Microsoft bets on the future of nuclear fusion power

amount of energy. e most advanced attempts at generating electricity through nuclear fusion involve shooting powerful laser beams at a tiny target or relying on magnetic elds to con ne superheated matter called plasma with a machine called a tokamak. Helion uses neither of those methods. e company is developing a 40-foot device called a plasma accelerator that heats fuel to 100 million degrees Celsius. It heats deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen) and helium-3 into a plasma and then uses pulsed magnetic elds to compress the plasma until fusion happens. ( e company has a Youtube video that illustrates the process in much more detail.)

Helion claims that the machine should eventually be able to recapture the electricity used to trigger the reaction, which can be used to recharge the device’s magnets. “We electrically recover all the energy we put into fusion so that we can actually build systems that are smaller and cheaper and we can iterate on them a lot quicker,” Kirtley says. Figuring out how to be energy e cient is crucial to make fusion power a reality. After all, you need extreme heat and pressure to force atoms to fuse together. And until recently, researchers hadn’t been able to do this without burning through more energy than the fusion reaction actually produced. In December, lasers achieved a huge breakthrough called “fu- sion ignition” — meaning that for the rst time, researchers were able to trigger a fusion reaction that resulted in a net energy gain. at’s a major milestone Helion has yet to accomplish.

Getting enough helium-3 fuel could be another big challenge, Rosner says, without a way of producing commercial quantities of it. It’s a very rare isotope that’s used in quantum computing and medical imaging. Helion, however, says that it has patented a process to make helium-3 itself by fusing deuterium atoms together in its plasma accelerator. Part of the appeal of nuclear fusion in the rst place is that it can run on hydrogen, the simplest and most abundant element in the universe.

Assuming Helion can pull this all o , it still has to ensure that it can do so in an a ordable way. e cost of the electricity it generates for consumers would need to be comparable to or cheaper than today’s power plants, solar, and wind farms. e company isn’t sharing what price it agreed to in its power purchase agreement with Microsoft, but Kirtley says the company’s goal is to one day get costs down to a cent a kilowatt hour.

Helion’s funders include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Microsoft has made a multibillion dollar investment in OpenAI to boost its development of popular tools like ChatGPT. Altman is Helion’s board chair and largest investor, e Washington Post cine – developed a vaccine that can be tailored to each patient’s unique genetic makeup, to train their immune system to destroy pancreatic cancer cells.