"While interstitial milestones are really important to show that the technology works and you can get regulatory approval, at the end of the day, it's about deploying power plants at scale to support the growing power needs," Helion cofounder and CEO David Kirtley told Fortune.
The Everett, Washington-based fusion energy startup Helion announced Friday that it has hit a key milestone in its quest for fusion power. Plasmas inside the company's Polaris prototype reactor have reached 150 million degrees Celsius, three-quarters of the way toward what the company thinks it will need to operate a commercial fusion power plant. "We're obviously really excited to be able to get to this place," David Kirtley, Helion's co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.
Inertia Enterprises has raised $450 million to build one of the world's most powerful lasers, which it hopes will serve as the foundation of a grid-scale power plant the fusion startup intends to start construction on in 2030. Inertia Enterprises is building on technology developed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility. The NIF is the site of the world's only controlled fusion reactions that have reached scientific breakeven, in which the reaction releases more energy than it took to start.
Researchers working on China's 'artificial sun' have reported breaking a long-accepted threshold that has limited the operation of nuclear-fusion reactors for decades. China's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) is a nuclear-fusion research reactor in Hefei. Researchers hope that it will one day produce clean, virtually limitless energy by replicating the fusion processes that power the Sun. In fusion reactors, light-weight atoms are compressed under extreme pressure and heat to form heavier atoms.
The company will merge with TAE Technologies-a privately held fusion energy firm that's backed by Alphabet, Chevron Technology Ventures, and others-in a deal that's worth more than $6 billion. It's an all-stock deal, which is expected to close sometime next year, and is a huge and eyebrow-raising move for Trump Media, which is best known as the owner of President Trump's social media platform, Truth Social.
Two East Bay cities dodged a bullet when they lost to Pacific Fusion's selection of Albuquerque for its $1 billion fusion site. All three cities offered excessive tax breaks, land and other perks for an enterprise that may never be operational, let alone profitable. Recent reports of fusion research labs achieving just a few moments of more energy created than the energy expended to spark fusion indicate that productive sustainability is decades away.
As advances in computing and AI have quickened the pace of research and development, the sector has become a hotbed of startup and investor activity. Inside a fusion reaction, atoms are compressed and heated until they form a fourth state of matter known as plasma. When the plasma reaches the right temperature and pressure, those atoms begin to fuse, releasing tremendous amounts of energy in the process.
General Fusion's recent layoffs and funding challenges underscore the increasing difficulties of the fusion industry as companies struggle for financial viability in a competitive landscape.
