Part 6 of 6 Parts

The fact that Helion is trying something new would appear to be an additional reason for skepticism about their timeline, rather than confidence. However, Kirtley’s statement does have the virtue of being true. Helion hasn’t published much about its approach to fusion, but the information it has made public verifies that Helion’s technology isn’t one with a long history of research and tests behind it. The company isn’t using DT fuel, and it claims it doesn’t need a blanket because it’s going to generate electricity directly from the expansion of its plasma. Helion claims that its “system is built to recover all unused and new electromagnetic energy efficiently” from its plasma, rather than going through the intermediate step of capturing neutrons.

Because Helion hasn’t published the details of this system, no experts have been willing to comment on the plausibility of this design. However, given the challenges that more conventional approaches to fusion face, it’s hard to believe that Helion’s technology will succeed on the timeline they’ve claimed. The good news is we won’t have to wait long to find out.

Even with all these difficulties, it’s possible that commercial fusion power will become a reality in the next few decades. The scientific and engineering challenges are significant, but there is little reason to think that they are fundamentally insurmountable. Feasible solutions have been proposed for many of them.

Nearly all those solutions are entirely theoretical, and most would require substantial research effort to construct even as prototypes, much less commercially viable products. Ma says that “If we had enough funding, if the world said—and I’m saying not even just the U.S., the world said—’Oh, this is an existential threat. We need fusion. We need all hands on deck. Let’s go Manhattan Project style or Apollo style, let’s really concentrate on it,’ I do think we could accelerate fusion energy on the grid. But barring that and looking at the history of funding, it will take longer [than 10 years].”.

While we wait for commercial fusion power to arrive, there’s a danger that the hollow promise of near-term fusion will be floated as a panacea, used as an excuse to ignore faster avenues to decarbonization and to use even more energy right now. Altman, who has other nuclear-energy investments beyond Helion, already seems to be doing this. He said in a January interview that ‘quickly permitting fusion reactors’ was the best way to meet climate goals without slowing down the growth of AI companies.

It is possible that Commonwealth or Pacific or another company will demonstrate net power from fusion within the next five or ten years. But that is still a long, long way from having fusion power on the grid at a competitive price any time soon. Until more research is carried out and more science and engineering problems are solved, humanity can’t count on fusion power to show up in time to save us from climate change, even with funding far beyond current levels. It is dangerous to assume otherwise. Loarte said, “Some people want to believe…that fusion is something that can be an energy source that will actually provide a replacement to other sources of energy, like nuclear or thermal power, or coal or gas in the next decade. I don’t think it is realistic.”.

Ma said, “We’re all rooting for each other. I would love for any one of these fusion companies to meet their goal of five years, ten years, whatever…..But that being said, the magnitude of the challenges remaining mean it will still take considerable work, and some time, to solve.”.

Helion Energy

Part 5 of 6 Parts

To solve the problem of neutron generation, a working commercial DT fusion power plant would need a device known as a ‘blanket,’ which would absorb the neutrons, converting their energy into heat. Then carry that heat away from the reactor to use it to drive a turbine, generating electricity. But nobody has ever created a full-scale blanket. The fusion reactors that Commonwealth, Pacific, and others plan to run in the next five years or so, like SPARC, don’t have blankets. They are just demonstrations that the form of fusion each company is developing can provide more energy than it consumes. These companies claim that they’ll have reactors with blankets in about ten years’ time, but a blanket is not a simple piece of technology to build. There are several different proposed designs, but they all involve surrounding the fusion chamber with an exotic coolant system, often containing molten lithium salts or lead. All these options are expensive and technically challenging.

Neutrons also cause other serious problems on their way out of the reactor. Paul Springer is a nuclear physicist. He said, “Neutron damage on things is significant and you can’t have that damage on a wall of a material that you need to rely upon. It destroys the integrity. Materials become porous and fluffy.”. Constructed from the wrong materials, even a better-than-breakeven fusion reactor wouldn’t be a reliable power source. It would need to be shut down constantly to swap out components destroyed by neutrons. Finding a way to avoid this problem requires years of testing to prove that materials can withstand continuous exposure to neutrons inside a reactor. Currently, no such testing facility exists.

The list of challenging problems goes on. Constructing and delivering a new fuel target once a second is a serious issue for pulsed power. Complex geometry makes maintenance difficult for tokamaks. Managing tritium, creating supply chains, and training the necessary workforce are challenges for virtually every fusion company in existence.

The lengthy list of obstacles makes these startups’ ten-year timelines for commercial fusion seem over-optimistic. When skeptics expressed skepticism in conversation, the companies’ executives acknowledged that the scale of the challenges is daunting. However, they explained, they expect to succeed anyway. “We have a track record that demonstrates to us that this timeline is possible with the right amount of resources,” Sorbom said in a written statement made available by Commonwealth, noting how quickly his team had built the first prototype component for their tokamak’s magnet. He said, “There’s neither a physics nor a ‘first principles’ reason that commercial fusion power can’t be achieved within ten years.”. Will Regan is the president and cofounder of Pacific Fusion. He suggested that the technology behind his company’s approach to fusion will allow a faster timeline: He said in an email, “Pulser technologies are now making fusion more affordable, manageable, practical, and scalable.”.

There is a company named Helion that is promising something even more ambitious than delivering competitively priced fusion power in the 2030s. Helion has raised over one billion dollars, more than three hundred and seventy-five million dollars of which has come from Altman. Other investors include Dustin Moskovitz, Peter Thiel, and SoftBank. Despite Helion’s failure to make its 2024 deadline for a demonstration of net electricity from fusion, the company claims that it’s still on track to meet a 2023 agreement to deliver fusion power to Microsoft by 2028 at competitive market rates. David Kirtley is Helion’s CEO and co-founder. When asked why this timeline was more trustworthy than previous estimates, he said, “we’re doing something that is incredibly complex that’s never been done before.”.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems

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Part 4 of 6 Parts

Power plants generally produce around five hundred megawatts of power, give or take a factor of two. To achieve that figure, a power plant based on NIF would have to reliably implode a fuel target about once a second, every second, for days, months, and years on end. In the three years since NIF first achieved ignition, it has repeated that feat exactly five more times. Tammy Mac is one of the lead NIF scientists. She said, “Sometimes you’ll hear folks say that the science behind fusion is solved, it’s all just an engineering problem. I disagree with that statement. “The science of fusion is not solved….NIF is the most successful fusion experiment to date, but we don’t get ignition every time.”.

Pacific Fusion faces challenges similar to NIF. Their technology hasn’t yet proven it can achieve net energy, though simulations suggest it will. Even if their machine does produce net energy, it could easily take longer to reach that point than their current estimate, which places that milestone in the early 2030s.

Alberto Loarte is head of the Science Division at ITER. He said, “We know from fusion experiments that since you start, until you get something [close to peak performance], it takes you ten to fifteen years. Fusion has worked in a given way since 1960 until 2020 and it’s very unlikely that tomorrow will be different.”. This ten-year shakedown period isn’t included in any of the published corporate timelines from Pacific, Commonwealth, or the rest of the current group of fusion startups.

Commonwealth has its own serious problems too. Its systems are modeled after ITER, but ITER is so big for a reason. The superconducting magnets used for Commonwealth’s SPARC as well as for ITER must be kept very cold, not far above absolute zero. However, inside the tokamak, on the other side of the wall from the cold magnets, there’s a one hundred-million-degree plasma. Inside SPARC there’s less room to work with. The temperature of the inner wall of the tokamak is expected to be five to six times greater than in ITER. SPARC won’t be able to run longer than about thirty seconds at a time. Any longer than that, heat would overwhelm its magnets. Loarte said, “If they get fusion power production under this condition, then the issue is how you get this to longer steps. So you may get a plasma that gets to produce fusion and does not then extrapolate to a reactor.”.

Pacific, Commonwealth, and nearly all other fusion companies also face another serious problem. The isotopic mixture of hydrogen they’re using as fuel is the same type that NIF uses in its successful fusion shots. It is a deuterium-tritium, or “DT” mix. (Deuterium is abundant in all water on Earth, but a fusion power plant would ultimately have to create its own tritium which is another difficulty.) About seventy-five percent of the energy released by DT fusion is in the form of neutrons which are electrically neutral subatomic particles. It’s difficult to capture the energy of neutrons in a useful way. Daniel Jassby is a plasma physicist. He said, “In seventy-five years of fusion R&D, nobody has produced a tiny amount of electric power. I’m not talking about net electric power, I’m just talking about any electric power,” says the plasma physicist. “Nobody has ever been able to convert neutron barrages into electricity.”

Pacific Fusion

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