One company promises commercial nuclear fusion by 2024
The new year is expected to bring big progress toward commercializing fusion-based nuclear reactors by, or even before, 2030: One company said it will start producing electricity by mid-2024.
Washington-based Helion , considered to be at the forefront of the race to develop a commercial and cost-effective fusion power plant, has said it wants to be the first fusion power company in the world to produce electricity from its prototype Polaris reactor in 2024.
This means that the company is ready to demonstrate that it can generate a sustained, net-energy fusion reaction, where the energy generated will be greater than that needed to create the reaction. This is the goal of every aspiring fusion energy developer.
Fusion energy offers the prospect of creating an unlimited source of zero-carbon baseload energy derived from the same thermonuclear reaction that powers the sun. And it can do so without many of the drawbacks of conventional fissile-fuel nuclear reactors, which require layers of safety protocols and produce highly radioactive waste. Helion claims that within this year it will be able to achieve this incredible result.
This company, with this aggressive goal. succeeded in attracting the investment community in 2021, resulting in the company raising $500 million to reach its net-electricity goal, with commitments of another $1.7 billion once Helion reaches certain performance objectives . So the incentive to achieve the merger as soon as possible is enormous.
Notably, the funding round was led by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the company that created the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT. Altman was the executive chairman of Helion.
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Helion said the capital will be used to complete construction of its Polaris seventh-generation fusion generator to demonstrate net electricity generation.
The company is “on track to build Polaris by mid-2024,” Helion founder and CEO David Kirtley said in a recent interview with The Energy Daily. “As soon as the assembly is completed, we will start working.”
If successful, Helion would be the first organization to generate electricity from fusion, using its unique pulsed non-ignition fusion technology perfected over six generations of prototype test reactors.
How do Helion plan to achieve fusion?
The Helion reactor is based on the compression of hydrogen plasma through continuous magnetic pulses until it reaches the melting point. The difference from Tokamaks and stellarators is that compression is achieved linearly, not via toroids. Furthermore, the temperature is kept particularly high by the use of liquid metal chambers, probably lithium
Another peculiarity of the Polaris reactor is that the energy is produced directly by the magnetic pulses produced by the fusion which excite, via the Faraday effect, a coil surrounding the reactor.
Attract investments
The energy sector's transition to low-carbon energy resources is driving investment in private companies like Helion, according to an S&P Global Commodity Insights report on billions in direct fusion investment.
Competition is very strong, but if Helio really managed to have a functioning fusion reactor with energy gain, the amount of investments it would be able to attract would not be just the 1.4 billion already promised.
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The article A company promises commercial nuclear fusion by 2024 comes from Economic Scenarios .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/una-societa-promette-le-fusione-a-uso-commerciale-entro-il-2024/ on Sun, 07 Jan 2024 07:00:21 +0000.