Inertia moves to commercialize one of the world’s most elaborate science experiments

Fusion power startup Inertia Enterprises said on Tuesday that it has signed three agreements with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to help bring the laser-based fusion reactor pioneered at the Californian lab to market.

The deals could give Inertia a boost over rival startups. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at LLNL is so far the only experiment to prove that controlled fusion reactions could produce more power than they require to ignite. Inertia burst onto the scene in February with a $450 million Series A, making it one of the best capitalized startups in the industry.

Inertia and LLNL are working on a type of fusion called inertial confinement, which generates fusion conditions by compressing a fuel pellet using some external force, unlike other approaches that use powerful magnetic fields to confine plasmas until atoms fuse.

At the NIF, 192 laser beams are fired into a large vacuum chamber so that they converge on a small gold cylinder called a hohlraum, which contains a diamond-coated fuel pellet. When the lasers hit the hohlraum, it gets vaporized and emits X-Rays that blast the BB-sized fuel pellet inside. The diamond coating is transformed into a plasma, which expands to compress the deuterium-tritium fuel.

If that doesn’t sound exotic enough, keep in mind that all of this needs to happen several times per second if the technology is ever going to produce power for the grid.

The laser-driven reactor design was first theorized in the 1960s as a safer way to research thermonuclear weapons, though scientists also recognized its potential for power production. Construction on the NIF began in 1997, and it took 25 years to reach the breakeven point where a fusion reaction released more power than needed to kick it off.

Several startups, including Inertia, Xcimer, Focused Energy and First Light, are attempting to turn the concept into commercial-scale power plants. Because NIF’s lasers are based on old technology, the hope is that new lasers will be more efficient, lowering the energy required to ignite each fusion reaction and so make it easier for each reaction to release enough energy to make a commercial-scale power plant profitable.

The agreements between Inertia and LLNL cover two strategic partnership projects, and one cooperative research and development agreement. The organizations say they will work together to develop more advanced lasers and improve the fuel targets with an eye toward better performance and manufacturing. Inertia is also licensing almost 200 patents from the lab.

It was perhaps inevitable that Inertia and LLNL would continue to work together. Annie Kritcher, the co-founder and chief scientist of Inertia, helped design the successful experiment at NIF that achieved scientific breakeven. The 2022 CHIPS and Science Act paved the way for her to found a company while retaining her position at LLNL.