Nuclear

‘Historic’ 500 MW fusion power plant would power steelmaking facility

Fusion power company Helion Energy has not yet achieved ‘net energy gain’ but said it expects to next year.
‘Historic’ 500 MW fusion power plant would power steelmaking facility
(Source: Helion Energy.)

The largest steel company in the U.S. is betting big on nuclear fusion.

Nucor Corp. and fusion power company Helion announced an agreement to develop a 500 MW fusion power plant to provide electricity to a Nucor steelmaking facility.

The partners said this is the first fusion energy agreement of this scale in the world, which would “pave the way for global decarbonization in industrial manufacturing.”

As part of the agreement, Nucor is making a $35 million investment in Helion.

Fusion occurs when two atoms combine to form a single atom. The combined atom has less mass than the original two atoms, with large amounts of energy released in the process.

Helion takes an approach to fusion called magneto-inertial fusion (MIF). In Helion’s machines, plasmas are formed at both ends of the device, then accelerated by magnets into a compression chamber, where the plasmas combine and are compressed to fusion conditions. Electricity is directly recaptured in the process.

An ambitious goal facing doubts

Nucor and Helion said they are committed to begin plant operations as soon as possible and “as of now, 2030 or after seems like a realistic target, depending on the final site selection.”

Additionally, Helion has said it believes one of its smaller, 50 MW fusion power plants could go online as early as 2028, providing electricity to software conglomerate Microsoft. That deal, believed to be the fusion industry’s first commercial agreement, was announced in May 2023.

These ambitious timelines run counter to many experts’ beliefs – that it will take multiple decades for nuclear fusion to generate large-scale energy or become economically viable.

Fusion is considered the holy grail of clean energy because of its potential to produce nearly limitless, carbon-free energy. But getting energy from fusion – the process that powers the sun and stars – has been a great challenge on Earth. Scientists have been trying to replicate it as far back as the 1930s.

But there have been recent breakthroughs. Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California for the first time produced more energy in a nuclear fusion reaction than was used to ignite it, a long-sought accomplishment known as net energy gain.

The extremely brief fusion reaction, which used 192 lasers and temperatures measured at multiple times hotter than the center of the sun, was achieved Dec. 5, 2022.

In August 2023, the laboratory said it had achieved net energy gain once again.

Achieving net energy gain has been challenging because fusion happens at such high temperatures and pressures that it is incredibly difficult to control.

We asked Helion whether the company has achieved net energy gain. A Helion spokesperson told us the company believes Polaris, its seventh-generation fusion device that is expected to be completed in 2024, “will be the first machine to demonstrate electricity.”

The spokesperson added the company’s 6th generation system, Trenta, set private fusion records in 2020 by demonstrating 100 million degrees at relevant densities and timescales. The spokesperson also said “Trenta also did bulk d-he-3 fusion.”

Beyond this, Helion has not released more information about Trenta’s operating results.

Where there is hope

Fusion proponents are hedging their bets on advances in technology and a recent surge in private investment.

Helion cited technology advancements in computers, power electronics and nanosecond fiber-optic networking that have allowed concepts to be reimagined. The company said increasing computer capacity has made it possible to simulate fusion reactions in greater detail, so predictions about performance can be made without the cost of building large experiments.

The push for zero-carbon energy has also increased investment by venture capitalists, traditional energy companies and the federal government. As of July 2023, World Nuclear News reported that investment in the global fusion industry had reached a cumulative $6.2 billion, up from $4.8 billion a year earlier.

We asked Helion why it has so much confidence in its ambitious timelines for deploying fusion power plants.

The company spokesperson told us in a statement:

“Our focus has always been to produce electricity for the end user. For us, we are no longer focused on just the science; we are focused on all the pieces that allow us to deploy fusion power facilities fast enough to help stop the effects of climate change.

By approaching our technology with electricity in mind, and with the results of our 6th fusion prototype, Trenta, we are confident that we have a technology that can meet the needs of our customers. On top of our team’s technical accomplishments, we also see the landscape for fusion energy in the US changing in a way that suggests that deploying fusion power plants on the grid will be viable at this scale.”

The company said major hurdles ahead for deploying its fusion power plants on time include siting, permitting and licensing. On the technical side, Helion said it would continue to scale up its pulsed power capabilities and ability to operate its machines repeatably for end-users.