Part 1 of 2 Parts
Nucor Corporation is a manufacturer of steel and steel products. Helion Energy is a fusion energy company. These two companies are collaborating to develop a five-hundred-megawatt fusion power plant to supply baseload electricity to a steel making facility. The two companies are cooperating to set a firm timeline. They say that they they are “committed to beginning operations as soon as possible with a target of 2030.” Nucor said that it is making a direct investment of thirty-five million dollars in Helion to accelerate deployment of nuclear fusion power. Nucor claims that this is the first fusion energy agreement of this scale in the whole world. It expects this agreement to “pave the way for decarbonizing the entire industrial sector.”
Leon Topalian is the chairman, president and CEO of Nucor. He said, “Nucor continues to position itself as a leader in developing clean energy solutions to decarbonize the industrial sector. This agreement with Helion, along with recent investments in clean energy, can change the entire energy landscape and forever change the world, embracing a clean energy future we could have hardly imagined a few years ago. We believe in the technology Helion is building and are proud to make this investment.”
Helion’s technology involves raising fusion fuel to temperatures greater than one hundred million degrees Fahrenheit in a fusion reactor. The energy generated by the fusion reactor is converted directly to electricity using a high-efficiency pulsed approach. According to Helion, the deuterium and helium-3 fuel mixture is heated to plasma conditions while magnets confine in the plasma in a “Field Reversed Configuration (FRC).” The magnets accelerate two FRCs to one million miles per hour from opposite ends of the device so they collided in the center of the reactor.
When the FRCs collide, they are further compressed by a very powerful magnetic field until they reach fusion temperatures (greater than one hundred eighty million degrees Fahrenheit). At this temperature, the deuterium and helium-3 ions are moving fast enough to overcome the forces that would otherwise have kept them apart and they fuse. This technology releases more energy than is consumed by the fusion process.
As new fusion energy is generated in the reactor, the plasma expands. As the plasma expands, it pushes back on the powerful magnetic fields generated by the reactor’s magnetics. In accord with Faraday’s Law, the change in field induces current which is then directly recaptured as electricity. This allows the Helion fusion reactor to skip the steam cycle found in most other power plants that burn fuel.
A highly renewable grid requires flexible and dispatchable power generation technology to maintain the reliability of the grid. Reciprocating internal combustion engines (RICE) are a mature, scalable, and cost-effective grid balancing solution. They have physical capabilities that are perfectly suited to integrate high levels of renewables, reduce carbon emissions, and maintain a reliable grid.
Please read Part 2 next