Video from today by Helion Energy, a fusion startup that is aiming for an actual working reactor in this decade.
This morning, February 13, the company reached a new milestone in it’s development.
Helion Energy, a startup backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SoftBank’s venture capital arm, has started construction on a site for a planned nuclear fusion power plant that will supply power to Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab data centers by 2028, the company said on Wednesday.
The site in Malaga, Washington, is in the center of the state along the Columbia River, where Helion hopes to take advantage of grid infrastructure in place for the nearby Rock Island Dam hydroelectric plant.
EVERETT, Wash. – Feb. 13, 2026 – Helion, a Washington-based fusion energy company, announced that its Polaris prototype has set new fusion industry benchmarks, becoming the first privately developed fusion energy machine to demonstrate measurable deuterium-tritium (D-T) fusion and achieve plasma temperatures of 150 million degrees Celsius (MºC). Both milestones mark significant breakthroughs in Helion’s vision to make commercially viable fusion energy a reality and are firsts for the private fusion industry.
“We believe the surest path to commercializing fusion is building, learning and iterating as quickly as possible,” said David Kirtley, co-founder and CEO of Helion. “We’ve built and operated seven prototypes, setting and exceeding more ambitious technical and engineering goals each time. The historic results from our deuterium-tritium testing campaign on Polaris validate our approach to developing high power fusion and the excellence of our engineering.”
Helion began operating its 7th-generation Polaris prototype at the end of 2024. This January, it became the first and currently only private fusion energy machine to use deuterium-tritium fuel, demonstrating the company’s ability to operate and show scaling across multiple fuels. Helion was also the first company to receive regulatory approval to possess and use tritium for the purpose of demonstrating fusion energy production. Achieving thermonuclear fusion using deuterium-tritium fuel is one step in Polaris’ testing program. The company will continue testing to reach optimal temperatures for deuterium-helium-3 fusion, a fuel Helion will use for commercial operations.
“I am impressed with our nation’s ingenuity and the pace at which we are de-risking our path to fusion commercialization,” said Jean Paul Allain, Associate Director for Fusion Energy Sciences in the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. “Seeing the data from the Polaris test campaign, including record-setting temperatures and gains from the fuel mix in their system, indicates strong progress. Our ability to get fusion on the grid requires approaches that enable rapid turnaround in design and testing, and these results reflect the growing capability of the U.S. fusion ecosystem.”
“I had the opportunity to review diagnostic data from Helion,” said Ryan McBride, an expert in inertial confinement fusion, pulsed power, and plasma physics, with experience as a Department Manager at Sandia National Laboratories and as a professor of nuclear engineering, electrical engineering, and applied physics at the University of Michigan. “It is exciting to see evidence of D-T fusion and temperatures exceeding 13 keV or 150 million degrees Celsius, and I look forward to seeing more progress.”
I wish them luck but commercializing a technology that would use tritium won’t go far until somebody commercializes mass production of tritium, which is a tricky task for a very rare, radioactive isotope with a fairly brief half-life. Deuterium is not too hard to get. Tritium forms in the atmosphere and the references I’ve looked at say there are about 7.5 kg of naturally-occurring tritium in the Earth system at any time. And they go on to say a 1GW power plant might need 55kg a year.
https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/commentary/blog/tritium-a-few-kilograms-can-make-or-break-nuclear-fusion/
And this link notes that CANDU reactors in Canada produce 2 kg annually – and sell it for $30,000US a gram.
https://rsis.edu.sg/rsis-publication/rsis/unlocking-tritium-for-fusion-energy/
Producing it from spent nuclear fuel is mentioned, the concept of moving all the spent fuel at US sites to what would likely be a centralized processing site would not be a fast-track permitting process. So, good luck with their R&D, but like the SMRs looking to use HALEU, especially the pelletized ceramic “TRISO” version, getting a device to work is one challenge, but being able to safely, affordably manufacture enough fuel is in many ways as difficult a task.
And still in the meantime I hope society proceeds with all due haste at electrifying and rolling renewable and battery deployments to get our generation farther and farther along to removing the carbon sources from the energy chain.
In the video blurb I heard the word “pulse”. I am going to assume that this was not a continuous plasma event so what was the time length of this pulse?
Aye, the nuclear fusion scientific community has a history of misleading funders (e.g., Congressional testimony) that conflates physics achievements—such as real fusion but at a microscale—with power generation achievements. They would conveniently omit the fact that the total energy input to achieve some stunning scientific goal was orders of magnitude greater than the energy produced by the eensy-weensy* fusion event itself.
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*Pardon the techno-terminology.