- Commercial Fusion
- Posts
- Takeaways from a webinar with Helion's Andrew Proffitt
Takeaways from a webinar with Helion's Andrew Proffitt
While much of the content was discussed in past press releases and papers, a few interesting details were surfaced.
This past week, I had the opportunity to tune in to an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Fusion Energy Webinar, where Helion Energy’s regulatory policy lead Andrew Proffitt laid out the vision for the company’s seventh prototype fusion reactor, Polaris, and its roadmap to commercialize fusion power.
While much of the content was discussed in past press releases and papers, a few interesting details surfaced, which I’m sharing below. I’ve edited the transcript for clarity.
It was nearly a year ago that Helion announced its power purchase agreement with Microsoft. They’re still holding fast to that stated timeline:
We've got that power purchase agreement in place with Microsoft, and that's to put a fusion power plant on the grid here in our home state of Washington in 2028, start delivering electrons in 2028, and ramp up over time into 2029, getting to that full 50 megawatts connected to the grid.
One of Helion’s key challenges is building a sustainable fuel loop. There were questions from the audience about the supply chain for Helium-3:
Absolutely…So there are several different concepts that we could run with this fuel cycle. You could run a DD machine to produce Helium-3, just to do that at lower energies and produce helium. That's one potential option, not seeking to produce electricity with that machine but just produce Helium-3.
The other option is even in a commercial system, you could run a balanced fuel cycle. You could run to where you're producing the same amount of Helium-3 as what you're burning. That's a nice balanced machine, although not operating as efficiently as maybe you would want.
But then thirdly, for every Helium-3 we produce, we also produce a tritium. And there may be folks interested in purchasing that tritium. But we could also hold that tritium and allow it to decay into Helium-3.
5.5% of all that tritium every year will decay into Helium-3 and then can be put right back into our system. So at that point, once you've built up some of these tritium and then Helium-3 reserves, you can operate at a net negative Helium-3 balance to where you're using more than you're producing in that generator, but operating more efficiently and delivering more power to the grid.
While Helion’s approach produces fewer high-energy neutrons than conventional D-T fusion, it isn’t fully aneutronic. The reactor will still emit neutrons that generate residual radioactivity in structural components—a materials challenge the team is actively working to solve:
It's 2.5 MeV neutron versus a 14 MeV deuterium tritium neutron, but we still need to design our systems to be able to work with that neutron shielding-wise and then also materials-wise, to have materials that last a commercially relevant amount of time.
During the “factory tour” portion of the presentation, vertical integration and taking manufacturing in-house were recurring themes:
We manufacture the world's largest diameter quartz tubes. We actually bought this machinery from a company in Germany, I believe. They had built our previous tubes, for Trenta and some of our other machines, but we needed a bigger radius for Polaris to make those bigger FRCs. They thought we were a little bit crazy, but we bought the machinery and we set out on this path to make it happen.
The same applies to other key supporting technologies:
We're actually doing a lot of the capacitor manufacturing in house…[there’s a] supplier that we rely on from overseas that we'd really like to bring domestically to secure that supply chain.
In short: Helion continues to project confidence. Polaris is targeting net electricity gain, major power purchase agreements are in place, and the team is scaling up to tackle manufacturing at a commercial scale. However, the IAEA presentation offered few new technical specifics. For a company chasing a 2028 delivery date, those details will need to surface soon.