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We Could Get Commercial Fusion Power By 2024
One company could soon revolutionise the world.
Fusion reactors are the ultimate in clean energy. Put in hydrogen, one of the most abundant elements in the Universe, squish these particles together into helium and get out an enormous amount of energy. The only waste product can be safely stored away in party balloons. Fusion is so clean that it makes wind, wave and solar energy appear dirty with their extensive use of space and toxic chemicals. But, whilst we have had machines that fuse hydrogen for decades, we struggle to extract energy from them. We can’t even recover the energy used to start the fusion! The slow progress has confined fusion power to the realms of futurists and science fiction writers, but this may soon change. Helion, a private company, just raised half a billion dollars to create a useable commercial fusion reactor by 2024, and it looks like they can hit that target!
So who are Helion? They are a fusion power startup that began back in 2013 and has been funded by Silicon Valley giants like Peter Theil of PayPal fame and Y Combinator, a startup investment company that helped launch Air BnB, Stripe and Coinbase. But government bodies such as NASA, the US Department Of Energy and the US Department Of Defence have also poured cash into this venture.
