A New Player Enters the Fusion Market

Today The Fusion Report is covering the entry of the newest player, Inertia Enterprises, into the commercial fusion market. Co-founded by Twilio’s former CEO Jeff Lawson, fusion physicist Dr. Andrea “Annie” Kritcher, and fusion power plant designer Prof. Mike Dunne, the company aims to build a new generation of compact, mass-produced, low-cost lasers and fuel targets that can translate NIF’s scientific breakthrough into grid-scale, gigawatt fusion power plants within the next decade.

Inertia Enterprises is funded by a $450 million Series A round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with major participation from Alphabet’s GV, Modern Capital, Threshold Ventures, and a group of additional institutional investors. This venture capital syndicate is making a concentrated bet that Inertia’s laser-based inertial fusion technology can scale from lab experiments to a commercial power plant, signaling growing confidence that fusion can become a viable part of the future energy mix.

Scaling NIF's Approach to Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF)

To put it simply, the goal of Inertia Enterprises is to commercialize the successful approach to fusion that the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) took four years ago: using hundreds of lasers to ignite a pellet of deuterium-tritium (D-T) fuel. Inertia will scale the NIF approach by using a thousand smaller lasers than at LLNL to achieve the greater power and twenty times the efficiency of NIF’s lasers. Inertia’s lasers will strike a 4.5mm hohlraum target at a rate of 10 times per second. The goal is to factory-produce targets for less than a dollar a piece, and to produce 1.5 gigawatts of baseload electricity.

The key founders of Inertia are Jeff Lawson (CEO and President), Dr. Annie Kritcher (Chief Scientist), and Prof. Mike Dunne (CTO and SVP of Fusion Power). The team includes: MariAnn Albrecht, Chief of Staff and Research Program Manager; Neil Alexander, SVP of Target Development; Michael Bradsafolis, Head of Business; Jim Gaffney, Vice President and Head of Integrated Plant Design; Doug Hammond, Vice President and Head of Lasers; Melinda Lee, Chief Communications Officer and Head of External Affairs; Gabriel Merrick, Senior Director and Head of Materials and Mechanical Engineering; and Vladimir Smalyuk, Vice President and Head of Experimental Physics. Inertia will be headquartered in Livermore, California (close to LLNL), and has fostered a deep partnership with LLNL to help achieve its key technologies.

Commercializing the Fusion Energy Supply Chain

To achieve their goals, Inertia will have to conquer a number of engineering challenges. To increase the gain from the system over what was achieved by NIF, which achieved Q=4.13. To achieve Inertia’s goal of producing 1.5 gigawatts of electricity, their fusion machine will have to achieve a Q of roughly 45. This includes powering the plant itself (which requires a gain of 18), and then creating the electricity to power the grid. And key to achieving this is increasing the power from lasers, the power absorbed by the fuel pellets, and minimizing other areas of power loss in the overall process. Other than improving efficiency, the approach is essentially the same as that used by NIF.

Target engineering is one of the biggest areas for improvements in Inertia's approach. This will be achieved by scaling up the target pellets to 4.5mm and increasing the output power of the lasers from NIFs 2 MJ output to 10 MJ at Inertia. Key is using diode-pumped solid state lasers at Inertia instead of the neodymium-glass lasers that were used at NIF, which were state of the art at the time, but are significantly less efficient than the solid-state lasers that can be today. By using more laser power, limitations such as roughness of the pellet surface, scaling the fuel compression amount/time achieved, and easing other adiabatic constraints can be achieved.

Many of the other changes in Inertia's approach are economic in nature. To achieve the goal of $1 per fuel pellet, the design will use lead in the hohlraum construction instead of using gold plating as was done at NIF, and eliminating the use of exotic materials. Similarly, the design of the “first wall” will focus on the use of ‘conventional’ materials, rather than on expensive advanced materials, which can be easily replaced every five years. Finally, tritium breeding will be achieved by using liquid lithium surrounding the fusion machine. This not only minimizes the amount of lithium required by our machine (equivalent to what is used in 15 electric vehicles), but also minimizes the amount of tritium required on-site for long-term operation to roughly a few hundred grams.

Conclusion: Commercializing Fusion is the Goal

Inertia's approach is not about achieving science breakthroughs, but achieving engineering breakthroughs. By focusing on achieving improved economics, the price of utilizing fusion for electricity can be significantly reduced.