Post #52485 by g0177325 on the US Policy board

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Ah, here's some more about Helion from https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/29/helion_fund...

Fusion energy startup Helion has yet to prove it can generate electricity, but that hasn't stopped investors from dumping another $425 million into the venture.

Helion, whose board is chaired by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, announced an "oversubscribed and upsized" Series F funding round yesterday. With the addition of $425 million to its coffers, the startup claims it's now worth $5.4 billion - despite failing to produce net-positive energy after more than a decade.

This latest round included more cash from Altman, Peter Thiel-founded Mithril Capital and others, also brought in new investors like the SoftBank Vision Fund, Silicon Valley funding giant Lightspeed Venture Partners, an unnamed "major university endowment" and more.

"We are on the brink of delivering a transformative energy solution that can meet the world's increasing electricity demands while preserving U.S. energy leadership," Helion cofounder and CEO David Kirtley said.

Helion acquired its first customer in Microsoft in 2023, with Redmond agreeing to host a 50MW fusion power plant at one of its datacenters in Washington State by 2028. Never mind the fact that some of Microsoft's current and planned datacenters likely consume more energy than that - Helion is still nowhere near that point, and it's questionable whether it'll get there in the next three years.

The fusion energy that Microsoft has agreed to purchase from Helion relies on a fundamentally different approach than the fusion experiment conducted by scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in 2022, which briefly achieved net energy gain.

In that case, LLNL boffins at the National Ignition Facility managed to accomplish an energy output of 3.15 megajoules after bombarding a fuel pellet with lasers outputting 2.05 megajoules of energy. While this marked a net energy gain at the fusion reaction level, it did not account for the total energy input, including the 322 megajoules required to power the laser system.

Helion, on the other hand, wants to generate electricity from fusion reactions using electromagnetic fields that accelerate plasma generated from deuterium hydrogen and helium-3 gases to speeds so fast they exceed 100 million degrees Celsius. By colliding two plasma blobs in the center of a field-reversed configuration (FRC) reactor, energy is supposed to be released; magnetic fields are generated. Theoretically, this allows Helion to extract power via induction.

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