Construction has begun on the world’s first nuclear fusion power plant. Washington-based energy startup Helion Energy announced that it has begun building the first structure aimed at commercially implementing nuclear fusion technology, which has long been tested only in laboratory settings and has yet to be successfully developed for commercial-scale energy production. The company plans to generate electricity from this facility by 2028.

The world’s first nuclear fusion power plant is being built

The fusion power plant is being built in Chelan County, Washington, USA. Helion signed a purchase agreement with technology giant Microsoft in 2023 for the electricity to be generated from this plant. This energy, planned for use in Microsoft’s data centers, will be the first commercial power source to be produced through nuclear fusion.

Nuclear fusion releases large amounts of energy during the process of combining two lighter atomic nuclei to form a heavier nucleus. This technology offers unlimited, clean energy potential with theoretically zero carbon emissions.

Helion is adopting a technique different from common approaches in this field. The reactor structure is designed in an hourglass shape. A fuel mixture of deuterium and helium-3 is injected from both ends of the reactor and converted into plasma.

These two plasmas move toward each other at a speed of 1 million mph. The colliding plasmas at the center initiate a fusion reaction, and the resulting energy is recovered as electricity directly through magnetic fields, not through turbines.

This method is theoretically considered much more efficient because it eliminates the traditional steam turbine cycle. However, the sustainability and scalability of the fusion reactions remain unresolved technical challenges. Work in this area is ongoing on Helion’s current prototype, Polaris.