this is a nuclear fuser I built a couple of months ago it's cute but directly behind me is only a test section of the Polaris nuclear fusion generator at helon energy just a little bit bigger as their seventh prototype Polaris is a next gen fusion generator unlike anything you've ever seen with over 100,000 Parts all built to ridiculous precision and scale it sits in a 150,000 ft facility that gives you chills a few weeks ago helon invited me for a tour to pick the brain of their passionate CEO talk to the Project Lead bringing this generator into reality and to nervously watch with them as they powered up their Polaris formation for one of the first times so let's take a peek into what helion's been brewing [Music] up Fusion is cuttingedge Tech and so is the event that keite Technologies is throwing on September 12th kyite live from the lab it's a free live stream for engineers and techies such as yourself and will take you inside electric vehicle test labs to explore the tech behind high power charging batteries and how EVS might actually fuel the grid and let's be honest Battery tech AKA energy density Tech kind of the New Frontier you'll also have a chance to win a 6 GHz 8 channel oscilloscope and other prograde test gear they do these events several times per year and past events are recorded on their site if you sign up using my link in the description key site will give you an extra bonus entry into the giveaway Let's Talk Fusion situated just north of Seattle Washington helon energies and Terrace test facility is Ground Zero for the future of energy production inside this building is a passionate team of over 150 Visionaries mechanics and Engineers who know that nuclear fusion power is inevitable and they're poised to make it a reality this is Iron Man's basement there's no other way to explain it Fusion may be the most important technological pursuit in the history of our species but it really isn't is n Easy you see it requires temperatures in the hundreds of millions of degrees C and also pressures similar to the center of the Sun in order to force items together against their will and when those items fuse tremendous amounts of energy are released but it's about as easy as getting Ana to eat a tomato tomatoes are disgusting achieving successful fusion with positive power out is the fight of our century and make no mistake innovators around the world are coming up with creative designs to accomplish this for example Lawrence Livermore National Labs uses a method called inertial confinement which relies on AR raise of super powerful lasers to superheat a pellet of fuel to the point of fusion they recently made headlines with this General Fusion is going about it in a mechanical approach relying on moving Pistons to compress the fuel and a liquid metal wall that resists corrosion from ignition it's pretty interesting then we've got the joint European Taurus or jet which relies on magnetic confinement of plasma and is a tokumx small enough to fit into a room and of course we can't leave out the multi-nation eater which is a Goliath tokomak several stories tall and the largest international science collaboration in history the tokomak approach involves a pidal vacuum which contains a ring of plasma bound into place with ultra strong superconducting magnets while this method creates conditions needed for Fusion startup costs are biblical and they're prone to plasma instabilities which damage reactor walls meaning continuous repair is inevitable while we've made massive strides in this topography we've got a ways to go maintaining about 10 times the temperature of the Sun only a meter away from a metal wall has its problems shocker spearheaded by their CEO David kirtley helion's approach is so different they've attracted numerous investors excited to support their development and after they walked me through their anas's test facility I could understand why the topography they've chosen for not only producing a fusion event but also capturing the produced energy is brilliant helion's Polaris generator uses what's called a field reverse configuration ation plasma or F FRC which essentially allows for extremely high temperatures and a very compact space it's also a type of plasma that contains itself so they take two F frc's slam them together and force them to initiate fusion and there's a lot to be excited about this type of topography but I think I'll let their CEO David spill the beans we were both equally excited to talk Fusion walk me through a little bit about the approach that you guys are using for nuclear fusion cuz I understand what you're doing is a little bit different yeah so we use an approach called puls magnetic Fusion our approach is a bit different where we take a high temperature plasma confined by magnets and then rather than trying to hold on to it forever we squeeze it we squeeze it increasing pressure and temperature till Fusion happens and then the most important part we then expand it extracting all that electrical energy that we put in back out to the system um allowing us to build these systems really efficient and then in theory a lot smaller and cheaper than anybody else weely on a sustained plasma like the classic tokc design has its advantages uh but also some drawbacks one of them being damaged to reactor walls over time from the sustained temperatures like I mentioned earlier but also the reactor walls can become radioactive eventually but the hardest part of all is just the technical difficulty of maintaining 150 million degrees celsus for extended periods of time now using a pulst approach helon hopes to not meet those same difficulties can you run me through like the energy recapture process and how are you directly extracting the energy out to usable energy say at one point for the grid y so um the approach we use the fundamental physics is the same that happens as in the alternator in your car or even in the motor and an electric car in your Tesla okay where um in these systems uh we put electrical energy into coils magnetic coils we'll see them today large Electrical uh current flows on the order of hundreds of thousands to millions of amps of current that generates a magnetic field and that magneet field we use in a pulsed manner to compress our Fusion fuel as soon as Fusion starts to happen it gets hotter the pressure pushes back and then by pushing back on that magnetic field we can induce a current going the reverse Direction pull it back out that's bril oh my gosh okay that's actually really really brilliant because then that's as fast as electricity itself generally wasteless it's as efficient as the electromagnet in the first place y you're just essentially reversing the process of compressing it you're letting it compress back this concept really blew me away so I had to take a look at these coils look at that fundamentally the physics of fusion is really hard we don't want to raise a single Jewel of energy we want to take all of it in electricity put it all in efficiently and take everything out we can efficiently and so that we just have to do just that little bit of fusion think of it this way their Topography is the simplest example of the conservation of energy so in any closed system the energy leaving can't be greater than the energy coming in an example Tesla coils all that high voltage coming out it's always less energy than what the coil consumed in the first place however when a nuclear reaction takes place mass is converted into energy so with a generator like this x amount of energy comes in from the coils fuel mass under goes fusion and turns into energy and X plus fuel energy comes out through the coils no moving parts to waste energy all solid state the coils provide and remove all energy speaking of fuel Mass most players in the market use a detarium trium now detarium is incredibly common it's like one in 500 Parts on this planet in fact this is a vial of detarium water right here pretty cool now tridium on the other hand uh not so much so what does helon use I understand that a lot of the players in the market will use a standard DT mix yeah so we actually name the company after the fuel um so we use dyum helium 3 and uh helium 3 the nucleus is called a helon so so that's actually what we name the company after a helium 3 when dyum and a helium 3 fuse it it makes no neutrons the primary reaction is all in charged particles so that topology you remove the middleman you go straight from fusion reaction to energy out with no waste of spinning Parts turbines energy loss I mean more or less energy loss from Steam yep it's just it's a direct two process direct and efficient at the same time hel helium 3 requires some more specific spefic uh challenges in per unit volume produces a little bit less energy than a traditional DT fuel but because it's so much more efficient you end up winning overall okay apart from being efficient the lack of neutron emission from a detarium helon reaction helps to overcome one of the main obstacles of fusion in the first place hear me out in a standard DT Fusion Neutron emission tends to damage reactor walls over time this seems to be a trend I'm talking about anyways using helon not so much so this approach allows them to maximize generator lifespan and potentially minimize [Music] costs to further minimize costs helon produces many of their parts in house this includes their high voltage pulse capacitors which they were happy to show off this is the winding robot for a lot of the capacitors that helon energy makes in the house and they call this the capacitor kitchen for a pretty obvious reason once wound the film capacitors go into a machine which unifies and welds each layer providing an electrical connection which are then welded in parallel these are huge these are only a part of the capacitors they use then series allowing for a voltage rating of tens of kilovolts these are then placed into oil filled containers which make up the giant blue capacitor Bank you see behind my head right here ultimately providing over 50 megga of energy needed for the player formation tests which is something J and here knows a thing or two about as the Project Lead he endured countless questions for me as I tried to understand how their machine worked so on our full-fledged Fusion devices we use frc's to make a fusion so we form two of them with two of these on either side that would accelerate those F frc's together and they merge and we com press them to get our Fusion conditions this is just for forming and studying F frc's and then we can use that data and leverage it into future designs so then you're going to be learning a lot from this test platform how big will the final ones be uh on the ends of the they'll be bigger than this this is about a meter in diameter go uh what was the team effort like to get this underway no doubt you guys had like a lot of struggles so we were growing while we were building this so there was a lot of struggles there for my system I I did a lot of the vacuum work on this and so inside of this we have about a billionth of an atmosphere so you have to extract all that air out um and to do that you have to make sure there's no little leaks around so even just a hair on one of the O-rings or anything will just make it not seal correctly um and since it's such a large diameter too it was very challeng you to get all that to seal billionth of an atmosphere a billionth of 14.7 PSI yeah it's like slightly lower than than the you know fuser that I brought just like by Factor about 500,000 Jin's team is essentially rapid prototyping an F FRC plasma Chamber from the ground up it's remarkable because that's a ton of work you know continuous repair and Improvement is inevitable for sufficiently advanced Tech like this so their writing the blueprints as they go and now it's in the test phase where I'm turning everything on and trying to fix it oh I like how you put it that way turning it on and trying to fix it cuz you're doing the incremental testing right yeah it's an experiment and so you don't we haven't built this particular device before we don't know how it's going to function we always don't do everything correctly and so just troubleshooting trying to get everything working there were a lot of Ip sensitive features which limited what I could capture on camera but it was time for [Music] tests with the walkthrough complete they were roaring to push a couple of buttons because they were planning to form a plasma for further tests and I had a front row seat their control room was under construction so this was their temporary Command Center complete with two official mascots Eko has one eye Kabir likes to sit in boxes while Jin manned the controls their Chief scientist Dr George vck explained what they were expecting to see a complete plasma formation lasting milliseconds with no instabilities Jin also explained that if things go well we'd hear pretty much nothing uh what if things don't go well but in just a few short tense moments I was about to find out ready to go no loud noises no bangs and Jin was happy so I think the test was a success I wasn't really sure what to expect but as you just saw it was nearly silent and lasted for just a fraction of a second but that's exactly how their generators are supposed to work in pulses this current prototype is slated for six pulses per minute and is intended for a long cycling life the Polaris formation is only a third of the finished generator and it's a scaled down version as well so their next steps will include building out the complete Polaris generator in their neighboring building right next door as their seventh prototype it'll be the latest in their line of fusion generators and a massive milestone for physics and they have had other prototypes in the past that were milestones in their own right so six current prototypes y uh number three was the first one where uh we compress a fusion plasma up to over 10 million degrees we call that one IPA okay the inductive plasmoid accelerator um and then number four was Grande we switch over we switched over to Starbucks Grande which showed over 50 million de and then we had venti and then Trenta uh at some point we ran out of Starbucks so we switched over to to helium burning St that's 50 million degrees that's almost as warm as my apartment that's like visiting their test facility was a phenomenal experience and after speaking to at least a dozen team members their passion is palpable their ambition is contagious and their plans might just change how we look at Fusion helon thank you for the Epic tour and for everybody watching I'll leave a link down below so you can check them out further David and I fundamentally believe in the Unstoppable power of human Innovation really given enough time there's nothing we can't do and with that thank you for watching and You Stay classy