The news comes as world leaders and diplomats convene in Glasgow at a key United Nations climate conference to negotiate ways to curb carbon emissions, largely from fossil fuels. While nuclear fusion is not yet ready for commercial deployment, it offers the potential of carbon-free electricity without toxic waste, and backers say it could be a key part of the effort to battle global warming.
“Fusion should be part of the conversation as we talk about energy in the future,” David Kirtley, the company’s founder and chief executive officer, said in an interview. “The world should count on fusion.”
Helion is part of a growing wave of companies seeking to tap fusion — the process that powers stars — for commercial electricity generation. A handful have made important technological advances, but the challenge is developing a system that generates more electricity than it takes to run it. Helion says it can reach this milestone within three years.
The company’s Polaris generator uses pulsed non-ignition fusion technology to produce carbon-free electricity from plasma that’s heated to more than 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million Fahrenheit).
The company’s seventh-generation system will be about 6 feet tall (1.8 meters) and 40 feet long. Kirtley said the goal is to demonstrate that it’s capable of generating a positive amount of electricity, and wouldn’t say how much power it would be able to produce.
The next step would be a commercial system that would have about 50 megawatts of capacity and could generate electricity for 1 cent per kilowatt-hour, he said. Natural gas power plants in the U.S. average about 500 megawatts, and generating costs in 2020 were about 2.45 cents per kilowatt-hour.
Conventional nuclear plants use fission, the process of splitting atoms, to generate energy. Fusion is the opposite, capturing energy that’s produced when atoms slam together and fuse into heavier elements.
(Updates with U.N. climate conference in third paragraph.)
