Fusion Helion’s launch hits hot weather as it races to a 2028 deadline

Everett, Washington-based Helion announced Friday that it has reached the final stage of its bid for integrated power. The plasma inside the Polaris prototype reactor has reached 150 million degrees, three-quarters of the way the company thinks it will be needed to use commercial fusion power.

“We’re very excited to be able to get to this point,” David Kirtley, founder and CEO of Helion, told TechCrunch.

Polaris is also working on deuterium-tritium fuel — a mixture of two hydrogen isotopes — which Kirtley said makes Helion the first company to do so. “We were able to see the fusion power increase as much as expected as heat,” he said.

The startup is locked in a competition with several other companies that want to sell hybrid energy, which could be an unlimited source of clean energy.

This possibility has investors rushing to bet on the technology. This week, Inertia Enterprises announced the $450 million Series A cycle that includes Bessemer and GV. In January, Type One Energy told TechCrunch that it was in instead of raising $250 millionwhen last summer Commonwealth Fusion Systems was upgraded $863 million from investors including Google and Nvidia. Helion himself arose $425 million last year from a group that included Sam Altman, Mithril, Lightspeed, and SoftBank.

While many other fusion companies are looking at the beginning of the 2030s to put electricity on the grid, Helion has an agreement with Microsoft to sell electricity from 2028, although the energy will come from a large commercial company called Orion that the company is building, not Polaris.

Each fusion reactor has its own set of events that depend on the reactor design. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, for example, needs to heat the blood plasma to more than 100 million degrees C inside a tokamak, a doughnut-shaped device that uses strong magnets to keep the blood plasma.

Helion’s reactor is different, requiring plasmas that are twice as hot to operate as intended.

The structure of the machine is the so-called modified configuration. The inner chamber looks like an hourglass, and at the end, fat is injected and turns into plasma. The magnet then accelerates the plasma into contact. When it first fuses, it is about 10 million to 20 million degrees C. A strong magnet then compresses the fusion ball, raising the temperature to 150 million degrees. All this happens in less than a millisecond.

Instead of extracting energy from thermal fusion, Helion uses the magnetic energy of the fusion reaction to generate electricity. Each pulse pushes back against its magnetic field, creating an electric field that can be harvested. By harvesting electricity directly from the combined cycle, the company hopes to outperform its competitors.

In the past year, Kirtley said that Helion cleaned some of the fields in the rectory to increase the amount of electricity it gets.

Although the company uses deuterium-tritium fuel today, on the road it plans to use deuterium-helium-3. Many fusion companies plan to use deuterium-tritium and extract energy as heat. Helion’s choice of fuel, deuterium-helium-3, produces a large number of particles, which strongly repel the magnetic field that confines the plasma, making it suitable for Helion’s direct-electricity method.

Helion’s main goal is to create plasma that reaches 200 million degrees, much higher than what other companies want, a function of the design of the reactor and the choice of fuel. “We believe that at 200 million degrees, that’s where you get to the sweet spot where you want to use the generator,” Kirtley said.

When asked if Helion had reached a scientific critical point – where fusion produces more energy than is needed to launch it – Kirtley expressed dismay. “We focus on the energy sector, the power generation, rather than the actual scientific activity.”

Helium-3 is common on the Moon, but not here on Earth, so Helion must make its own fuel. First, it will combine deuterium nuclei to form the first clusters. In full operation, while the main source of energy will be deuterium-helium-3 fusion, some of the reactions will be deuterium-on-deuterium, which will produce helium-3 that the company will purify and reuse.

The oil refinery is already underway. “It’s been amazing because a lot of technology has been easier to do than we expected,” Kirtley said. Helion has been able to produce helium-3 “at a very high energy level in terms of yield and purity,” he added.

Although Helion is currently the only developer using helium-3 in its fuel, Kirtley said he thinks other companies will do so in the future, hinting that he would be open to selling to them. “Some people – when they come and realize that they want to do this method of lighting directly and see the benefits from it – they will want to use helium-3 fuel,” he said.

Along with its efforts with Polaris, Helion is also building the Orion, a 50-megawatt fusion reactor needed to fulfill its Microsoft contract. “This is a step towards a power plant.”