Mumgaard says these super powered magnets will enable Commonwealth to perfect their somewhat more traditional fusion approach of building a donut-shaped “tokamak” reactor, which Mumgaard calls a “big magnetic bottle" where powerful magnetic fields control balls of 100 million degree plasma - "star stuff." His optimism is buoyed by Commonwealth's successful summer test of new electromagnets engineered with superconductors made from rare earth barium copper oxide. CEO Bob Mumgaard says they’ll have a working reactor in 6 years. That puts Helion in a race with Boston-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems, an MIT spinoff, which raised $1.8 billion from investors including Bill Gates and George Soros. “In 10 years we will have commercial electricity for sale, for sure.” A 50 mw scale system, packaged into three shipping container-sized units would power 40,000 homes. In time he envisions manufacturing fusion generators in a factory. He came back to the field in 2008 to help commercialize Helion’s tech. But Kirtley lost faith after determining early approaches just couldn’t evolve fast enough to yield a commercial solution - so he went to work on advanced spaceship propulsion using plasma jets controlled by electromagnets. He started his career in the fusion field, inspired by scientists at national labs in the 1960s who made big advances in magnetic containment (vying with Russian scientists to devise donut-shaped reactors called tokamaks) even before the invention of transistors. To be sure, Kirtley understands fusion skepticism, especially around his aggressive timetable. “We can do it with no steam turbines or cooling towers. Other fusion approaches aim to generate heat, in order to boil water and power steam turbines, which make electricity - like at traditional nuclear power plants. Royan of Mithril says perhaps the biggest attraction of Helion’s direct electricity generation method is its simplicity. Rendering of Helion's fusion "engine." Helion ![]() ![]() (For more, read up on Faraday’s law of induction.) In Helion’s novel system, the energy released in the fusion reactions continuously pushes out against its magnetic containment field, which pushes back - causing oscillations (“like a piston,” says Kirtley) that generate an electric current, which Helion captures directly from the reactor. It’s the principle that enables “mag-lev” tech like Japan’s famous bullet trains, which utilize magnetic repulsion to float on a cushion of air.įusion researchers for decades have sought to devise the world’s strongest electromagnets, with which they engineer reaction chambers with magnetic fields so strong that they can contain, and compress, an injected stream of positively charged protons into a ball of plasma so hot that they fuse into helium. To understand Helion’s approach, first consider the magnetic repulsion that occurs when you try to force the positive poles of two bar magnets together. Helion cofounders Chris Pihl (L) and David Kirtley, in the lab.
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