Helion Energy promises a fusion reactor that produces electricity as early as 2024
A look inside the older Trent fusion reactor. Credit: Helion Energy.
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US startup Helion Energy, one of the players in fusion energy development, recently won $ 500 million and a pledge of another $ 1.7 billion to complete its Polaris facility in Everett, Washington. A prototype of the seventh generation fusion reactor, named “Polaris”, should work there.
Helion has gained extensive experience with the sixth-generation “Trento” prototype, which was built in 2020. It handled more than 10,000 high-energy pulses and was in operation almost every day, for 16 months. This year, the Trenta reactor has reached a plasma temperature of over 100 million degrees, which is approaching the start of a proper fusion. In addition, Helion maintained the plasma for more than 1 millisecond and also created magnetic fields with a force exceeding 10 Tesla.
Helion’s technology is definitely worth paying attention to. Many fusion projects rely on heat to generate steam and spin turbines. Helion relies on an “electromagnetic” approach, as well as helium-3. Helium-3 fuses with deuterium in their reactor. Their collisions release energy, which leads to the expansion of the plasma. This in turn affects the magnetic fields, creating an electric current with high efficiency.
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Scheme of fusion system. Credit: Helion Energy.
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The previous Helion Trenta reactor generated fusion pulses every 10 minutes. The new reactor should be a dramatic improvement, handling one fusion pulse per second. Helion makes no secret of its intention to become the first fusion reactor to achieve a net electricity yield. They hope it will be in 2024.
The piquant thing is that electricity generation is not the primary goal of the Polaris reactor, although its creators will certainly enjoy the first place in the textbooks. Electricity is actually just a by-product of the Polaris fusion, whose task is to produce helium-3 by precipitating deuterium atoms. Helium-3 is considered an excellent fusion fuel. But it’s hard to get, so he’s even considering mining it on the moon, where it should be more common.
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Logo. Kredit: Helion Energy.
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Helion co-founder and current chief David Kirtley says they want to build crate-sized fusion reactors that will produce around 50 MW, roughly about 8,200 U.S. households. They plan to produce it at about $ 10 per 1 MWh, which would make the merger one of the cheapest, if not the cheapest, methods of energy production. Helion is now competing with other fusion projects, most notably the SPARC tokamak, which they want to launch at MIT in 2025. As history shows, similar races tend to be a great motivator.
Video: Company searching for ‘Holy Grail’ of energy in Everett
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