The US company Helion Energy wants to have a power plant ready in five years that will generate electricity from nuclear fusion. The first customer wants to be the software company Microsoft, which has now reached an agreement with Helion. Details on this were not disclosed.
The planned fusion power plant should deliver an electrical output of at least 50 MW, announced Helion on Wednesday. The company itself says that the year of completion is set at 2028, which is much earlier than is normally forecast for this technology.
Helion has been working on fusion technology for well over a decade. According to the company, it has built six prototypes so far and is the first private company to reach a plasma temperature of 100 million °C. Work is currently underway on a seventh prototype, which should generate electricity in 2024.
Optimistisches Microsoft
“We are optimistic that fusion power can be an important technology to support the clean energy transition,” Microsoft President Brad Smith said. Helion will support Microsoft’s long-term goals for clean energy and drive the market for a new, efficient way to generate more clean energy. “We certainly have work to do, but we are confident in our ability to deliver the world’s first fusion power plant,” writes Helion.
Helion Energy isn’t the only company running such an ambitious schedule. Commonwealth Fusion Systems – a start-up that grew out of fusion research at MIT – wants to deliver a kind of anti-ITER: small, quick to build and much cheaper. The SPARC reactor prototype is expected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars instead of billions and be ready in a few years. The first construction work is underway.
The international nuclear fusion reactor ITER is currently under construction in Cadarache in southern France. This was originally supposed to be filled with plasma for the first time in 2025, but the plan may be delayed due to damage to central components that have yet to be repaired. Nevertheless, it is expected that ITER will generate electricity for the first time in 2035, as previously planned.
Investor Sam Altman
Like Commonwealth Fusion, Washington State-based Helion Energy is working on a smaller system. The aim is to confine the plasma using a combination of compression and magnets.
One of Helion Energy’s key investors is Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company responsible for the AI products for GPT-4 and ChatGPT. In 2021, he was involved in a funding round totaling $500 million. OpenAI, in turn, gets billions in investment from Microsoft.
At the end of last year, a team from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) managed to extract more energy from a laser fusion experiment than was previously put into it. The fusion reaction produced 3.15 megajoules of energy, while the lasers pumped 2.05 megajoules of energy into the fueled target, it said.
(anw)
