Helion Energy, a private energy company based in Washington State, has become the first of its kind in the world to secure the regulatory licenses needed for a fusion power plant. The two licenses were issued by the Washington Department of Health (DOH) on June 16, 2026, and are the Radioactive Material License (RML) and the Radioactive Air Emissions License (RAEL), which verify that Helion Energy has the facilities, procedures, and trained personnel in order to safely build and operate its fusion operations at its Orion facility in Malaga, Washington.
Helion Energy is building pulsed non-ignition fusion generators that use magnetized target fusion. Unlike traditional designs that use massive, continuous magnetic coils to trap plasma, Helion’s compact linear machine rapidly fires rings of plasma together, compressing them with powerful magnets until they are hot and dense enough to fuse.
A schematic of its [machine design](https://www.helionenergy.com/technology
) is on its website, and its unique approach features:
*No Steam Turbines: Instead of boiling water to spin a turbine, the expanding plasma pushes against the machine’s magnetic field. This directly induces an electric current in the surrounding coils.
*Advanced Fuels: Their generators are designed to run on a mix of deuterium and helium-3, which produces fewer high-energy neutrons (resulting in less radioactive structural wear) and allows for a smaller, more efficient machine.
*Pulsed System: Operating like a high-speed internal combustion engine, the machine pulses repeatedly (up to 1 time per second) rather than trying to sustain one continuous burn.
Helion Energy has raised substantial funding—total capital raised is more than $1.5 billion—from private capital institutions and individuals, including Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and a board member until March of this year, and also Reid Hoffman, who was a key early investor and major financial backer of Helion Energy. Hoffman was the co-founder of LinkedIn, formerly on the board of PayPal, and is fully enmeshed in the Silicon Valley nexus of Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, et. al.
