achievable using known materials. The other is theoretically achievable using unknown materials. That distinction might make a difference.
So far only one of these two ideas sounded not entirely deranged to the good people of YC.
So there is at least (and, perhaps, also at most) a sociological difference.
I had to recheck to make sure it wasn't a Softbank investment. YC must be rolling in the dough to fund companies like this one.
Or swing for all the fences at once--"we're making fusion powered AGI for the technorapture!" Or similarly, why not faster than light space travel?
Forget FTL,. 5C, I'm generous.
What is the feedback from actual prospective clients?
Did YC ask mostly about feasibility, or were they more interested in the customer's opinion?
The customers are interested, there's really no slam dunk other way to decarbonize the industry, it's a super hard (and expensive) problem.
At the risk of being a vadnik, commercial nuclear SMR are well advanced in another country: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RITM-200
How do you intend to address the crew training issue? Merchant vessel operators tend to hire low wage seamen with limited technical training, plus a few qualified engineering officers. Marine diesel engines are pretty simple and robust but I would imagine that operating a fusion plant might require more technical training.
Back of the envelope (and some quick googling), a large container ship burns hundreds of tons of fuel per day, at a cost of 700-1000 $/t. Plus, all that fuel occupies tonnage that isn't carrying paying cargo. If you can save on that with a magic new reactor, the cost of a well trained tech on every ship isn't going to break the budget.
Fusion fuel isn't going to be free. Fusion reactors aren't magic: in a sense they're very traditional in that they will be used to turn water into superheated steam that spins a steam turbine to drive the propeller. Just like in 1897. Even if the fusion reactor could somehow magically be made maintenance free, the steam plant will be maintenance intensive. Ask any engineering officer who worked on a steam plant, regardless of whether the heat source was fossil fuel or fission. This is part of the reason why merchant ships switched from steam turbines to diesel engines decades ago: lower maintenance costs and lower crew training requirements.
Maritime fusion power could be a good idea but you have to evaluate complete system lifecycle cost instead of looking at just one component.
Fusion fuel will be close enough to free. Deuterium is less than a thousandth of the hydrogen in water, and there's enough in your morning shower to provide all your energy needs for a year. A liter of heavy water costs about a thousand bucks.
For DT reactors, lithium is the other side of the fuel equation, and at the scale we need that's really cheap as well.
I'd really like to hear what you guys are going to work on, beside PR. There are no nuclear fusion reactors, nor do we even know what one would look like if it did exist. How can you already plan to adapt fusion reactors to ships then?
This feels oddly "premature", for lack of a stronger word.
If it's small enough to fit in every ship used in a carrier group, you could revolutionize US naval operations.
The carrier is nuclear powered and can travel at its top speed indefinitely. But it doesn't except briefly in emergencies, because the rest of the group is powered by oil and would quickly run out of fuel.
Why don't you make one that works on land first? Would be an achievement in and of itself.
As it applies to shipping, I'm curious to know if you initially considered alternative/hybrid approaches which would augment current/modern approaches to shipping, like using sails. It seems to me like this is an obvious miss in modern (dirty) shipping.
There are other companies doing exactly this (for a random example: https://www.bartechnologies.uk/), but they definitely don't replace the need for engines entirely, just reduce their usage by a bit.
Not sure why you would expect a fusion company to have anything to do with this. The technology is completely different.
(Note: not affiliated with launching company, just a random commenter)
Cool!
Ships were the first application that came to my mind when I read about the roughly container-sized reactor by Lockheed Skunk Worls...that didn't happen.
Are you guys working together the Commonwealth Fusion Systems? JET-Size and HTS magnets sounds a lot like SPAR/ARC.
Really excited about this! Congrats on the launch. Ships make sense as a first target, but I'm curious -- do you see a future in which we have household fission reactors? E.G. power an entire house (city block, etc...) with fission reactors?
Thank you! Household fission reactors: my take is that from a technical perspective we could definitely do it. It's more from a proliferation and nuclear waste perspective, will it be allowed and accepted by the public? Not sure, maybe though.
If that's a concern, how do you solve that for shipping? What if some somali pirate steals your fusion ship? Would they have to have armed protection (on top of the guards they already have, that's probably not enough when nuclear proliferation is the issue)?
With fusion, there is no Uranium or Plutonium or highly radioactive materials. The main concern is Tritium which is a categorically reduced concern from enriched Uranium (but still needs to be secured and accounted for).
Is the tritium a different isotope than the one I can have shipped to my house on the internet?
https://tritiumworkshop.com/products/megaglow-tritium-marker...
Nope, that's it! We do need vastly larger quantities though, on the order of a kilogram.
why do we continue to discount solar and batteries for home use?
The argument that I've heard is that roof installed solar is incredibly expensive compared to all other solar. Add in the other compromises with orientation and obstructed sunlight, and you quickly realize that it is likely better to install solar and batteries at dedicated power facilities that scale better than to distribute the infrastructure in residential neighborhoods.
> if we’re deploying thousands of nuclear reactors globally, they need to be meltdown-proof. Fusion is the only way to guarantee that. Regulation also isn’t as bad.
"What's a molten salt reactor"
MSRs can melt down, but the steps to get there are rarer. Also the number of things that can go wrong and release radioactivity might be higher than LWRs.
Might be, but probably aren't. The most troublesome fission products all end up chemically bound in the fuel salt, and most designs are passively safe, and inherently pretty stable since the reaction slows down significantly as the fuel heats. There's a good safety margin since the salt is liquid over a wide range.
A "melt down" isn't exactly a thing for them since the fuel is melted already by design, but if the fuel manages to overheat, then a plug melts and either the fuel dumps into cooling tanks, or neutron poisons spread through the fuel.
Excellent initiative. From the 1st reading, it does seem "within the realms of current technology". All the best.
I have a small question. Which CAD / 3D / Physics software is used for such design and simulations ?
Thank you! We're probably going to have to eventually use every engineering software in existence haha for CAD, mainly solidworks and CATIA, for EM Physics modeling: COMSOL. But most of the analysis is done with specialized plasma physics and radiation transport codes like MCNP or Open MC.
Nuclear fission is far more tractable than fusion, highly proven in marine transport, well-suited to workloads (boiling water -> electical generation -> propulsion), and yet still has proved nonviable not only in commercial shipping (Soviet/Russian icebreakers excepted), but in military transport other than submarines and, for the US and France, aircraft carriers. Even in those use-cases, most militaries with submarine fleets have no nuclear subs, and those which do often have few; only the US, Russia, UK, France, China, and India operate any nuclear submarines. Only the US and France operate nuclear carriers, with the latter operating only one such (China has one under development).
The US commissioned several nuclear cruisers, with a total of 9 achieving active status, though the last of these, the USS South Carolina, was decommissioned in July 1999.
Even given military (rather than commercial) considerations, the ships were too costly to operate and maintain.
There were a total of three non-Soviet commercial nuclear vessels, the American NS Savannah, and two ships launched by Germany (Otto Hahn) and Japan (Mutsu) respectively. Dating from the late 1950s to early 1970s, none proved economically viable, all faced major regulatory hurdles, being excluded from most ports and requiring extensive negotiations where they were permitted to berth at all, and all three were either converted to conventional powerplants or decommissioned entirely well before designed end-of-life.
As of 2023 China has designed, but not built, a thorium-based molten salt reactor (MSR) 24000 TEU cargo ship, a new development since I'd last looked at the space. More:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion#Civi...>
Looking into the matter of nuclear-powered shipping about a decade ago, I was struck by the relative small count (about 80k vessels then, since expanded to about 100k), and the frequency of hull losses, roughly 200 or so per decade. This suggests both scale issues and significant safety concerns, whether for fission-based or fusion-based propulsion, which despite a far smaller radiation footprint still has concerns with fusion reactor radioactive contamination, particularly on heavily-travelled sea lanes which tend to concentrate near population centres and fisheries, and thus significant environmental considerations, likely leading to severe regulatory restrictions. The tendency of shipping standards to be a race-to-the-bottom (figuratively and literally) given various minimal-requirements "flags of convenience" registries makes the probability that a nuclear fleet would have dodgey standards and/or find itself excluded from most ports (and commercially attractive ones most especially) also bodes poorly for prospects likely extending out decades even with unprecedented technological developments in the area.
Maritime Fusion strikes me as not only a very long shot but one with pretty limited prospects overall.
Hi guys.
I don't claim to understand any of the physics and engineering challenges of fusion, but from all the general-interest material published, and the long history of fusion research, it seems that the capital cost of a fusion propulsion system is going to be far in excess of a conventional marine engine. I guess the hope is that the very cheap fuel might reduce the operational expenses such that it can compete economically.
However, if you've got a fusion power plant that a) has essentially free and practically-massless fuel, and b) the relationship between rated power output and capital cost is less than linear (again, not an expert on the physics but true of pretty much all such systems), I wonder whether the way to make a fusion ship economically competitive against conventional shipping is to max out the power and build a ship capable of much faster speeds than conventional ships.
I mean, we used to operate passenger liners back in the 1950s that averaged about 35 knots across the Atlantic, so presumably we could do considerably better than that.
I thought we need Q > 10 to really get enough power out of the reactor, due to our inability to capture all the energy efficiently.
Do you have any clever ways to capture the energy output?
How are you looking at electromagnetic shielding, and the requirements imposed by the use of ship radar and possible magnetic compasses?
I had a startup in the bunker fuel market (BunkerEx - acquired a few years ago) - if you need any on the ground help let me know!
not a fusion founder myself - but would love to chat/validate a green maritime concept
email is in my profile, or leave email here
I love your enthusiasm for an ambitious technological goal, and love the idea (always have) of fusion power being used for as many things as possible, especially for ships, but all that aside, color me skeptical of success. ITER and the U.S. fusion projects have barely gone anywhere despite billions in investment and I don't see that changing soon.
Twitter thread:
https://x.com/MKVRiscy/status/1893590632901595491
> Would love to hear your thoughts
Spaceships. Or patents for those.
Could be your plan B - no ships for you, pity, but your patented designs are worth paying for.
Where will the priming energy to sustain the plasma come from, if an emergency restart at sea is needed?
They need a backup powerplant for propulsion anyway, there's a million things that can go wrong with the reactor and you can't repair it a thousand miles away from land.
And maritime diesels have a lot of power. 50 MW is not unusual. Add a couple of batteries/fly wheels/super capacitors, and you easily have enough to start a fusion reactor.
I'm curious why a Tokamak rather than a spherical design; aren't they supposed to be more compact? Best of luck!
Hey, how small do you think a fusion generator can get? Like, ships, sure. But how about car sized? Phone sized?
The scaling laws for fusion follow a power law for size and magnetic field (see https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/175830/nuclear-f...), which allow for better break even for commercial applications for larger fusion reactors like ITER. All of the smaller fusion reactors proposed need to use high Tc superconducting wire to generator higher magnetic fields for smaller reactors.
And at the sizes CFS is building, we're already maxing out the structural strength of the reactors. We can't go much smaller with tokamaks, even if the superconductors get even better.
What's wrong with putting ordinary reactors in ships again? Already tried and tested, yet still extremely under-tapped...
Plus, you know, your startup will have a chance of landing a customer within a human lifetime, so there's that.
On "because regulation", sounds like that's the problem. Maybe you make a ship that's reactor can pop out and float when you approach national waters, pick it up on the way back.
What would the engine with this look like? Does it cause a lot of noise or any other damage to sea life?
It's a heavy black box which emits neutrons.
The good news is that neutrons are easily absorbed by steel and water.
The bad news is that the resulting irradiated steel isn't anywhere near as strong as it was pre-irradiation.
https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run...
Isn't it Output Power / Input Power which results Q > 1?
Have you considered making long haul tugboats?
At first I thought this was insane.
But I also think HTS superconductors have changed the game for fusion.
Picking an early adopter that could support higher prices than the grid makes sense.
This is super ambitious and difficult, but I wish you all the best in overcoming these challenges. Someone will, sometime.
Is now the time? Could be.
High temperature superconductors changed the game for fusion in 1986.
But what it has done recently is allowed creation of much more powerful magnets. This is a new development, the practical application of these high temperature superconductors. I don’t know why it took so long to get there, but it has.
HTS was available in ceramic form, but ceramics sorta suck to work with. So potential users had to wait for people to make them into wires, which was apparently a fat pain in the ass, and then for that technology to be commercialized, all of which took until the 2010s.
so, given no one knows how to use fusion to produce energy, why do you think now is the time to plan how to put this non-existent technology on to boats?
Don't understand how that could have somehow been vetted by a YC committee. I mean I'm all in for fusion power, but so far it remains in the state of utterly edge-case research project into which governments all over the world have been pouring insane amounts of money in the hope for the holly grail of energy. And you are spawning a private company that is discussing the nitty-gritty details of applying that non-existent technology to a niche market? I mean would people invest into a startup applying quantum computing to wearable devices? And that latter idea is actually way more down to earth.
Helion Energy (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8178450) has been going 11 years and building prototypes and raising many millions by saying power is 5 years away or so and not publishing any results. So I guess that model works sort of.
Currently "Helion claims it will build the world’s first nuclear fusion power plant by 2028 and has already secured a purchase agreement from Microsoft." but Sabine is sceptical (https://youtu.be/YxuPkDOuiM4)
Helion's timelines were always conditioned on funding, which they didn't get until years had passed. Adjusted for when they did get funding, they're pretty much on track.
Building seven prototypes, each larger and more advanced, doesn't seem to me like a knock against them.
Interesting yes, but regardless of the scientific viability of Helion's approach (that I have no means to discuss), at least they are aiming at addressing the core problem of fusion energy as an investment strategy: turning an non-existent into an existent technology. What bewilders me here are people discussing the business model and implementation details of these ships' reactors for the endeavor to become profitable. These kind of discussions would only be appropriate in the Worldbuilding StackExchange.
I guess taking an optimistic view, these sort of designs seem quite similar to the MIT ARC/SPARC design put forward in a lecture put up on youtube "Breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion? - Prof. Dennis Whyte" https://youtu.be/KkpqA8yG9T4?list=PL_ywmYr5cjkBWSPyqEaps8uGu...
That actually seems a reasonable attempt at a practical design so all Maritime Fusion have to do is wait till someone cracks that and then do the marine version.
There are plans to build an ARC design producing power in the 2030s https://chesterfieldbusinessnews.com/2024/commonwealth-fusio...
You should have Fusion Reactors first...
Y'all got any of them jobs?
Do you plan to use AMSC as a vendor?
This company will fail. Most likely it will be a huge opportunity cost for the founders and set them back financially by a huge chunk. I hope it will be a good time. Spend some YV funds on a keg.
Fusion will never be practical. Why not put it in an application that will ALSO never be practical?
Fusion for crypto?
Oh, fusion for AGI datacenters
What if we already have fusion power at sea? Water has one of the highest heat capacities of any substance in the world, and Earth is covered in it. The sun provides all the fusion energy we need while our oceans absorb and store it. What if we simply extract the stored fusion power from the ocean? Ocean Thermal
To extract thermal energy you need a temperature difference. The way to do it for ocean thermal is with OTEC, which pumps cold water from deep down up to a large heat exchanger at the surface. It's usable for stationary power but I don't think it'd work for a ship, it's bulky and would add a lot of drag. Plus it mainly works in tropical regions.
Good luck. I'd wager you'll end up pivoting to SMRs. They exist today. Are cheaper to produce. And their failure mode would be... capsizing the reactor at sea probably and running on stored diesel until you make it to port?
We've been running reactors on ships since the 50s after all.
> I'd wager you'll end up pivoting to SMRs. They exist today.
who is selling ~zero maintenance, mass-produced SMRs today?
I meant in that they could actually be built and working SMRs exist in labs and test facilities in greater numbers than fusion reactors. My local university has been running one for ages.
How is that an argument to avoid SMRs if magical thinking about fusion reactors is allowed?
all my other comments on this post are about how fusion doesn't exist and YC funding a Fusion Boating Company before anyone has ever generated any net electricty with fusion is deeply stupid.
SMR can be stupid and not exist too!
Why focus on maritime? Plan for interstellar ships already. This changes nothing about the viability of your „startup“
This is awesome— sounds hard but rooting for you guys.
naysayer here, but best of luck anyway
it's definitely a good choice to target a niche market, but imho (DT) fusion will never be competitive on earth unless theres a breakthrough in cold fusion, muon fusion, etc
the right niche is probably spaceships
fusion is still worth pursuing; i always judge these efforts by their scientific output rather than their chances of reaching commercially viable fusion (zero)
adorbs
Congrats on launching. This is a hard area. Wish you luck.
Thank you!
> “focusing on military vessels … [we] come from SpaceX and Tesla”
So you guys are basically part of the MAGA military complex? Why do you need YC?
Is funding your moonshot concept a way for YC to signal something politically?
Nothing to do with the hot news of the moment. It's just YC doing what it always does.
I think there is probably some kind of headline bleedover effect where, because of repetition, we start seeing these things everywhere, like the afterimage of a bright light.
I think the point being made is more subtle than you're appreciating: it's not just any defense firm, it's a defense firm founded by engineers who have worked on multiple Elon projects. I understand we try to stay away from politics here, but speaking objectively+non-normatively: Elon has been known to greatly favor working with people that have worked at his companies, and he now has immense influence over the contracting processing of the federal government.
In other words: two Cybertruck engineers starting a defense company in February 2025 is naturally going to raise some eyebrows, especially when they're selling a technology that they're counting on other people to invent soon.
More interestingly/generally, your mention of confirmation bias/Bader-Meinhoff raises a question for me: is Y-Combinator really investing more in government and heavy industry as it appears? And it looks like the answer is yes, though it's still a tiny minority compared to general B2B SaaS companies:
https://jaredheyman.medium.com/on-the-last-decade-of-y-combi...
Government is a bigger slicer than it's been since 2017, and similar for industry. More drastically, the pool of companies has greatly constricted in geographic terms, with almost all of the 2024 batch coming from the US. Most importantly--as many of y'all probably already know, but I didn't--they just backed their first pure-defense startup in August, Ares Cruise Missiles.
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ares-industries
As far as company mottos go, "Missiles are cool" is a fucking terrifying one... Every day I fear the LessWrong people were less wrong than I thought they were.
You guys are welcome to connect whatever dots you like, but the idea that YC funding decisions would change depending on the politics of the CEOs of the companies the founders used to work for strikes me as absurd, and I think I have a basis for saying that.
YC's process looks something like this: smart founders? check. Technical? check. Big important problem? check. Technically credible on this problem? check. "Did $Thing at $Company" can help on that last point for obvious reasons, but the idea of some triple-bank-shot collusion/corruption with Big Political Players is Too Much Internet.
This matters! I would hate it if any smart, technical, wants-to-work-on-big-problem founder were to read HN threads and think "I don't have connections, so I guess YC is not for me." Please don't anyone think that! If that's you, then YC is for people just like you. You have as good a chance as anyone, precisely because these externalities don't make the difference.
To shift gears to your other question:
> is Y-Combinator really investing more in government and heavy industry as it appears?
I don't know, but it's possible. However, the reason might not be what you'd expect. Trends among YC startups have to do with what founders want to work on, and that is mostly determined by macro factors beyond YC.
I suppose both my points could be summed up like this: "YC is all about the founders". A nice, simple, true sentence, but with a lot of implications that are easy to miss.
I wish n-gate.com was still around.
The mere fact that you're proposing doing this on a moving vessel already tells me you're completely incompetent. No one has made fusion net positive, somehow building a net positive fusion reactor on a boat would be fine I guess but to suggest its better than enriched uranium is dishonest. You'll have more luck building a regular fission reactor on a commercial freighter than verify a fusion reactor for any ocean capable ship.
Have you modeled how plasma will behave when your reactor walls move tens of meters in any possible direction while rotating violently in every degree of freedom? Mind you, its not the plasma I'm concerned about. The ideal gas law keeps the atmosphere nice and steady. Its more of a combination of high magnetic field strength with salt water everywhere around the reactor that when destabilised in the slightest will cause a massive implosion.
>Jason and I come from SpaceX and Tesla >in the coming decades (2050-2060) >we'll pivot to decarbonising the grid and saving the world
just make a fission reactor, on land, in a pit, with a massive concrete wall between me and potential neutrons.
You'll have more luck building a regular fission reactor on a commercial freighter than verify a fusion reactor for any ocean capable ship.
That part, I'm not so sure about. Enriched uranium is potentially dangerous stuff, and has to be guarded closely. In a world with literal pirates, getting one on a commercial ship sounds very, very unlikely.
As you say, fusion seems equally unlikely, albeit from a physics standpoint rather than a regulatory standpoint. It's hard to tell whether the immovable object of physics would dominate the unstoppable force of regulation, or vice versa.
We already have 70 years experience of marine nuclear reactors. Most of them highly enriched uranium or plutonium.
Submarines for electrolysis of water into breathable oxygen and electrical power for propulsion and aircraft carriers for its massive power density.
On the other hand, we have 0 years of operational experience with fusion reactors. We have 0 energy positive land based designs, 0 marine adaptations. We have discovered exactly 0 benefits of fusion reactor designs over fission. and I'm certain that we'll have more than 100 years of experience in commercial fission operation before we even have a single decade of net positive fusion energy.
Highly dangerous? Absolutely, but the giant weapons attached to these nuclear marine reactors have killed far more people than those reactors. Hell, those aircraft carriers experience more radiation from coal power plants than their own reactor. And I'm not kidding.
> Enriched uranium is potentially dangerous stuff
Doesn't have to be very enriched to be used as fuel. Fuel rods are really tame and can be handled pretty easily.
Once they get put into a reactor and it is turned on, it's a completely different matter.
There are alternative fuel sources as well.
now, this is a thing that I want to see YC invest more into
Agreed!
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Great to see people trying to solve hard problems!