雅思阅读-072-helion-fusion-power-plant-startup-timeline改编自-scientific-american-带音频

ielts 👁 10 · 💬 0 · 📅 2026-09-14
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雅思阅读 072 — Helion Energy Wants to Build Fusion Power on a Start-up Timeline

改编自 Scientific American（2026-05，Alex Pasternack）。

🎧 课文朗读音频（约 1 分半）

Reading Passage

Just east of Malaga, Washington, a very different kind of power project is taking shape. Helion Energy, one of the world's best-funded private fusion companies, is building what it calls Orion: a machine it says will become the world's first fusion power plant, delivering 50 megawatts of electricity to Microsoft data centres by 2029. In a field long dominated by laboratory milestones and moving timelines, Helion, backed by the likes of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, is the first fusion company to make a commercial promise.

"The pressure's on for Helion and everyone else," says David Kirtley, Helion's CEO. He has a ready reply to the old joke about fusion always being 20 years away. "I say, 'We're 20 years late. We need to step up and build these plants and deploy them at scale.'"

Private money has flooded the field. Big tech companies are signing power deals with fusion firms years before any commercial machine has delivered electricity. Data centres require staggering amounts of around-the-clock electricity; fusion start-ups are selling a path to firm, carbon-free power.

But you can't buy your way around the laws of physics. Even as the walls at the Orion site rise, big questions swirl over the company's bold promises.

Fusion happens in stars all the time. But doing it on Earth is harder: first, you must heat light nuclei into plasma at temperatures above 100 million degrees Celsius, then keep them hot, dense and stable long enough for sufficient reactions to occur.

Helion is betting on one of the more obscure fusion ideas: a linear reactor built around a plasma shape called a field-reversed configuration, or FRC. Unlike the doughnut-shaped steady-state plasma inside a tokamak, an FRC plasma, resembling a spinning smoke ring, holds itself in place, requiring fewer external magnets. An FRC reactor "has very few external magnets," says Troy Carter, director of the Fusion Energy Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. "The magnets you need are much less complex, much lower field and less costly." The catch is confinement: FRC plasmas are notoriously hard to stabilise as they take in more energy.

A key insight was that two FRC plasmoids could be formed with magnetic pulses at either end of the reactor, accelerated toward each other at up to 1.6 million kilometres per hour, and made to collide and merge — using the collision itself as a shortcut to fusion temperatures. The reaction takes place in fractions of a millisecond.

Another unusual feature of Helion's approach is what comes after the reaction. Most fusion power plant designs call for using fusion heat to boil water, spin a turbine and drive a generator. Helion is skipping that thermal cycle. As the merged plasma expands after the fusion pulse, it should push back against the magnetic field and induce electric current directly in coils surrounding the machine. Helion claims that when the plasma generates current directly, it can recover electricity at efficiencies over 95 per cent.

Helion has built seven prototype machines, each more powerful than the last. The latest, Polaris, is a 19-metre device with capacitor banks capable of storing and delivering 50 megajoules of energy per pulse. Earlier this year Helion announced that Polaris had reached a record 150 million degrees Celsius and had become the first privately developed fusion machine used to "demonstrate" fusion using deuterium-tritium fuel.

The engineering challenges have been brutal. Helion has had to replace research-grade switches with solid-state hardware that can survive hundreds of millions of pulses. Through each rapid repetition, all the electrical systems must work in perfect synchrony, with nanosecond timings.

Questions

Questions 1–5: TRUE / FALSE / NOT GIVEN

  1. Helion's Orion plant is expected to deliver power to Microsoft by 2029.
  2. Helion is the first fusion company to make a commercial promise.
  3. Fusion on Earth requires temperatures above 100 million degrees Celsius.
  4. FRC reactors require more external magnets than tokamaks.
  5. Helion's Polaris machine has already begun delivering electricity to the grid.

Questions 6–10: Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

  1. What is an FRC?

    • A. A type of tokamak
    • B. A plasma shape resembling a spinning smoke ring
    • C. A type of fusion fuel
    • D. A cooling system

  2. How fast are the two FRC plasmoids accelerated toward each other?

    • A. 160 kilometres per hour
    • B. 16,000 kilometres per hour
    • C. 1.6 million kilometres per hour
    • D. 160 million kilometres per hour

  3. What makes Helion's approach unusual?

    • A. It uses deuterium-tritium fuel.
    • B. It directly induces electric current without boiling water.
    • C. It uses a doughnut-shaped reactor.
    • D. It operates at room temperature.

  4. Helion claims direct electricity recovery efficiency of over

    • A. 50%
    • B. 75%
    • C. 95%
    • D. 100%

  5. How many prototype machines has Helion built?

    • A. 2
    • B. 5
    • C. 7
    • D. 12

Questions 11–13: Complete the sentences. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS.

  1. Helion's CEO is David __________.
  2. The latest prototype machine is named __________.
  3. The fuel used in fusion is deuterium and __________.

Answers

  1. TRUE
  2. TRUE
  3. TRUE
  4. FALSE (FRC需要更少外部磁铁)
  5. FALSE (只是"demonstrate"了核聚变，尚未并网发电)
  6. B
  7. C
  8. B
  9. C
  10. C
  11. Kirtley
  12. Polaris
  13. tritium

Glossary

  • fusion /ˈfjuːʒn/ n. 核聚变
  • plasma /ˈplæzmə/ n. 等离子体
  • megawatt /ˈmeɡəwɒt/ n. 兆瓦
  • tokamak /ˈtəʊkəmæk/ n. 托卡马克装置
  • magnet /ˈmæɡnət/ n. 磁铁
  • capacitor /kəˈpæsɪtə/ n. 电容器
  • deuterium /djuːˈtɪəriəm/ n. 氘
  • tritium /ˈtrɪtiəm/ n. 氚
  • millisecond /ˈmɪlisekənd/ n. 毫秒

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