Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.A US start-up whose backers include tech billionaires Sam Altman and Peter Thiel has raised $425mn to keep it on track to achieve its target of producing electricity from nuclear fusion in 2028.Helion has the most ambitious timeline among start-ups racing to develop nuclear fusion, a long sought-after technology that combines hydrogen atoms to form helium atoms and release a significant amount of energy.Venture capital firm Lightspeed and SoftBank\u2019s second Vision Fund are the investors joining OpenAI boss Altman, Thiel\u2019s Mithril Capital and steel company Nucor in backing Helion. Helion has now raised more than $1bn and has a valuation of $5.4bn, including the latest fundraising round.Nuclear fusion is carbon-free and creates no long-lived radioactive waste, but scientists have so far only been able to sustain a reaction for short periods of time. Earlier this month, Chinese scientists set a new record of 1,066 seconds in a reactor in Hefei, according to state media.\u00a0Helion has a contract to start supplying Microsoft with electricity produced from its fusion system in 2028, and the new funds would put it \u201con course\u201d to achieve the goal, said chief executive David Kirtley. The company also has an agreement to build a 500MW power plant for Nucor.\u00a0Kirtley said the money would be spent on manufacturing pulse capacitors, an important component of its Polaris reactor in the US. \u201cThe capacitor is where about a third of the cost of the whole system goes, and about 85 per cent of Polaris\u2019 capacitors were built overseas. We bought them and waited several years to get them in-house,\u201d he said.\u00a0\u201cWe are now the first US manufacturer of large-scale pulse capacitors in decades, and we are going to expand that. So rather than waiting three years, we could get them in a year or less,\u201d added Kirtley.\u00a0\u00a0He said Polaris, the company\u2019s seventh-generation reactor, was \u201cin operation\u201d but declined to share details about its results.\u201cWe have a technology that can be built, built quickly and iterated upon, especially relative to other fusion,\u201d he said, adding that Helion\u2019s design was \u201csmaller, cheaper, easier to build and with less concrete\u201d.\u00a0The remaining challenges for the start-up lie on the regulatory side, where Helion needs state permits to deploy power plants, and on squeezing more efficiency from its engineering, he said.\u00a0Kirtley added that \u201cit would not change anything\u201d if the development of AI, a vital driver for investment into energy companies, turns out to be less power intensive than previously estimated.\u00a0\u201cThere is a huge need [for baseload power] even more than we thought before. So if that extra need is a little bit less, that is OK too,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.A US start-up whose backers include tech billionaires Sam Altman and Peter Thiel has raised $425mn to keep it on track to achieve its target of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-183868","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183868\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}