Helion Energy Raises $500 Million On The Fusion Power Of Stars
10 November, 2021
Helion, a clean energy company that seeks to usher in a new era of plentiful, zero-carbon electricity from fusion, just announced the close of its Series E raise of $500 million. The round was led by Sam Altman, whose involvement in the company as investor and chairman dates back to 2015. Existing investors, including Dustin Moskovitz, Mithril Capital and Capricorn Investment Group also participated in the round. The funding includes the opportunity for an additional $1.7 billion dollars tied to Helion reaching key performance milestones.
The capital will be used to complete the construction of Polaris, Helion’s seventh generation fusion generator, the world’s first fusion electricity demonstration facility. Building on the achievements of Helion’s pulsed non-ignition fusion technology and the performance of its six predecessors, Polaris is expected to be the first fusion device capable of demonstrating net electricity production. Helion plans to reach this milestone in 2024, paving the way for future fusion power plants.
“This funding ensures that Helion will be the first organization to generate electricity from fusion,” said Dr. David Kirtley, Founder and CEO of Helion Energy. "Our 6th prototype demonstrated that we can reach this pivotal milestone. In just a few years we will show that the world can count on fusion to be the zero-carbon energy source that we desperately need."
PROMOTED
Earlier this year, Helion became the first private fusion company to heat a fusion plasma to 100,000,000°C, a critical milestone on the path to commercial electricity from fusion. This was followed by Helion breaking ground in July 2021 for the Polaris facility in Everett, Washington, an event in which Helion’s leadership, Governor Jay Inslee and other Washington state elected officials participated.
“I’m delighted to be investing more in Helion, which is by far the most promising approach to fusion I’ve ever seen,” said Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and former President of Y Combinator, who now serves as Helion’s executive chairman. “With a tiny fraction of the money spent on other fusion efforts, and the culture of a startup, this team has a clear path to net electricity. If Helion is successful, we can avert climate disaster a much better quality of life for people.”
Fusion is the process of building up simple atoms into larger more complex ones, in most cases fusing hydrogen into helium. It releases a lot of energy, and occurs every day in our Sun as well as almost every other star in the Universe. The trick for humans is to harness it on Earth for producing clean abundant energy.
Traditional solar arrays capture the Sun’s fusion energy after it’s worked its way from the core to the surface and then traveled through 93 million miles of space and become hopelessly dispersed. Helion’s fusion energy will only travel a few feet before it’s captured.
Fusion is the opposite of fission, which is the process of breaking apart atoms. Both release energy under the right conditions. For fission, the bigger the atom, the more energy is released. For fusion, the opposite is true - the smaller the atoms used, the more energy that is released.
For this reason, most efforts towards fusion concentrate on fusing hydrogen or helium, the smallest of atoms, to release the most energy. Helion fuses deuterium (hydrogen-2) and helion (helium-3) to produce helium-4 (the common isotope of He) and a proton, with an energy of over 18 million electron volts:
2H + 3He → 4He + 1p 18.4 MeV
The appeal of 3He fusion stems from the aneutronic nature of its reaction products, that is, the fusion of 3He atoms releases large amounts of energy without releasing neutrons which can cause some of the surrounding materials to become radioactive. There are some minor side reactions, that can produce tritium (3H) and a neutron, but the resulting waste is low level and quite tiny.
3He itself is non-radioactive. The lone high-energy by-product, the proton, can be contained by means of electric and magnetic fields. The momentum energy of this proton (created in the fusion process) will interact with the containing electromagnetic field, resulting in direct net electricity generation. Potential conversion efficiencies of 95% may be possible, as there is no need to convert the proton energy to heat in order to drive a turbine, alhough Helion estimates that realistic restrictions on physical expansion ratio and resistive circuit elements limit practical efficiencies to 85%.
The 18.4 MeV corresponds to about 493 MWh for every three grams or so of 3He. 52.5 kilograms of 3He would produce about the same power as a traditional 1,000 MW power plant. The amount of 3He fuel needed to power the residential sector of America would be about 20 tons per year.
But 3He is not abundant on Earth and we have been planning on getting it from the Moon, at great cost.
Instead, Helion’s approach is to make their own 3He by creating deuterium-deuterium fusion that creates 3He + a neutron and 3H + a proton. They separate the 3He for use as fusion fuel and store the 3H long enough for it to decay to 3He, which occurs in 12 years.
One of the other challenges of fusion is the temperature required to produce significant amounts of power from an ionized gas (plasma). Depending on the type of fusion, the temperatures are in the millions of degrees.
Think of the Sun.
These high-temperatures are largely a non-negotiable requirement for fusion because at lower temperatures, no matter how much fuel you put into the reactor, the amount of fusion power produced will be vanishingly small simply because fusion reactions are not likely to occur at lower temperatures. So Helion’s success at heating their fusion plasma to 100,000,000°C is a major achievement.
There is a lot of misunderstanding about the set-up of fusion reactors. One might think that a million-degree core would be a real hazard if something went wrong. But even at a million degrees, the material in the core doesn’t even have the mass of a dollar bill, so there is no danger from this temperature even if something does go wrong.
And unlike fission reactors, there is no decay heat since there is little radioactivity in the fuel. There is no solid fuel or core to melt down. It’s just hydrogen and helium.
Helion’s fusion does not produce any long-lived radioactive waste. The process can produce tritium, which is commonly used in commercial applications such as wristwatches and exit signs. Tritium’s half-life is only 12 years and poses no human health or environmental hazard.
And as tritium decays, it turns into 3He, which Helion uses as fusion fuel, thus recycling 100% of its byproduct materials over time.
The capital will be used to complete the construction of Polaris, Helion’s seventh generation fusion generator, the world’s first fusion electricity demonstration facility. Building on the achievements of Helion’s pulsed non-ignition fusion technology and the performance of its six predecessors, Polaris is expected to be the first fusion device capable of demonstrating net electricity production. Helion plans to reach this milestone in 2024, paving the way for future fusion power plants.
“This funding ensures that Helion will be the first organization to generate electricity from fusion,” said Dr. David Kirtley, Founder and CEO of Helion Energy. "Our 6th prototype demonstrated that we can reach this pivotal milestone. In just a few years we will show that the world can count on fusion to be the zero-carbon energy source that we desperately need."
PROMOTED
Earlier this year, Helion became the first private fusion company to heat a fusion plasma to 100,000,000°C, a critical milestone on the path to commercial electricity from fusion. This was followed by Helion breaking ground in July 2021 for the Polaris facility in Everett, Washington, an event in which Helion’s leadership, Governor Jay Inslee and other Washington state elected officials participated.
“I’m delighted to be investing more in Helion, which is by far the most promising approach to fusion I’ve ever seen,” said Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and former President of Y Combinator, who now serves as Helion’s executive chairman. “With a tiny fraction of the money spent on other fusion efforts, and the culture of a startup, this team has a clear path to net electricity. If Helion is successful, we can avert climate disaster a much better quality of life for people.”
Fusion is the process of building up simple atoms into larger more complex ones, in most cases fusing hydrogen into helium. It releases a lot of energy, and occurs every day in our Sun as well as almost every other star in the Universe. The trick for humans is to harness it on Earth for producing clean abundant energy.
Traditional solar arrays capture the Sun’s fusion energy after it’s worked its way from the core to the surface and then traveled through 93 million miles of space and become hopelessly dispersed. Helion’s fusion energy will only travel a few feet before it’s captured.
Fusion is the opposite of fission, which is the process of breaking apart atoms. Both release energy under the right conditions. For fission, the bigger the atom, the more energy is released. For fusion, the opposite is true - the smaller the atoms used, the more energy that is released.
For this reason, most efforts towards fusion concentrate on fusing hydrogen or helium, the smallest of atoms, to release the most energy. Helion fuses deuterium (hydrogen-2) and helion (helium-3) to produce helium-4 (the common isotope of He) and a proton, with an energy of over 18 million electron volts:
2H + 3He → 4He + 1p 18.4 MeV
The appeal of 3He fusion stems from the aneutronic nature of its reaction products, that is, the fusion of 3He atoms releases large amounts of energy without releasing neutrons which can cause some of the surrounding materials to become radioactive. There are some minor side reactions, that can produce tritium (3H) and a neutron, but the resulting waste is low level and quite tiny.
3He itself is non-radioactive. The lone high-energy by-product, the proton, can be contained by means of electric and magnetic fields. The momentum energy of this proton (created in the fusion process) will interact with the containing electromagnetic field, resulting in direct net electricity generation. Potential conversion efficiencies of 95% may be possible, as there is no need to convert the proton energy to heat in order to drive a turbine, alhough Helion estimates that realistic restrictions on physical expansion ratio and resistive circuit elements limit practical efficiencies to 85%.
The 18.4 MeV corresponds to about 493 MWh for every three grams or so of 3He. 52.5 kilograms of 3He would produce about the same power as a traditional 1,000 MW power plant. The amount of 3He fuel needed to power the residential sector of America would be about 20 tons per year.
But 3He is not abundant on Earth and we have been planning on getting it from the Moon, at great cost.
Instead, Helion’s approach is to make their own 3He by creating deuterium-deuterium fusion that creates 3He + a neutron and 3H + a proton. They separate the 3He for use as fusion fuel and store the 3H long enough for it to decay to 3He, which occurs in 12 years.
One of the other challenges of fusion is the temperature required to produce significant amounts of power from an ionized gas (plasma). Depending on the type of fusion, the temperatures are in the millions of degrees.
Think of the Sun.
These high-temperatures are largely a non-negotiable requirement for fusion because at lower temperatures, no matter how much fuel you put into the reactor, the amount of fusion power produced will be vanishingly small simply because fusion reactions are not likely to occur at lower temperatures. So Helion’s success at heating their fusion plasma to 100,000,000°C is a major achievement.
There is a lot of misunderstanding about the set-up of fusion reactors. One might think that a million-degree core would be a real hazard if something went wrong. But even at a million degrees, the material in the core doesn’t even have the mass of a dollar bill, so there is no danger from this temperature even if something does go wrong.
And unlike fission reactors, there is no decay heat since there is little radioactivity in the fuel. There is no solid fuel or core to melt down. It’s just hydrogen and helium.
Helion’s fusion does not produce any long-lived radioactive waste. The process can produce tritium, which is commonly used in commercial applications such as wristwatches and exit signs. Tritium’s half-life is only 12 years and poses no human health or environmental hazard.
And as tritium decays, it turns into 3He, which Helion uses as fusion fuel, thus recycling 100% of its byproduct materials over time.
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