Didn't this same company make the same "three years" claim in 2014? "Helion CEO David Kirtley says that his company can do it in three years."[1]
Happy to see investment in this space, but also tempering my expectations that having a commercial fusion reactor in three years is anything approaching realistic.
A comment[0] on Reddit by someone close to the Helion CEO claims the media left out some important context. Helion said they could do it in three years with funding and they didn't get the funding they needed.
She is talking about Tokamak, particularly, which really is a dead end. But a minuscule fraction of the spend is giving plasma fluid dynamics physicists work experience, so it is not all totally wasted. Maybe some more of it is going to superconducting magnets, which ought to be useful for something someday.
Happy to see investment in this space, but also tempering my expectations that having a commercial fusion reactor in three years is anything approaching realistic.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/14/y-combinator-and-mithril-i...