Helion reaches record of over 150 million degrees Celsius as it strives for ambitious commercial launch

Helion Energy on Friday announced two milestones for the company and the commercial fusion industry: reaching plasma temperatures of 150 million degrees Celsius and becoming the first private company to test its reactor with a radioactive fuel called tritium.

The Everett, Wash.-based company. is part of a global race to solve the physics and engineering challenge of harnessing fusion reactions to produce usable energy.

Although its technology has not yet reached that high point, Helion last summer broke ground at a commercial energy center in Eastern Washington that aims to start smashing atoms by 2028 — an ambitious goal that has many skeptics.

As the facility continues to be built, the company is continuing important tests at its headquarters on its seventh-generation machine, Polaris, which has received new temperature and fuel measurements.

“We have a long history now of building fusion prototypes,” said David Kirtley, CEO of Helion. “We’ve been able to show that we can continue to … push the boundaries and get even closer to those power plants.”

The challenge for the fusion industry is to create hotter-than-solar, incredibly dense plasmas, and then store them. All work needs to conserve energy enough to create more energy and absorb it.

Although the sun and the stars naturally achieve fusion, no one on Earth – in academia or industry – has achieved that goal and some believe the goal is many years away.

Magnetic method of assembly

Helion aims to decelerate fusion using magneto-inertial, pulsed operation, field-reversed positioning devices. That means the system sends a pulse of energy to the fusion device where the magnets compress the plasma and fusion occurs. As the plasma pushes through the field, it creates a current that feeds electricity back into the system.

The company has published little peer-reviewed research, but has shared information about its latest progress with selected experts.

“Seeing the data from the Polaris test campaign, including record-setting temperatures and benefits from fuel fusion in their system, shows strong progress. Our ability to achieve fusion in the grid requires methods that allow rapid changes in design and testing, and these results show the growing strength of the US fusion ecosystem,” Jean Paul Allain, associate director of Fusion Energy Sciences, said in a statement at the Department of Energy.

Ryan McBride, a fusion expert and University of Michigan professor of nuclear engineering, electrical engineering and applied physics, also reviewed Helion’s diagnostic data.

McBride said in a statement that it is “exciting to see evidence” of these two important steps and he looks forward to “seeing progress.”

Kirtley said the team is preparing documents detailing the diagnostic tools used to confirm the temperature record, which surpassed the company’s previous record high of 100 million degrees Celsius.

The phone’s ultimate goal is to hit 200 million degrees C, he said, adding “we’re not announcing that today. But given the results we’ve had so far, we’re very excited and hopeful to reach that high point.”

Industry momentum is growing

Helion also highlights its use of tritium in combination with deuterium as fusion fuel. Both are forms of hydrogen, but deuterium is non-radioactive, so most companies use that isotope alone as it is safer to handle and more abundant. Helion’s commercial fuel mixture will be deuterium and helium-3, which require high plasma temperatures for fusion but are very efficient in generating electricity.

Experiments running with tritium provided insights into how helium-3 can perform, Kirtley said, and allowed the company to demonstrate its ability to handle the fuel throughout its program.

The fusion industry itself is heating up as technology companies and others increasingly look to new sources of clean energy for data centers, transportation and industry. This week, fusion startup Inertia announced a new $450 million funding round, and BC’s General Fusion last month announced plans to go public with a $1 billion SPAC.

For decades, the need for cheap energy and flat electricity has hindered the development of integration, Kirtley said. That’s not the case anymore.

“I’m very happy that there’s such excitement about the reunion,” she said, “and it’s pushing us.”