Helion Energy
American fusion research company
Follow Helion Energy on Notably News to receive short updates to your email — rarely!
| 2024 | Helion projects achieving fusion breakeven, with their prototype now having a 10 tesla magnetic field. |
| 2024 | Projected completion of Project Polaris, Helion Energy's seventh prototype, which is designed to be 25% larger than the previous Trenta model and capable of generating plasma pulses at a dramatically increased rate of one pulse per second for short periods. |
| 2023 | Became a finalist for the GeekWire Best Workplaces of the Year. |
| May 10 2023 | Announced Microsoft as their first customer, with a commitment to provide fusion power to Microsoft starting in 2028. |
| 2022 | Initiated design of Ursa Major (8th prototype), expected to be twice the size of Polaris. |
| 2022 | Initiated design of the 8th prototype. |
| 2022 | Selected as one of five finalists for the GeekWire Awards in the fusion energy startup innovation category. |
| 2021 | Helion Energy was valued at three billion dollars, with total investment reaching $77.8 million by late 2021. |
| 2021 | Helion Energy began development of its seventh-generation prototype, Project Polaris, aiming to significantly improve fusion plasma technology with increased pulse rates and higher temperature capabilities. |
| 2021 | Helion Energy announced its sixth prototype, 'Trenta', completed a 16-month test cycle with over 10,000 pulses, reaching 100 million degrees Celsius - the minimum temperature for a potential commercial nuclear fusion generator. The prototype demonstrated significant achievements including magnetic compression fields exceeding 10 Tesla, ion temperatures over 8 keV, and electron temperatures over 1 keV. |
| November 2021 | Helion Energy received $500 million in Series E funding, with an additional $1.7 billion in milestone-based commitments, primarily led by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and executive chairman of Helion. |
| 2020 | Helion became the first private company to successfully demonstrate thermonuclear fusion plasmas exceeding 9 keV, achieving expected deuterium-deuterium fusion reactions and neutrons, with a triple product greater than 1 × 10^20 keV·s/m3, meeting the Lawson criterion. |
| April 2019 | Helion Energy was criticized by retired Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory researcher Daniel Jassby in the American Physical Society newsletter Physics & Society, who accused the company of practicing 'voodoo fusion'. |
| 2018 | Helion's sub-scale prototype VENTI, developed for the ALPHA program, achieved significant plasma results including ion density of 8 × 10^22 ions/m3, energy confinement time of 4 × 10^-5 seconds, and a temperature of 2 keV. |
| October 2018 | Helion Energy presented a detailed report on D–D fusion experiments producing neutrons at the U.S. Department of Energy's ARPA-E annual ALPHA program meeting. The company's 5th prototype 'Venti' demonstrated magnetic fields of 7T and achieved plasmas with multi-keV temperatures and a triple product of 6.4 × 10^18 keV·s/m3. |
| 2015 | Helion Energy demonstrated the first direct magnetic energy recovery from a subscale pulsed magnetic system. Using modern high-voltage insulated gate bipolar transistors, they recovered energy at over 95% round-trip efficiency for over 1 million pulses. In a smaller system, the team also demonstrated the formation of more than 1 billion FRCs. |
| 2015 | Awarded an ARPA-E ALPHA contract for 'Staged Magnetic Compression of FRC Targets to Fusion Conditions'. |
| 2014 | Helion Energy developed Grande, their 4th fusion prototype, designed to test high field operation. The prototype achieved magnetic field compression of 4 tesla, formed cm-scale Field-Reversed Configurations (FRCs), and reached plasma temperatures of 5 keV, outperforming other private fusion companies. |
| 2014 | Won awards at the ARPA-E Future Energy Startup competition and became members of the Y Combinator program. |
| August 2014 | Helion Energy received $1.5 million in seed funding from Y Combinator and Mithril Capital Management, supplementing earlier funding from NASA, the US Department of Energy, and the Department of Defense. |
| 2013 | Founded by David Kirtley, John Slough, Chris Pihl, and George Votroubek. The founding team won the National Cleantech Open Energy Generation competition. |
| 2012 | Conclusion of the Inductive Plasmoid Accelerator (IPA) experiments, which claimed achievements including 300 km/s velocities, deuterium neutron production, and 2 keV deuterium ion temperatures. |
| 2011 | Helion team publishes peer-reviewed research demonstrating deuterium-deuterium (D-D) neutron production, a significant milestone in their fusion research. |
This contents of the box above is based on material from the Wikipedia article Helion Energy, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.