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How one startup is progressing toward commercialized nuclear fusion
In this episode of Decoding Innovation, Scott Krisiloff shares Helion Energy’s journey so far in creating electricity from nuclear fusion and the subsequent plans to commercialize this form of energy.
Fusion — the inverse of fission — is a process where energy is created when two lighter atoms are combined to form a new atom. Established in 2008, Helion Energy is aiming to use nuclear fusion for producing electricity and meeting the global energy demand.
Scott Krisiloff, Chief Business Officer of Helion Energy, details how the company has taken an unconventional approach to its fusion reactions, so that more energy is generated from the reaction than is put into it. Helion’s sixth prototype, completed in 2020, was able to reach a temperature of 100 million degrees. Without such high temperatures, bulk fusion reactions cannot begin. By showing that it can achieve commercially relevant fusion conditions, Helion Energy was able to raise US$500m at the end of 2021.
Scott also talks about Helion Energy’s future goals. The company expects to demonstrate the ability to produce net electricity by 2024. But for nuclear fusion to replace fossil fuels, society will need to be educated about the safety profile and risk characteristics of fusion.
Nuclear fusion may completely transform the global energy industry and help tackle climate change. However, it will need a lot more experiments, advancements and investments.
Key takeaways:
Helion Energy uses deuterium and helium-3 as the fuels. Enough deuterium exists on Earth to produce fusion energy for billions of years, whereas helium-3 is a by-product of deuterium-deuterium fusion.
The sixth-generation Helion prototype is small enough to fit in a shipping container, and is able to create an ideal combination of temperature, density and time — the three fundamentals that govern fusion reactions.
The US$500m raised by Helion Energy in 2021 came from its group of existing investors, who were impressed by the results of the sixth prototype and the future potential of this form of energy.
For your convenience, full text transcript of this podcast is also available.
Intro
Fusion has been the fundamental source of energy in the universe. It's actually the source of energy that powers the sun and all other stars. Deuterium is an extremely energy-dense fuel. So a bottle of water filled with deuterium water will power home for 850 years approximately.
Announcer
Welcome to the Decoding Innovation Podcast series brought to you by the EY-Nottingham Spirk Innovation Hub, where we explore the innovative technologies, business models and ideas that are shaping the future of industries. During each episode, Mitali Sharma, a principal in the EY-Parthenon Strategy practice, meets with stakeholders at the cutting edge to discuss innovations in their space, challenges they need to overcome and their outlook on the future.
Mitali Sharma
Hello and welcome. I'm your host, Mitali Sharma. And today's topic is nuclear fusion, which some believe can lead to limitless clean energy for our planet. To talk more about this, we have with us our guest Scott Krisiloff, the Chief Business Officer for Helion Energy. Welcome to the show, Scott.
Scott Krisiloff
Thank you.
Sharma
Before we get into the details about nuclear fusion, Helion and other things, would you mind sharing your background with us?
Krisiloff
Yeah, sure. I am Chief Business Officer at Helion Energy, which is a company that is producing, hoping to produce the world's first fusion electricity generator. I started with Helion first as an advisor in 2019 and then I joined Helion full time in 2021. And prior to joining Helion as an advisor, I was working in venture capital and then prior to that I was working in public markets, just capital markets broadly as an economist. And so, I have a nontechnical path to Helion and it has been a really exciting and thrilling project for somebody who's nontechnical to who's really a business person to be a part of. So that's how I got to Helion.
Sharma
Thank you for sharing that, Scott. I think you created a perfect segue for me to talk about fusion. What is fusion exactly? How does that differ from fission? Can you talk about that a little bit?
Krisiloff
Fusion is the fundamental source of energy in the universe. It's actually the source of energy that powers the sun and all other stars. It's where all of the elements of the universe come from. So, it is this fundamental source of energy that we know is possible and occurs everywhere in the universe. Fusion is kind of the inverse of fission. Fission is where you take a heavy atom and you split it apart and you get energy out of it. Fusion is where you take two light atoms and you put them together and then you get energy out of that interaction.
Sharma
Is it safe?
Krisiloff
When you think of fission and you think of the things that people think of it as being unsafe, those issues don't occur in fusion in the same way. So, with fission, the things that people think about are proliferation risks. So weapons, they think of meltdown risks, they think of waste primarily. And so with fusion, this is not a technology that can be weaponized in any way. It's also not a technology that produces long-lived waste in any form. And it also is one where the nice thing about fusion is if something were to go wrong out of fusion facility, if you are in the middle of operating and something happens like an earthquake or something that's an extraneous event, the fusion reaction actually just shuts off. It doesn't keep going. So, the big difference between a fission reaction that powers a power facility and a fusion reaction that could power a power facility is that a fission reaction is a chain reaction. It'll keep going, that leads to meltdown or criticality. It's also the mechanism that creates a bomb. With fusion, you're not actually creating a chain reaction where one reaction leads to a subsequent reaction and subsequent reaction, and so you don't have those same risks fundamentally from fusion.
Sharma
So what are some of the hurdles with fusion?
Krisiloff
The biggest hurdle with fusion is that we've been able to do fusion in small amounts on Earth before, and we've even done some significant amounts of fusion. But what we have had a challenge of doing as humanity is getting more energy out of the fusion reaction than we put into it and specifically using that energy in order to generate electricity.
Sharma
I think we will get into the technology in a little bit, but if I can start with Helion, just the name itself, how did the name come about? Does it have anything to do with helium?
Krisiloff
That's a good question. So Helion is actually the scientific name for helium-3, which is an isotope of helium, which is one of the core inputs to our system from a fuel standpoint. So, one of the things about fusion that if people are coming to it for the first time, you don't always think about the fact that fundamentally underlying all of this, just like other energy sources, there's a fuel source. And so, with fusion, what people use primarily is deuterium and tritium, which tritium and deuterium are both isotopes of hydrogen. But in our case, we use deuterium and helium-3 in order to produce our electricity, and helium-3 is an isotope of helium. And so, the company's name derives from that isotope of helium, helium-3, Helion.
Sharma
Interesting! How did the idea come about? So, tell us about its inception and the journey.
Krisiloff
Yeah, that's a great question. So, the team that founded Helion started working together in 2008, and they were at a company called MSNW in the Seattle area. There were some affiliations with the University of Washington and also some government funding behind the work that they were doing. That team was basically researching a type of plasma configuration called the field reverse configuration. And they were using it both in energy experiments and also in propulsion experiments. And one of the experiments that they did in energy worked so well that by 2013 they had built three prototypes already with that experiment and they decided to spin off as a company for Helion Energy in 2013 based on this approach, these experiments. And so over the course of Helion's life from 2008 until 2013, the company has built six working prototypes. We actually do fusion every day. We still have our largest prototype which is Trenta, which came online in 2020 operating in the Redmond, Washington area, but that's kind of the background of Helion.
Sharma
Could you tell us how Helion's approach is different than anything else being tried by the universities or other competitors?
Krisiloff
Let me start at the beginning. If you're coming to fusion for the first time, one of the things that's difficult to process is that everybody is trying to reach fusion conditions and it's kind of like the race to build a flying machine. Like everybody knows that the thing has to fly in some ways when people were developing flying machines. In the same way, we all know that we have to basically convert these fuel sources to deuterium and deuterium to tritium, helium-3 into energy. We need to extract the energy via fusion, we need to get them to fusion conditions, which is primarily very high temperatures and densities. And so, there are a lot of organizations that have different approaches to how or are taking different approaches about how to get that reaction to actually happen. And the most popular approach is one called the tokamak. This is one that people have been studying for a very long time. There's a big international program that's funded by governments around the world that's pursuing this approach. That is a steady-state approach and it's kind of akin to like a campfire where what you would do is you would take, you would just generate enough heat from that reaction in order to spin a steam turbine to create electricity. That's the ultimate way that people are trying to do it. And you take just like a campfire, you're burning the fuel, you're igniting it, you're boiling the water with it, you're putting more fuel on the fire and the idea is to keep the campfire running as long as possible. So, the difference with the Helion approach is really a couple of things. One is that it's a pulse approach and the second is that we do direct energy conversion, is what we call it. In the tokamak or most traditional approaches to fusion, you're trying to boil water to spin a turbine. In our approach, actually one of the nice things about plasma and fusion is that the way in which we contain plasma, all of these systems or most of these systems is using magnets because the particles inside of a plasma create their own magnetic fields. And so, you're able to control them and manipulate them using external magnetic fields. And so, what we do in our machine is that you can picture our machine like a 30-foot long tube and about 6-feet tall. And what happens is on either ends of those tubes, we form plasmas, which plasma is the fourth state of matter. It's like fire-ish type of plasma. It's like we form two fireballs basically; we put them into the field reverse configuration which is kind of like a large doughnut-shaped plasma and then we fire them at each other. The two FRCs, the field reverse configurations, they collide in the center of the machine and then when they hit the center of the machine, we further compress those down with another magnetic field and that's how they get to fusion conditions, and so, at that high temperature and density. And so, when fusion is happening, those plasmas that are combined now in the center of the machine, they start to push back on the other, on the rest of the magnetic field. And when they push back on the field, they create, they induce electric current out of that. So they create a change in field strength that creates electricity and that's the electricity, that’s the current that we capture out of the fusion reaction. The difference of our approach is that we're very efficient in getting out that energy from the fusion reaction, which means that we have lower thresholds for how much fusion we actually have to do. So, one of the ways that people in the outside world measure a fusion reaction is queue or break even. People talk about needing to get to like Q = 5–10 in order to reach a state called ignition where you're igniting a campfire. We don't have to get to ignition thresholds in our machine; we just have to produce a little bit of extra energy and then here is where the pulse comes in or the rep-rated nature of our device is that you just do it once and then you do it over and over and over again. And the goal is to try to get to like about once a second, and then you're aggregating small amounts of energy from the fusion reaction and summing that up into large amounts of meaningful amounts of electricity.
Sharma
So, there was a lot to unpack there. One step at a time, talk about the efficiency levels, what are we talking about here? Is it an order of magnitude that we're talking about?
Krisiloff
It is, we are talking about like 85%–90% efficiency versus like 20%–30% total efficiency. That’s the efficiency going into the plasma and then also coming out of the plasma.
Sharma
Interesting. And what kind of temperatures are we talking about here?
Krisiloff
That’s a great question. So when we announced, I mentioned earlier that we had built six working prototypes in our history. The sixth prototype we built in 2020 and that was our first full physical scale prototype that we built in Redmond. And we announced to the world in 2021 that in that prototype we had reached 100 million degree temperatures, which 100 million degree temperatures are really important. Because that's the temperature at which bulk fusion really starts to happen. And we demonstrated therefore that we were able to reach commercially relevant fusion conditions in our approach. And so, that was one of our big endpoints for that device for this approach.
Sharma
The reason the intense temperatures are needed is because the gravitational pull that is present in the sun is not present on Earth, obviously. So you need temperature to compensate for that. Is that correct?
Krisiloff
That's more or less correct. I think the thing that governs the fusion reaction people refer to as the triple product, and so it's about a function of temperature, density and time. So, this is especially more important in more steady-state approaches, but it's still functionally as helpful to govern this. But basically, like if you think about a plasma, you have a bunch of atoms just bouncing around in the plasma. If you're trying to get them to like collide and break their coulomb barrier, you need to have a certain amount of energy imparted into them, which is temperature. And then you have to have them close enough together that from randomness they're likely to collide with each other. So that's density, helps with that. And then time is how long can you hold those temperature, those atoms, those particles at that temperature and density, so that you maximize the amount of reactions that are happening. And so, the more temperature you have in there, the more energy you can have, the more likely you could have collisions where fusion is going to happen. So that is one lever that we can pull on Earth in order to get more fusion reactions to happen, is have higher temperatures.
Sharma
And so, what kind of energy output are we talking about here?
Krisiloff
Our goal in our devices is to get the 50 MW systems with our device.
Sharma
And you talked earlier about the size of your reactor. Could you give us a frame of reference? How big is it and how easily deployable would it be?
Krisiloff
We really think of it as this particle accelerator. That's the best way for the audience to envision it as well probably. It's different from like a fission reactor. This is more about like accelerating particles and raising their temperatures, basically, especially in our approach. But the way that our machine works, our accelerator works is that the size of our accelerator, excuse me, is about 30-feet long and about 6-feet tall, is the scale of it. And so, one of the things that's really cool about that is that's about the size that could fit into a shipping container, which means that we can mass manufacture these in one place and then we would be able to ship those to sites around the country, around the world in order to deploy them.
Sharma
Interesting. So, you talked about using isotopes to generate the energy and then convert it into electricity. How do you get those isotopes?
Krisiloff
I mentioned that our fuel sources are deuterium and helium-3, and we'll start with the deuterium first, which the deuterium is abundant on Earth. Deuterium is a form of hydrogen that's found in water. It's found in your body today. It's found in the ocean. It's found in saltwater, seawater or freshwater. There's enough deuterium on Earth to last humans using fusion energy for billions of years, like longer than the earth will be around. There's enough deuterium, so that's not really that much of a problem. And also, I should mention deuterium is an extremely energy-dense fuel. So like a bottle of water filled with deuterium water will power home for 850 years approximately. But that's the deuterium side of it. The helium-3 side of it, and this goes for tritium, tritium-driven fuel, or tritium-driven approaches as well, both tritium and helium-3 are very difficult to find on Earth. The way that tritium and helium-3 have historically been produced, there's really no good way to produce them. People have theorized that in order to get helium-3, you could find large helium-3 deposits on the moon, and so you could mine the moon for helium-3 and use that in fusion. For us, in order to get the helium-3, the nice thing about having a working efficient fusion generator is that helium-3 is actually a by-product of deuterium-deuterium fusion. So you have this abundant fuel source, which is deuterium, and you can put that into the machine, and then you can do fusion efficiently with the deuterium, recapturing most of the energy that's created, and then you also get out of it helium-3, that you can take the helium-3 and put it back into the system, and then do deuterium-helium-3 fusion in that system.
Sharma
Scott, we are talking about very high temperatures and magnetic fields. Tell us about the safety concerns here.
Krisiloff
One of the questions that I get asked a lot is about temperature because we're operating at such high temperatures, 100 million degrees, people ask, think immediately, is it safe to be around 100 million degrees? Is that possible? And one of the interesting things about a fusion generator is that because the fuel is operating at the densities and with low amounts of fuel, the temperature of the particles inside of the machine doesn't actually translate to the temperature of the machine itself. Our current prototype, our sixth prototype, is cooled entirely just by the air conditioning in the room. It's able to stand in a room and doesn't generate much more heat than that. So, from that standpoint, from the temperature standpoint, that's not a safety concern. But that said, this is an industrial form of energy. No form of energy is free. And in fusion’s case, there are certain safety protocols and measures that will certainly need to be put in place in order to have fusion deployed. The by-products of a fusion reaction are similar to ones that you might find at a hospital off of an X-ray machine. There’re neutrons that are generated but those are shielded by simple concrete basically. And then as we talked about earlier in the conversation, there's no risk of meltdown in a fusion reaction because it's not a chain reaction and then also the waste products are short-lived waste. So, in our device, the waste product is tritium, which is the fuel source of many other devices. But tritium has like a 12-year half-life and then decays into helium-3.
Sharma
How did you convince investors? You said you just went through a round in 2021 to invest in this technology, which is very exciting but also very risky.
Krisiloff
That's a great question as well. I get this question a lot actually of there's a lot of money going into fusion. What's changed in fusion? Why is all of this money going into fusion now? And I think that there are certainly some capital markets elements of it for the broad industry and I can't speak to what other organizations are seeing. But what I know and what is nice for Helion is that I know it really is all driven by our own results. We know that our sixth-generation prototype performed at a level that we expected it to, and it hit some really important endpoints for our system in terms of proving out our capability to make the jump to this next milestone of demonstrating that electricity and our investors knew that too. And so, the US$500 million that we raised, one of the things that I'm most proud of is that it actually came from our existing investors who basically saw the results of the sixth prototype, were excited by the results of the sixth prototype and decided to make additional investment. And in fact, the round was led by Sam Altman, who's our Chairman. This was the largest single investment I think that he's ever made in a company based on the results of our sixth prototype.
Sharma
Thinking ahead a little bit, how are you thinking of commercializing it once you've got a functional product?
Krisiloff
Some of that is still evolving and figuring out what the best way to do this will be something that will iterate on and figure out over time. In the near term, it's safe to say that we'll likely be operating these ourselves. These are going to be first-of-a-kind devices. This is something that really takes our own expertise in order to operate and understand how to operate. But in the longer term, even though we think that this will be a relatively inexpensive form of electricity and relatively low capital cost, we're still talking about a very large global capital investment in order to make fusion power a reality. If you want to be able to supplant fossil fuels with fusion, it's going to take hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars of global investment in order to make that a reality.
Sharma
Setting aside the difficulties of the technology and fund-raising, have there been other surprises in the commercialization journey?
Krisiloff
This business is like a capital markets economist background. One of the biggest surprises to me has been watching how progress can happen and how progress cannot happen, basically. The decisions that we can make as a society that can prevent really important breakthroughs from happening just because we don't all agree on how to pursue those or what resources to devote to those. And this is in fusion, the original ideas of how to make many of these approaches work are not ones that are totally new. In Helion’s case, there certainly were some important advancements in underlying technologies that allowed us to build this for the first time. But in some of the other approaches, especially like the steady-state tokamak ones, the biggest difference between having a working fusion reaction or working tokamak and not has been just the amount of money and resources that are devoted to it, and the way in which we are bringing those resources together. So for me as somebody who works in capital, it's made me ask the question a lot of times. What other areas could we make step function change in progress for society that we're not doing just because we're oriented in the wrong direction or not willing to commit enough capital to? That's been one of the biggest surprises.
Sharma
If we were to talk about Helion’s approach, I read it on your website, it said that you took a more of an engineering-based approach to problem solving. Can you talk about that? What does that mean and how does that differ from some of the other approaches other people are taking?
Krisiloff
One of the cool things for me personally at Helion is that I get to kind of jump into a world that's pretty far outside where I grew up in, in terms of my career, and where I think probably a lot of your listeners did as well, if there are accountants out there. But one of the cool things about that is getting to learn the communities that are involved. And two of the important communities that are constituents of this community are engineers and scientists. And you've got the scientists who really are the keepers of the plasma physics and the idea of how to approach the problem, and then you have the engineers who are the keepers of the building of the device and how you'll actually build something that can approach the problem and solve the problem in a physical real way. And those two things don't always bridge. Again, where funding has historically been heavily in government research labs or in just government-funded labs at universities or at national labs or elsewhere, the scientific approach or the scientific mindset is slightly different to how to solve this problem and the engineering approach or the way that capital would think about it. And so again, I think this goes back to what we were just talking about. If the resources were devoted to this problem in a way that you could take the straightest shot path in order to solving it, how might that change the way that people are actually going about trying to solve it?
Sharma
Very true. Going forward, would you suggest that there is an opportunity for private funding to even take a bigger role along with government because, like you said, there's a lot of research lab activity that's going on in this space or other spaces which are on the edge.
Krisiloff
I think it has and I think it comes down to risk tolerance and the cost of capital as well, just like it always does. But it also comes down to the frontier of the unknown, broadly of even for a scientist, even for people who are working on fusion devices currently. There are elements of this that we just won't know until we build it. We've got to build it and then we'll figure out how it does.
Sharma
You talked about scale being very important for any plasma-based reactor. In a trend that's coming in, in the fission side of it, is all around micro reactors. Do you envision a future where you would also go toward that or do you think that does not work with the fusion technology?
Krisiloff
The thing that's interesting about the end market for this is ultimately we're producing a commodity, which is electricity. In a commodity business, you just have to produce at the lowest cost you possibly can and that's how you have the highest volume. That's how you win a commodity business. So, all of it is dictated. The deployment in my opinion will all ultimately be dictated by what's the lowest cost way to deliver the electricity that we're producing from our devices.
Sharma
Well, it's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for your time and for making an intensely complicated issue simpler to understand.
Krisiloff
Thank you for having me.
Sharma
On December 13, 2022, U.S. Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Administration announced the achievement of fusion ignition at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This podcast episode was recorded prior to that announcement.
Announcer
The Decoding Innovation podcast series is a limited production of the EY-Nottingham Spirk Innovation Hub, based in Cleveland, Ohio. For more information, visit our website at ey.com/decodinginnovation. If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe. Leave a review wherever you get your podcasts and be sure to spread the word.
The views of third parties set out in this podcast are not necessarily the views of the global EY organization or its member firms. Moreover, they should be seen in the context of the time they were made.
Presenters
Mitali Sharma
Former host, Decoding Innovation podcast
Scott Krisiloff
Chief Business Officer, Helion Energy
