Big Investments In Helion Energy

Nuclear fusion can provide nearly limitless amounts of clean energy without the byproduct of long-lasting radioactive waste to be managed, and Silicon Valley luminary Sam Altman announced his $375 million investment in Helion Energy, a nuclear fusion start-up. It’s part of a larger $500 million round that the startup will use to complete construction of a fusion facility near its headquarters in Everett, Washington. Altman was the president of the Silicon Valley start-up shop Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019. He’s now the CEO of Open AI, an organization that researches artificial intelligence, which he co-founded with Elon Musk and others. Altman made his first investment of $9.5 million into Helion in 2015. Nuclear fusion is the opposite reaction of nuclear fission. Where fission splits a larger atom into two smaller atoms to release energy, fusion happens when two lighter nuclei slam together to form a heavier atom. It’s the way the sun makes energy and the basis of hydrogen bombs. Helion is among the few start-ups working to control and commercialize fusion as an energy source, including Commonwealth Fusion Systems and TAE Technologies.