Cat Clifford, CNBC climate tech and innovation reporter, at Helion Energy on October 20.
Photo taken by Jessie Barton, communications for Helion Energy, with Cat Clifford’s camera.
On Thursday, October 20, I took a reporting trip to Everett, Wash., to visit Helion Energy, a fusion startup that has raised raised nearly $600 million from a slew of relatively well known Silicon Valley investors, including Peter Thiel and Sam Altman. It’s got another $1.7 billion in commitments if it hits certain performance targets.
Because nuclear fusion has the potential to make limitless quantities of clean energy without generating any long-lasting nuclear waste, it’s often called the “holy grail” of clean energy. The holy grail remains elusive, however, because recreating fusion on earth in a way that generates more energy that is required to ignite the reaction and can be sustained for an extended period of time has so far remained unattainable. If we could only manage to commercialize fusion here on earth and at scale, all our energy woes would be solved, fusion proponents say.
Fusion has also been on the horizon for decades, just out of reach, seemingly firmly entrenched in a techno-utopia that exists only in science fiction fantasy novels.
David Kirtley (left), a co-founder and the CEO at Helion, and Chris Pihl, a co-founder and the chief technology officer at Helion.
Photo courtesy Cat Clifford, CNBC.
But visiting Helion Energy’s enormous workspace and lab pulled the idea of fusion out of the completely fantastical and into the potentially real for me. Of course, “potentially real” doesn’t mean that fusion will be a commercially viable energy source powering your home and my computer next year. But it no longer feels like flying a spaceship to Pluto.
As I walked through the massive Helion Energy buildings in Everett, one fully operational and one still under construction, I was struck by how workaday everything looked. Construction equipment, machinery, power cords, workbenches, and countless spaceship-looking component parts are everywhere. Plans are being executed. Wildly foreign-looking machines are being constructed and tested.
The Helion Energy building under construction to house their next generation fusion machine. The smokey atmosphere is visible.
Photo courtesy Cat Clifford, CNBC.
For the employees of Helion Energy, building a fusion device is their job. Going to the office every day means putting part A into Part B and into part C, fiddling with those parts, testing them, and then putting them with more parts, testing those, taking those parts apart maybe when something doesn’t work right, and then putting it back together again until it does. And then moving to Part D and Part E.
The date of my visit is relevant to this story, too, because it added a second layer of strange-becomes-real to my reporting trip.
On October 20, the Seattle Everett region was blanketed in dangerous levels of wildfire smoke. The air quality index for Everett was 254,…
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