Everett-based Helion receives approval to build fusion power plant

EVERETT — A Chelan County hearing examiner approved a conditional use permit on Tuesday, allowing Everett-based Helion Energy to construct what could become the world’s first fusion power plant in the town of Malaga near the Columbia River.

Helion broke ground for the facility in July. The decision this week clears the way for it to build a 100,000-square-foot “fusion generation building,” a 55,000-square-foot substation and a 26,800-square-foot assembly building, according to project documents.

“This is another important step toward a future of abundant, clean, safe, affordable energy,” said David Kirtley, Helion’s co-founder and CEO, in a press release. “As a company of builders with a single-minded focus on making electricity from fusion commercially practical, we couldn’t be more excited to move into this next phase of construction for the Orion power plant.”

Some energy experts have said they don’t think that commercial fusion, which aims to harness the same nuclear reactions that fuel the sun and stars, will be available until the year 2050 or beyond. But Kirtley said the approval to build the plants puts Helion on track to provide power to Microsoft by the end of 2028.

Helion had announced back in May 2023 that it had signed an agreement with Microsoft to power some of the company’s data centers from its planned 50 megawatt power plant.

Helion employs 500 workers in Everett, Thomas said. She declined to discuss the employment plans for the new facility.

Kirtley said Helion is the first private fusion company to achieve 100 million degrees Celsius plasma temperatures in its testing models. That temperature is generally considered the required operating temperature for commercial fusion.

Helion has received around $1 billion in funding, with one of its key backers being OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

“And?”

I happened to be in their city and unknowingly crashed their (i think) break even party.

they had a group of about 25 people and had taken over the bar of a Mexican restaurant.

I was curious who they were and was trying to figure it out when I saw one guy wearing a shirt with a Helion logo. so I looked it up real quick on my phone and saw they were doing fusion stuff. I walked up to them and said Everyone knows there is a working Fusion reactor about 8 light seconds away, but apparently they mis heard me cause their test reactor is 8 miles away and 2 of them dropped their drinks.

I talked to them some more later and they explained what they were doing and explained they were an offshoot of work that started at University of Washington and how their device worked and told me to check out some of their videos.

at the time I did look into it a bit more and it seemed reasonable to me, but I am not an expert and it has been a long time since I took nuclear plasma dynamics/

“working Fusion reactor about 8 light seconds away,”

8.3 light minutes away is the largest fusion reactor and 99.86% of the mass in the whole solar system even Jupiter is noise in a rounding error.

I about an hour that fusion reactor in the sky will start to shower my energy harvesting machines on my roof lines and yard by the time the planet rotates and the line of sight is lost( sorry flat earthers) those machines will have made 81,000 watt hours or 81kWh I’ll use maybe 30 today running LED lights and one heat pump plus the Mitsubishi split today

Helion is something special they are not doing large torus plasma machines nor are they doing laser inertial confinement with deuterium - tritium fuel.

They are doing magnetic mirrors , ion pump heating and Deuterium - Helium 3 which only makes a few lower energy neutrons vs DT fusion. It takes a much higher temp 100 million C is plenty hot. In fact it’s critical to how they are going to get the He3 part of their fuel.

They are going to breed it by running at 100 million C with deuterium- Deuterium which has a 50/50 split of it’s fusion output products

D+D = H + Tritium
D+D = He3 + neutron

That plan to filter out the hydrogens and use the He3 with more D in a second power reactor. If they surround the middle of the mirror assembly with regular light waters as shielding for that single produced neutron H captures a thermalized n and becomes....deuterium it’s an elegant cycle.

Course if you have the plasma heat at 100 million C then every other lower temp fusion reaction can be used D-D is the hard one. D+T plus D+He with readily fuse at the plasma conditions of D-D fusion if you don’t strip them out out nearly immediately. It’s called catalyzed D-D fusion if you burn all 3 by r recycling all but the single proton hydrogen back to the plasma in near real time.

Combined those three offer the highest energy or unit of mass of any nuclear fuel.

You have to deal with both a 14 MEV and a 2.45 MEV fast neutrons the first from D-T and the other from one branch of D-D 50% = He3 + n (2.45MEV)

If you want no significant neutrons you have to breed He3 and strip out tritium as it’s formed in the D+D side reaction. Helion is going this route not the catalyzed D-D,D-T,D-He3 route.

Given they hit 100 million C there is a good chance they can at least break even....in that case surround the central mirror assembly with uranium and then a large tube of light water...You will breed huge amounts of Pu239 and also deuterium. Pu239 is roughly 1 gigawatt day worth of energy. That’s also worth 1.2 million dollars at $50 per megawatt hour wholesale rates. A 100 megawatt fusion plasma would make 4000 kg per year in Pu239 with a uranium breeder blanket a Q of just 1 and catalyzed D-D.

That works out to 3.6 billion a year worth of energy just in plutonium alone. You are also breeding light water into heavy water loaded with deuterium as well I didn’t do the math but it should be a couple hundred kilos a year in D as well.

So they need two reactors a He3 breeder and the power producer. If you don’t do D-D catalyzed fusion. And or hybrid fusion fission breeding.

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