Could Fusion Beat Advanced Fission Reactors to Market?

Fusion: Just 30 Years away for the Last 50 years.
Or is it about to make some kind of leapfrog?

Reuters:

Private U.S. nuclear fusion company Helion Energy will provide Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab with electricity in about five years, the companies said on Wednesday, in the first such deal for the power source that fuels the sun but has been elusive on Earth.

Government labs and more than 30 companies are racing to generate power from fusion, which could one day help the world slash emissions linked to climate change. Unlike today’s fission reactors, it could generate power without producing long-lasting radioactive waste.

Fusion occurs when two light atoms such as hydrogen, heated to extreme temperatures, fuse into one heavier atom, releasing large amounts of energy. So far, earthly fusion reactions have been momentary and suck up more energy than they release, but companies have raised about $5 billion in private funding in the quest to achieve net energy gain.

Helion’s plant is expected to be online by 2028 and will target power generation of 50 megawatts or greater after a one-year ramp-up period, it said. One megawatt can supply up to about 1,000 U.S. homes on a typical day.

“Fifty megawatts is a big first step of commercial-scale fusion, and the revenue feeds right back into us developing more power plants and getting fusion out on the grid both in the United States and internationally as fast as possible,” David Kirtley, Washington state-based Helion’s founder and CEO, said in an interview.

Polaris, Helion’s seventh-generation machine, should come online next year and demonstrate electricity generation, using pulsed high-power magnet technologies to achieve fusion, Kirtley said. In 2021, Helion was the first private company to achieve 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit) and the optimum temperature for fusion is about twice that, Kirtley said.
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Andrew Holland, head of the Fusion Industry Association, said nothing about fusion has been easy and that the power purchase contract likely had clauses regarding the timing of the delivery of electricity. But he said the deal shows trust is building.

“The business world is starting to understand that fusion is coming and perhaps sooner than a lot of people thought,” Holland said in an interview. “It’s a vote of confidence that Helion is on its way, as are other companies building their proof-of-concept machines now.”

Utility Dive:

Type One Energy and Commonwealth Fusion Systems both received multimillion-dollar commitments last year from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program. Six other fusion companies were included in the award, which could provide funding until 2028, depending on Congressional appropriations.

By then, Commonwealth Fusion Systems expects to have “first plasma,” or an initial fusion reaction, at a demonstration facility it’s building near Boston, Needham said. He said that could happen as early as 2026, with net energy to follow soon after. Commonwealth could deploy its first 400-MW commercial plant in the “early 2030s,” he said.

“This is coming sooner than you think,” Needham said.

Commonwealth is also pursuing a “horizontal play” to supply superconducting magnets to other fusion companies as well as non-fusion industries like offshore wind and maglev rail, Needham said.

The Commonwealth reactor, which Needham called “the least scientifically risky” design, is a donut-shaped tokamak supported by a proprietary superconducting magnet. Type One’s reactor is a stellarator, a twisted loop that Mowry said represents a “direct shot on goal” rather than “another large science machine.”

“We have absolute conviction that a stellarator is the way to go,” Mowry said.

While Needham expressed confidence in Commonwealth’s compact high-field tokamak design, he admitted “we are not married to the tokamak as the ultimate winner.”

“Other [fusion] architectures could be really interesting, but fusion will trump fission and the only thing that beats a fusion power plant is a better fusion plant,” he said.

Type One said in a February news release that it could begin construction next year on its Infinity One pilot plant at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Bull Run Fossil Plant in Clinton, Tennessee, which was retired in 2023.

Mowry did not confirm that timeline on Wednesday. He said only that the company is verifying its power plant design and “focused on business metrics … rather than spending money on bricks and mortar.” But he did note the symbolism of replacing a coal-fired power plant with a nuclear reactor.

Powermag:

Helion’s technology involves raising fusion fuel to temperatures greater than 100 million degrees Celsius in a fusion generator and directly extracting electricity using a high-efficiency pulsed approach. According to the company, deuterium and helium-3 fuel is heated to plasma conditions while magnets confine the plasma in a “Field Reversed Configuration (FRC).” Magnets accelerate two FRCs to 1 million miles per hour from opposite ends of the device so they collide in the center.

When the FRCs collide, they are further compressed by a powerful magnetic field until they reach fusion temperatures (greater than 100,000,000C). At this temperature, the deuterium and helium-3 ions are moving fast enough to overcome the forces that would otherwise keep them apart and they fuse. This releases more energy than is consumed by the fusion process.

As new fusion energy is created, the plasma expands. As the plasma expands, it pushes back on the magnetic field from the machine’s magnets. By Faraday’s Law, the change in field induces current, which is directly recaptured as electricity, allowing Helion’s fusion generator to skip the steam cycle.