In this on‑site interview, journalist Ashlee Vance visits Helion’s Everett, Washington facility and talks with CEO/co‑founder David Kirtley about the company’s secretive, ambitious pursuit of practical nuclear fusion. Helion distinguishes itself from other fusion startups by using a pulsed magnetic approach that aims to convert fusion energy directly into electricity, bypassing steam turbines. The conversation walks through Helion’s lineage of machines—Grande, Venti, Trenta, and the latest Polaris—highlighting record‑setting plasma temperatures, massive 60 MJ capacitor banks, and a dense cable architecture that delivers and recovers energy in sub‑millisecond pulses. Kirtley explains the physics of compressing hydrogen to 100 million °C, forming helium, and extracting current from the plasma’s push against magnetic fields, citing efficiencies up to 94 % in parts of the system. The video also addresses external skepticism about Helion’s lack of published data, intellectual‑property concerns, and the challenge of achieving net‑positive energy output. While Polaris was slated to produce electricity in 2024, Kirtley does not confirm net‑gain yet. Helion is already planning the next machine, Orion, targeted for 2028 operation with Microsoft as its first customer, and envisions manufacturing gigafactories to supply baseload clean power for AI data centers and beyond. Vance remains cautiously skeptical but impressed, describing the experience as “breathtaking” and noting the company’s bold, almost mad‑scientist ethos.
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Hey, Ashlee. Hello. What are we doing? We're in Everett, Washington, going to Helion, which is a fusion startup. I don't think they really let many people in to see what they're doing. Oops. Sorry, guys. We almost died. Yes. We almost died. Ashlee Vance is right. Helion hasn't let any filthy journalist like me see its most prized machines before. But here we are poking around and taking pictures of exotic looking things. The story on Helion is this: it has raised a ton of money to make nuclear fusion real.
It's pronounced nu-ki-ular.
We're talking clean, plentiful energy. We're also talking tons of skepticism, not just around fusion, but around Helion itself. The company is weird, secretive, and beyond ambitious, which is exactly what we like.
Welcome to Helion.
Yeah, thanks. This place is freaking crazy.
Thank you very much.
That's Helion CEO and co-founder David Kirtley, and some people think he's quite mad.
Some people call fusion the holy grail. I hate that because the holy grail is a thing that no one ever finds.
He started Helion way back in 2013, and it's now part of a new wave of fusion startups that want to prove that the technology, after many, many decades of hope and hype, can work. The last time I was at a fusion place—
Ah, okay.
—it was in Russia. I think it's like going back to the '50s and '60s, them doing research on this. In Siberia. There were only like 5 guys working in there. I think it was far from their glory days of what was happening in that building. That's funny. You're gonna see actually some interesting similarities. Kilian has been backed by more than $1 billion from Sam Altman and others, and it's seen as sort of the bad boy of the field.
Over here are some of our earlier machines where we showed at really small scale that you could do fusion. And we call this one Grande. This one set world records for fusion temperatures. That set the stage for Venti. We used to name them after Starbucks. Yeah. Much higher compression fields. Now it was designed to really squeeze on the fusion plasma. And so then we moved to Trenta. You can actually look down the bore of Trenta, or if we did our job, where two plasmas meet at about 10 million degrees.
Most of the startups here are trying to use fusion to produce heat, which is then used to produce steam that spins a turbine to make energy. Helion, by contrast, doesn't want to produce steam at all. It's trying to capture energy straight from the fusion reaction. Helion uses extreme heat to help atoms fuse together, then surrounds the resulting charged particles with magnetic fields. When those particles push back against magnetic fields, Helion turns that push directly into electricity. Or at least that's what it wants to do. Over the years, Helion has been doing one experiment after another to prove first that it can achieve fusion and then that it can control these magnetic fields and harness their energy. Along the way, it's been building ever bigger fusion systems.
You take those atoms and you want to overcome their atomic forces. Then for me, the really interesting thing happens. They're forming heavier elements that are now really hot. They're going from hydrogens to heliums, pushing back on that magnetic field. It's expanding and taking all that energy, we can directly recover it at high efficiency. The electrical current flows in through here, goes through one of these electromagnets, and then back out. And as you go down the machine, you increase in the pressure that you're compressing. The number of cables increases too as you go.
Oh, and here's a little treat for you people with cable fetishes. Helion's latest and greatest machine is called Polaris, and it's being made inside of a building called Ursa. And we'll get to both of them in a minute. But first, let's do some Fusion 101.
Energía por fusión, el rito más grande que el hombre haya enfrentado jamás.
To perform fusion, you want to take a couple of atoms, like say hydrogen hydrogen, and bash them together. If you do this, you get helium and a bunch of energy as a result. The trick is that you need extreme heat to get the hydrogen atoms to fuse. We're talking 100 million degrees Celsius. And you need a way to capture the resulting energy. All of this is very, very hard. Fusion has been the holy grail of energy for a long time. Sorry, David. David, look out! Ah! It's clean, it's super safe, and the reactors can be much smaller than the fission reactors that we use today. The major problem so far has been that fusion reactors consume more energy than they produce. The new wave of startups are betting that they have finally figured this major problem out.
This showed that we can do 100 million degrees, showed that we understood the physics of how to heat these fusion plasmas, these fuels to thermonuclear conditions. Plasma pushes back and we can get electricity out of that.
And that paved the way for Polaris. Helion has already proven that it can do fusion. With Trenta, it's also proven that it can recover electricity from its fusion reaction. The next step is showing that it can make more electricity than it consumes. Which brings us back to Polaris.
So what you're doing here is what we call lockout-tagout. And so inside this box is a key that controls the power supplies that run all of this. Okay. And so that key, that is now locked and we put the key in the box. Do they have to do this? Everyone here has to do it. Now I completed our lockout-tagout. These systems cannot be energized while we're in here. So you're in URSA. This is actually the power supplies that run Polaris. This capacitor bank in units is over 60 megajoules of electrical energy. This is the largest magnetic pulse power bank on the planet right now.
The Helion skeptics out there doubt that any of this will work. They complain that the company doesn't publish any of its research, that its techniques remain science fiction, and that there's just no way this thing makes extra electricity. There was one story. It was kind of giving you guys grief, giving you some shit for the machinist the builders versus like the PhD types, and they were sort of saying you're low on PhD types.
Having scientists that understand fusion physics, that are the best scientists in the world, is really, really important. Same with the high voltage electrical engineers that design this. But at the end of the day, what we found is to be able to do science quickly, to be able to learn fast, to iterate, to learn about the natural world as fast as you can, it all comes down to the building.
And to try and prove the doubters wrong, David let me into Polaris. He just, uh, wouldn't let you in. And they have to stop here? Yes. All right. Thank you. Bye, guys. What I saw was genuinely breathtaking. I could not bear the thought of you missing out on something so out of this world. And so we found a comic book artist to illustrate what I saw. And they have to stop here?
Yes.
All right. Thank you. Bye, guys. Kamin, are you doing audio on this? I am. Okay, good.
Holy cow. We are orders of magnitude smaller than everybody else in Fusion. And it's still enormous. Super-sized, though. Yep, yep. And so we'll go up and I'll show you from above.
Oh my God.
So we'll come up here. Holy shit. You saw the cables, and the cables go through the wall, and then the cables go and plug into the machine.
Holy shit, that is a lot of cables.
We do, we do buy them by, uh, the team loves to joke, the megameter, but 1,000 kilometers at a time. This is Polaris.
This is how I want a Fusion machine to look in my dreams. This is it. This is like exactly the way it should be.
And then when we fire this, it glows that bright fuchsia pink color. Yeah. As we superheat the hydrogen and the helium, it emits this really bright pink glow. This is our fuel injector. We puff it in just like, honestly, the fuel injection on a rocket engine. Very similar. We then ionize it here and then accelerating down to the middle through all of these individual cables. The energy in 1/1000th of a second goes in and comes right back out, recharges those capacitors. And when you do that, now it's sitting on that capacitor ready to go again. And so you just fire it again. Bang, it goes back in. Bang, it goes back in. This is insane. It's too fast for a normal camera to catch the plasma accelerating a million miles an hour down the ends, but the high-speed cameras can.
And it's just that gradual process of just doing more and more tests.
And every day you add a system, you upgrade, you go to higher power. Honestly, some days you break things.
That's crazy. Thank you guys for letting me see this. Awesome. When will the world get to see that?
I don't have an answer for that. I don't have an answer for that.
Okay. Yeah. Okay, well, I got to, so fuck you guys. I am not totally sure why Helion won't show this to the public. David talked about intellectual property concerns, and I guess China is always watching. All I can tell you is that it looked very real to me.
Let's not do the same techniques with steam turbines of the past where you're trying to generate fusion energy to make heat, to boil water, to run a steam turbine, but in fact to directly recover electricity. So we focus on an approach to fusion, this pulse magnetic approach, where we can recover electricity from the whole fusion system and from the fusion reaction. In some of the electromagnetic coils, they're really efficient, 94% efficiency in some parts of the machine. And so that's radically different than other fusion approaches where they might do fusion but recover no electricity. And so they have to make up all those losses. And so what Polaris is designed to do is do fusion, make energy from that fusion, and recover that electricity back out onto the capacitor.
Polaris was once meant to be pumping out electricity in 2024, which means that Helion is running a bit behind schedule. David also won't say yet if the machine makes more energy than it consumes. None of this though has stopped Helion from starting work on its next machine. This is called Orion, and it's under construction in nearby Malaga, Washington. Helion says Orion will be up and running in 2028,— and Microsoft has signed on to be the first customer. I mean, if this works, what do the next like 20, 30, 50 years look like?
Our goal is to build manufacturing gigafactories that are producing fusion generators. So rolling off the line every day is another generator so we can go deploy it. We can meet the needs of power systems of AI centers. We can then go and build or replace fossil fuels and actually really target climate change. There's whole continents that don't have firm power. As long as you have baseload, always-on clean power, that's what fusion can be.
Do I remain a fusion skeptic? Yes. You sort of have to be until one of these startups actually delivers the goods. Do I think David is a madman? Well, also yes, but in a good way. Bang! He has a theory. He's building very real things to test it, and he comes off as a man possessed. These seem like the basic qualities required to perhaps finally make fusion real.
Los científicos todavía están tratando de encontrar el punto de empate donde la máquina produzca tanta energía como la que consume.
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