Speaker

David Kirtley

David Kirtley

Nuclear engineer and plasma physicist; CEO of Helion Energy, a fusion company building electricity-generating fusion plants by a route most of the field set aside in the 1950s.

Kirtley leads Helion’s pursuit of pulsed magneto-inertial fusion in a straight, linear machine, exploiting the field-reversed configuration — a self-organised plasma that carries its own current and so generates the magnetic field that confines it. Rather than fuse fuel to boil water and spin a steam turbine, Helion’s design recovers electricity directly off the reaction as the expanding plasma pushes back on the magnetic field. The company has built seven machines, reaching 100 million degrees and bulk deuterium–helium-3 fusion, and in 2023 signed a deal to supply a grid-connected plant to Microsoft with first electricity targeted for 2028.

His engineering route to fusion came through space. Before spinning off Helion to focus only on fusion, the founding team worked on rocket propulsion and fusion rockets, and the aerospace habit of wasting nothing — recover every watt, reject every joule of heat at a cost — shaped Helion’s emphasis on direct electrical recovery and efficiency. He is, by his own description, as much an electrical-engineering and manufacturing leader as a fusion scientist.

Core positions

Kirtley’s governing conviction is that fusion is fundamentally safe and cannot be weaponised, and that the remaining obstacle is engineering and manufacturing, not physics. He insists fusion machines are generators, not reactors — they run only while fed and stop themselves the instant fuel is cut — and that a fusion plant, unlike a fission one, holds about one second of fuel and so has no large store of energy to release. He has worked with proliferation experts and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to establish that fusion is regulated like a particle accelerator, not a nuclear reactor.

His distinctive engineering thesis is that relentless cheap, fast manufacturing accelerates the science rather than competing with it: build the smallest machine that does the job, from commonly available materials, and iterate quickly — you learn by building. Helion is roughly half technicians and vertically integrated down to its own production lines. He frames fusion as the natural energy source for an AI-hungry future, since the cost of computation bottoms out at the cost of dense, on-site electricity, and is an optimist on the Fermi Paradox, favouring the Matrioshka brain — civilisations that grow their cognition inward rather than expanding outward.

In the wiki