Helion 7th Generation

[Elvisa Schimke]

Fusionenergy developer Helion Energy has broken ground on a new facility in Everett, Washington, which will house its seventh generation fusion prototype, known as Polaris. Construction of the facility, which will also produce helium-3 fuel, is expected to be completed in early-2022. Meanwhile, General Fusion and Canadian Nuclear Laboratories are to collaborate on the development of tritium extraction techniques for use in commercial fusion power plants.

Helion said the new facility in Everett will accelerate its efforts to build the world's first commercially-viable fusion power plant. It is developing a cost-effective, zero-carbon electrical power plant using its patented pulsed, non-ignition fusion technology. Helion says its fusion power plant will provide "flexible, scalable, baseload power that is affordable, providing the world a new path to full decarbonisation of electricity generation".

"At this facility, Helion will close in on its goal of breaking the fusion barrier and pushing the world towards the end of the fossil fuel era," said Helion founder and CEO David Kirtley. "Helion has deep roots in Washington, having spent the last eight-plus years here researching and developing a technology with unparalleled implications for reshaping how the world obtains its energy."

"Washington is proud to be the home of world-leading pioneers developing affordable, clean energy solutions," said Governor Jay Inslee, who attended the ground-breaking ceremony on 27 July. "It's a great milestone that Helion is now ready to commercialise their innovative technology. With this new facility, Helion and Washington are taking game-changing action to address the climate crisis."

Helion says its approach to fusion energy differs in three main ways from other approaches. Firstly, it uses a pulsed fusion system, which helps overcome the hardest physics challenges, keeps its fusion device smaller than other approaches, and allows it to adjust the power output based on need. Secondly, its system is built to directly recover electricity, while other fusion systems heat water to create steam to turn a turbine which loses a lot of energy in the process. Thirdly, it uses deuterium and helium-3 as fuel, which helps keep its system small and efficient.

Last month, Helion became the first private company to announce exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius in its sixth fusion generator prototype, Trenta. The company said reaching this temperature is a critical engineering milestone as it is considered the ideal fuel temperature at which a commercial power plant would need to operate. It also announced its Trenta prototype recently finished a 16-month testing campaign, completing almost 10,000 high-power pulses.

General Fusion's Magnetised Target Fusion (MTF) approach to fusion involves injecting hydrogen plasma into a liquid metal sphere, where it is compressed and heated so that fusion occurs. The heat from the fusion of the hydrogen atoms is transferred into the liquid metal.

The Vancouver, Canada-based company plans to demonstrate its MTF technology with its Fusion Demonstration Plant (FDP), to be built at UKAEA's Culham Campus near Oxford in the UK. The FDP - a 70%-scaled version of the commercial pilot plant - is expected to begin operations in 2025.

The demonstration plant will create fusion conditions in a "power-plant relevant" environment but will not be used to produce power. The FDP will cycle one plasma pulse per day, and will used deuterium fuel, whereas the commercial pilot plant will use deuterium-tritium fuel and will cycle up to one plasma pulse per second. The neutrons in the reactor interact with the liquid metal liner of the fusion vessel generating more tritium.

General Fusion has announced it will work with Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) to identify the most promising approaches for managing tritium in fusion energy systems - specifically, the process of extracting tritium from liquid metal to provide a limitless supply of tritium fuel for use in fusion power plants.

This work will be carried out through the Canadian Nuclear Research Initiative, a programme that facilitates access to CNL's facilities for industrial partners in Canada and around the world. CNL has a CAD40 million state-of-the-art tritium facility capable of handling the materials required to conduct full-scale tests of tritium extraction technology.

"Our global research partners play an important role in helping General Fusion advance its MTF technology for commercialisation," said Ryan Guerrero, chief technology officer at General Fusion. "This collaboration with Canadian Nuclear Laboratories will further refine this technology for application in commercial power plants."

General Fusion says its approach of maximising the use of existing industrial technologies such as pneumatic pistons, and not relying on large, superconducting magnets or expensive lasers means a more readily available supply chain, making MTF easier to manufacture and scale than other fusion technologies. The company says its goal is to bring fusion energy to the world by the early 2030s.

Helion Energy, Inc. is an American fusion research company, located in Everett, Washington.[2] They are developing a magneto-inertial fusion technology to produce helium-3 and fusion power via aneutronic fusion,[3][4] which could produce low-cost clean electric energy using a fuel that can be derived exclusively from water.[5]

The company was founded in 2013 by David Kirtley, John Slough, Chris Pihl, and George Votroubek.[6] The management team won the 2013 National Cleantech Open Energy Generation competition and awards at the 2014 ARPA-E Future Energy Startup competition,[7] were members of the 2014 Y Combinator program,[8] and were awarded a 2015 ARPA-E ALPHA contract, "Staged Magnetic Compression of FRC Targets to Fusion Conditions".[9]

This system is intended to operate at 1 Hz, injecting plasma, compressing it to fusion conditions, expanding it, and recovering the energy to produce electricity.[13] The pulsed-fusion system that is used is theoretically able to run 24/7 for electricity production. Due to its compact size, the systems may be able to replace current fossil fuel infrastructure without major needs for investment.[14]

Helion uses a combination of deuterium and 3

He as fuel. Deuterium and 3He allows mostly aneutronic fusion, releasing only 5% of its energy in the form of fast neutrons. Commercial 3He is rare and expensive. Instead Helion produces 3He by deuteron-deuteron (D-D) side reactions to the deuterium - 3He reactions. D-D fusion has an equal chance of producing a 3He atom and of producing a tritium atom plus a proton. Tritium beta decays into more 3He with a half-life of 12.32 years. Helion plans to capture the 3He produced this way and reuse it as fuel. Helion has a patent on this process.[15]

This fusion approach uses the magnetic field of a field-reversed configuration (FRC) plasmoid (operated with solid state electronics derived from power switching electronics in wind turbines) to prevent plasma energy losses. An FRC is a magnetized plasma configuration notable for its closed field lines, high beta and lack of internal penetrations.[7]

Two FRC plasmoids are accelerated to velocities exceeding 300 km/s with pulsed magnetic fields which then merge into a single plasmoid at high pressure.[7] Published plans target compressing fusion plasmas to 12 tesla (T).[16]

Energy is captured by direct energy conversion that uses the expansion of the plasma to induce a current in the magnetic compression- and acceleration- coils. Separately it translates high-energy fusion products, such as alpha particles directly into a voltage. 3He produced by D-D fusion carries 0.82 MeV of energy. Tritium byproducts carry 1.01 MeV, while the proton produces 3.02 MeV.

This approach eliminates the need for steam turbines, cooling towers, and their associated energy losses. According to the company, this process also allows the recovery of a significant part of the input energy at a round-trip efficiency of over 95% [7][17][18]

The company's Fusion Engine is based on the Inductive Plasmoid Accelerator (IPA) experiments[19][20] performed from 2005 through 2012. These experiments used deuterium-deuterium fusion, which produced a 2.45 MeV neutron in half of the reactions. The IPA experiments claimed 300 km/s velocities, deuterium neutron production, and 2 keV deuterium ion temperatures.[20] Helion and MSNW published articles describing a deuterium-tritium implementation that is the easiest to achieve but generates 14 MeV neutrons. The Helion team published peer-reviewed research demonstrating D-D neutron production in 2011.[20]

In 2014, according to the timeline on the company website, Grande, Helion's 4th fusion prototype, was developed to test high field operation. Grande achieves magnetic field compression of 4 tesla, forms cm-scale FRCs, and reaches plasma temperatures of 5 keV. Grande outperforms any other private fusion company.[17]

In 2015 Helion demonstrated the first direct magnetic energy recovery from a subscale pulsed magnetic system, utilizing modern high-voltage insulated gate bipolar transistors to recover energy at over 95% round-trip efficiency for over 1 million pulses. In a smaller system, the team demonstrated the formation of more than 1 billion FRCs.[17]

In 2018, the 5th prototype, "Venti" had magnetic fields of 7T and at high density, an ion temperature of 2 keV.[14] Helion detailed D-D fusion experiments producing neutrons in an October 2018 report at the United States Department of Energy's ARPA-E's annual ALPHA program meeting.[21] Experiments that year achieved plasmas with multi-keV temperatures[22] and a triple product of 6.4 1018 keVs/m3.[23]

In 2021, the firm announced that after a 16-month test cycle with more than 10,000 pulses, its sixth prototype, Trenta, had reached 100 million degrees C, the temperature they would run a commercial reactor at.[14] Magnetic compression fields exceeded 10 T, ion temperatures surpassed 8 keV, and electron temperatures exceeded 1 keV.[24][25] The company further reported ion densities up to 3 1022 ions/m3 and confinement times of up to 0.5 ms.[26]

3a8082e126