Helion Energy to demonstrate net electricity production by 2024

[usesbiggerwords]

Maybe this is a better venue because there can be so much noise on Reddit.

My experience on Reddit has been that the name of the subreddit generates only opposing discussion. r/fusion? Only people that say it will never happen, or a bunch of ITER die-hards.

[Skipjack]

Helion just got another 425 million in investment!

Today we’re sharing news of our oversubscribed and upsized $425 million fundraise!

I am very excited for what this funding will enable for us. We will be radically scaling up our manufacturing in the U.S. – enabling us to build capacitors, magnets, and semiconductors much faster than we have been able to before. This accelerates the construction of the world’s first fusion power plant and then all our plants to come.

We brought on several new investors this round, including Lightspeed and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, who completed extensive due diligence in our science, engineering, and business. Their decision to invest in Helion reflects how much we have built, how fast we have done it, and their belief in Helion’s approach to getting fusion to the grid as quickly as possible. The round also had participation from existing investors, including Sam Altman, Mithril Capital, Capricorn Investment Group, Dustin Moskovitz through Good Ventures Foundation, and Nucor.

To have such a prestigious group behind our mission to bring fusion power to the world is very special. We are thankful for their commitment and belief in what the world could be with abundant, clean energy everywhere.

There’s still a lot of work to do, and our team is excited to keep pushing to do what no one has done before. If you’re excited by solving hard problems and big missions, we’re hiring!

– David

https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/a ... -series-f/

[Carl White]

Maybe this is a better venue because there can be so much noise on Reddit.

My experience on Reddit has been that the name of the subreddit generates only opposing discussion. r/fusion? Only people that say it will never happen, or a bunch of ITER die-hards.

https://old.reddit.com/u/baking has made a lot of thoughtful comments regarding Helion and fusion efforts in general there though, even though they might not be as positive about Helion as we'd like Welcome to the forum, baking.

[Ivy Matt]

Related to the recent news about the Series F investments, TechCrunch has an article on Helion:

https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/28/helio ... microsoft/

“In AI, what’s the big challenge? Getting the chips. In fusion, what’s the big challenge? Getting the chips,” CEO David Kirtley told TechCrunch in a recent interview. “Polaris is 50,000 of these large-scale, pulse-power semiconductors, and getting those set the timeline.”

In the lab, the company has small systems that can fire more than 100 times per second, so it’s possible that future Helion reactors will be able to fire 60 pulses per second, the same frequency as electricity on the grid. “But there’s some big engineering challenges to get to those high repetition rates at the kind of big pulse powers where we talk about millions of amps flowing around,” Kirtley said.

Engadget also has an article, but it seems to be only regurgitating part of the TechCrunch article:

https://www.engadget.com/science/a-priv ... 20697.html

It has some comments, though.

[Skipjack]

New Helion Blog post and comment from David Kirtley:

In addition to unlocking high-efficiency direct energy recovery, pulsed fusion can also be load following to meet the real time needs of an AI datacenter or an electric arc steel plant! We’ve demonstrated ramping FRC pulsed plasmas from 0 to hundreds of pulses per second.

https://x.com/dekirtley/status/1889332186442342643

Blog post:

More on Helion's pulsed approach to fusion from Director of Research, Dr. George Votroubek:

https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/m ... to-fusion/

[Skipjack]

Most of the things above were already things we knew, or had at least suspected. The comment by David Kirtley about 100s of pulses per second is interesting. I suspect that this is not any of the big machines, but probably relates to the smaller prototypes, or maybe the FRC- propulsion- system they built a few years ago.

[mvanwink5]

Helion’s ability to sub cycle load follow means load leveling batteries are not needed. OTH, ‘Solar’ & ‘wind’ need massive batteries. Moreover, the ability to ramp load is not an issue like it is for fossil & fission because thermal cycling is not a big issue for Helion (turbines are huge chunks of metal under huge rotational stresses, thermal cycling stresses should be low for Helion’s low mass quartz tubes & there are no rotational force stresses).

[Skipjack]

Short video interview with David Kirtley. Not much new there for us who follow Helion, but still worth noting.

https://x.com/twistartups/status/1889840037426077732

[mvanwink5]

Short video interview with David Kirtley. Not much new there for us who follow Helion, but still worth noting.

SJ, thank you for that link.
You sell the interview short for 2 reasons:
First, who is interviewing. David Sacks (another tech savvy billionaire) is a direct reporting member of Trump’s team & is a close associate of one of the interviewers. Second, David Kirtley is restating timelines which lets us know there is not a commercialization delay. 2028 for revenue from fusion is huge (I know of no other team with a more aggressive timeline), & shows DK & team are in the mode of ’sleeping on the floor if necessary'.

DK makes many points (which we know, that’s true) which separate Helion from the pack. Research, build, & manufacturing in Helion’s project are being rolled into one parallel effort. Helion’s machine is designed to be manufactured, the machines to make their machine are Helion's.

[Giorgio]

The only important point for me in that video was the :
"We have penalties to pay if we don't meet the 2028 date to deliver those electrons to Microsoft".

That's an extremely powerful statement guys.
If they signed a contract like that it means that they have a very strong confidence on their tech maturity.

[mvanwink5]

Sorry, not clear, regulations & siting permits are always a sword hanging over Fusion builds & having connections to the top is important. Also not sure if Helion is getting any Fed money, if so connection to A.I. (Sacks’ focus) also is important.

[paperburn1]

another helion video

Code: Select all

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxuPkDOuiM4

[Carl White]

another helion video

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxuPkDOuiM4

Yes, Sabine Hossenfelder. Disappointingly, she starts with the same tired argument, namely that Helion made some predictions early on that didn't pan out, therefore anything they say is suspect. This when Helion stated that it would only come with the funding they needed and didn't yet have. She doesn't go into much depth either (for example, mentioning that a large part of the energy spent to initiate fusion is recovered as a part of the process).

There are plenty of comments attached to the video if anyone wants to argue with the usual crew. Here is a direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxuPkDOuiM4

[Munchausen]

another helion video

Code: Select all

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxuPkDOuiM4

Yes, Sabine Hossenfelder. Disappointingly, she starts with the same tired argument, namely that Helion made some predictions early on that didn't pan out, therefore anything they say is suspect. This when Helion stated that it would only come with the funding they needed and didn't yet have. She doesn't go into much depth either (for example, mentioning that a large part of the energy spent to initiate fusion is recovered as a part of the process). There are plenty of comments attached to the video if anyone wants to argue with the usual crew. Here is a direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxuPkDOuiM4

Hossenfelder is right. The Helion has published no detailed technical reports on their findings and how ever justified this may be, it means that we innocent bystanders cannot make any valid estimations of the validity of their approach.

To this date, all attempts at exploiting fusion reactions for energy production has failed sinced fusion reactions were first vetted by Mark Oliphant in the nineteenthirties.

Until Helion demonstrated their first amount of positive net energy it is safest to assume that this will be yet another failure.

[Skipjack]

Hossenfelder did not even bother to read their recent paper. Helion did publish results for Trenta.
The argument about their missed timeline is moot because that timeline was of course contingent on sufficient funding, which Helion did not have until 2021...