A Sam Altman-backed startup has raised nearly half a billion dollars as it aims to build the world’s first nuclear fusion power plant to solve the energy crunch issue. US-based Helion Energy received $425 million in Series F investment that included investors such as Lightspeed Venture Partners, SoftBank, and Vision Fund 2 with existing investors Mr Altman, Capricorn Investment Group, Mithril Capital, Dustin Moskovitz, and Nucor also participating.
With the latest round of funding, Helion has raised over $1 billion in capital since it was founded in 2013. The company claims that it will build the world’s first nuclear fusion power plant by 2028 and has already secured a purchase agreement from Microsoft which is a major investor in Mr Altman’s OpenAI.
“I am very excited for what this funding will enable for us. We will be radically scaling up our manufacturing in the US – enabling us to build capacitors, magnets, and semiconductors much faster than we have been able to before. This accelerates the construction of the world’s first fusion power plant and then all our plants to come,” said David Kirtley, Helion’s co-founder and CEO.
Scientists regard nuclear fusion as the holy grail of energy. It is what powers our Sun as atomic nuclei are merged to create massive amounts of energy, which is the opposite of the fission process used in atomic weapons and nuclear power plants, where the heavy atom is split into multiple smaller ones.
Polaris, Helion’s seventh prototype, unveiled recently in Everett, Washinton, operates at temperatures greater than 100 million degrees Celsius with the company hoping to produce electricity from it.
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China’s nuclear fusion reactor
The development comes in the backdrop of scientists at the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) fusion energy reactor, dubbed China’s ‘artificial sun’, managed to sustain plasma for a whopping 1,000 seconds, breaking the 403-second record it set in 2023.
By stabilising the system for 1,000 seconds, scientists believe a major milestone in the quest to improve the technology has been achieved. The nuclear reactor is yet to achieve ignition which is the point at which nuclear fusion creates its own energy and sustains the reactions. However, the new record is an encouraging step towards maintaining prolonged, confined plasma loops that may power future reactors.