David Kirtley

So at Helion, we've built seven systems.

The first six were a series of prototypes that we built end to end that were focused on scaling the process of making these field reverse configurations, compressing them to thermonuclear fusion conditions and demonstrating that you can do fusion and then increasing the scale, increasing the temperature and the energy.

The very first ones were named after beer.

Actually, the most successful was the inductive plasmoid accelerator, the IPA.

And it was the first system that showed that the team could make these FRCs and hold on to them and understand some of the stability criteria, the heating criteria.

And then we started increasing the field.

Now, okay, great, we can hold on to one of these FRCs.

We know how long, we know how to make them, but now can we squeeze on them and start doing fusion, increasing in pressure and temperature?

What we noticed is...

you know, machine after machine, we always used Starbucks when we were in Redmond at the time, Redmond, Washington, and, uh, Starbucks cups sitting on top of the machine as the, this is the scale.

Um, uh, they were too small to have a human really in the picture all the time.

So the Starbucks cup was enough.

And, uh, and so then we switched to tall grande Venti.

Um, and then the biggest Trenta was the biggest system that came online in 2020.

That was a system that showed 100 million degrees and was the first system that did deuterium and helium-3 fusion.

In fact, as far as we know, the only bulk deuterium-helium-3 fusion that has been done and also showed the 100 million degree fusion temperatures from an FRC.

And throughout that time, the earliest work was government-funded, government grants, SBIRs and other type of government grants.

And actually, the team involved, myself and the rest of the founding team, were really good at winning government programs, doing fundamental science, but moving very quickly.

And there's a lot of ways to think about how to iterate and how to build quickly.

I want to talk about the teams first, and then we can talk about some of the technology pieces to do that.