Between a commercial funding source and a recipe for fusion success, this is as good as it gets…
The Fusion Report has covered the efforts of numerous companies to achieve commercial fusion energy; in most cases the engineering and scientific approaches are the same, even if the fusion technologies utilized differ. Typically, companies build test systems using a subset of the technologies they are trying to verify, run the experiment, and then see if the results are what they expected. If they are, they build the next step of the experiment and try to run it; if not they change their approach slightly and try to re-verify the new approach. Regardless of the fusion technology being perfected, the approach is the same, as is the goal: finding out how to commercialize fusion energy.
The other thing that is the same, at least for fusion, is the need for capital. Even for companies like Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), which has raised nearly $3B in funds, you can never have too much money given that the expected cost for a working prototype fusion energy power plant is in the range of $3B to $10B, not counting non-recurring engineering (NRE) charges for prototyping, or the cost of any missteps.
That’s why this step from Barclays to get involved in funding is so important: it puts real cash behind commercial fusion energy deployment. With total assets of £1.54T and net income of £7.2B, Barclays consistently ranks as one of the top five banks in Europe. Additionally, today we bring to you the fusion energy commercialization roadmap for Inertia, one of the leading Inertial fusion energy (IFE) companies. While Inertia is new to the game, the founders of the company were some of the chief innovators at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) National Ignition Facility (NIF), the only facility so far that has achieved Q>1. But first, let’s cover the Barclays press release.
Barclays supports the development of commercial fusion power in the UK (July 21, 2026)
Barclays today announces it is supporting the UK Infinity Fusion Consortium, a private sector-led collaboration established to advance the development of a commercial fusion power plant project in the UK.
Barclays provides the global fusion with its expertise in energy, infrastructure, project finance, capital markets and commercial frameworks, and will bring that experience to this consortium. Fusion is a complementary technology alongside nuclear fission, including gigawatt-scale, small modular reactors and next-generation reactor technologies.
The UK Infinity Fusion Consortium was established in May 2026 by Type One Energy, Tokamak Energy and AECOM to help develop the UK’s fusion value chain and attract the investment needed to deliver a commercial fusion power plant. It is complementary to the UK Government’s Fusion Strategy and the STEP programme, the Government’s flagship fusion project. Barclays and the consortium companies are members of the Sustainable Markets Initiative, founded by His Majesty King Charles III to accelerate the transition to a sustainable economy.
C.S. Venkatakrishnan, Group Chief Executive at Barclays, said: “Fusion has the potential to become an important part of a secure, resilient and low-carbon energy system. Barclays is pleased to work with fusion related companies and to support the UK Infinity Fusion Consortium as part of our broader engagement with clients and partners working to advance sustainable innovation, including through the Sustainable Markets Initiative. We look forward to continuing to share our sector perspective and experience with fusion groups in the UK as the consortium helps build momentum behind the UK’s fusion ecosystem and the Government’s advanced energy ambitions.”
Chris Mowry, Chief Executive Officer, Type One Energy, said: “The UK Infinity Fusion Consortium brings together technology, engineering and project delivery capabilities that can help accelerate a private sector-led pathway for fusion commercialisation in the UK. Barclays’ support, including its financial markets and infrastructure expertise, will be valuable as the consortium works to engage the broader UK value chain, attract private capital and align with the UK Government’s fusion ambitions.”
Inertia’s Roadmap To Commercialize Inertial Fusion Energy
While Inertia is one of the newer companies in the commercial fusion industry (they were publicly launched less than a year ago in August of 2025), they have certainly been busy. We have covered them several times, including an interview with their CTO and co-founder Mike Dunne roughly four months ago, where he laid out their priorities to commercialize fusion energy. While we will not go over the specific details of their Phase 1 Commercial Roadmap (the link to their roadmap is here), we will include their “Top 10 List” to accomplish during Phase 1 (Component Development) of their four-phase program (BTW, Phase 2- Subsystem Integration; Phase 3 – End-to-End Integration; Phase 4 – Deployment):
1) Increase yield to >25x. The hardest part of Laser Indirect Drive fusion is done: proving it’s possible to achieve ignition. This milestone took the US government 60+ years and more than $30B.1 Currently, the target used at NIF generates over 8 MJ of energy per shot. That’s an impressive 4x yield against the 2 MJ that goes in. But for commercial scale, we need to generate enough heat energy from each target shot to power the laser and put a meaningful amount on the grid, all after lossy conversion from heat to electricity. Despite that, our plant’s initial operation requires only 25x target yield to generate 250MW of grid electricity.2 We will demonstrate that we can scale up our target to generate an initial >25x gain for a total of >250 MJ of energy per shot. We will demonstrate this by executing a “Virtual NIF Shot” (referencing the same ICF design codes that LLNL uses to achieve ignition), and demonstrate at the highest possible fidelity that our design, including mass-manufactured targets, preserves the proven physics while scaling to commercially relevant gain.
2) Make laser diodes cheap. The laser at the NIF is impressively large (both in energy and in physical size), but it is very inefficient. It loses ~99.5% of the electricity it draws from the grid, emitting only ~0.5% of that energy as laser light onto the target. Without higher efficiency, generating commercial energy is impossible. While the NIF laser is an engineering marvel, it surprises most people to learn that it is literally powered by gas-filled vacuum tubes (called flash lamps). The key to making a laser that is more powerful, more energetic, more efficient, and more compact is the same transition that’s made every major technology smaller, more powerful, and more efficient: moving from vacuum tubes to semiconductors. Laser diodes are the answer, but as of today, they’re considered cost-prohibitive. That’s because the market for our particular variety of high-power, frequency-tuned laser diodes is currently tiny. But we’re going to change that; the demand for just one of our commercial power plants will need 500 years’ worth of today’s global supply! That means we need to scale up production to meet our anticipated demand. We will (with our industry partners) demonstrate that we can scale up high power laser diode production by several orders of magnitude, and bring the cost down by about 50x from today’s prices. 3
3) Make an efficient and high repetition-rate laser amplifier. The NIF laser is operable for roughly one shot per day, and requires substantial maintenance and cool-down time between shots. For commercial energy, our diode-pumped laser must operate continuously at 10 Hz. Migrating from flash lamps to laser diodes helps enable high repetition rates, but there are many design tradeoffs needed to make the amplifier performant and efficient. We are building a ¼ scale amplifier test stand, demonstrating high-efficiency coupling of diode laser light to the gain medium, while cooling it for continuous operation at 10 shots per second.
4) Make laser optics durable. At Inertia, we will build a laser that is the world’s most energetic (most energy per shot) and the world’s highest average power (100 MW continuous operation). One of the challenges in high-power lasers is finding the sweet spot between making optics large enough to handle all that energy, but small enough to manufacture and handle at scale. The NIF (which was built with optics that were state-of-the-art at the time) intentionally operates above its damage threshold. It was a conscious tradeoff in costs versus longevity—one that won’t work for continuous commercial operation. We will work with industry partners at our in-house optics lab to demonstrate that state-of-the-art optics are durable and economical enough to operate at plant scale.
5) Industrialize carbon shell manufacturing. The fuel targets used by the NIF are made of four main parts: (1) an outer canister (called a hohlraum), (2) a high-density carbon (HDC) shell, (3) frozen deuterium-tritium (DT) fuel inside the shell, and (4) several thin-film tents that hold the shell in place in the hohlraum and seal the hohlraum. In the process of commercialization, we are using this proven design—changing as little as possible—as we cost-effectively scale up manufacturing. Currently at the NIF, these HDC shells take several months to grow and polish in small batches via Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD). This is a well-known process in manufacturing (widely used in the semiconductor industry), but more typically applied on flat surfaces instead of the round sphere of our target. We are demonstrating that we can scale up fabrication and reduce the cost of these shells through larger batches and shorter cycle times—all while maintaining the required tolerances calibrated on NIF data. We will demonstrate that a scalable CVD process can be applied to meet these properties.
6) Track and hit the targets. At the NIF, the fuel targets are shot one at a time, stationary in the chamber, inserted and aligned using a precision robotic positioning system with detailed manual alignment by a team of technicians. For commercialization, we won’t shoot a single target at a time; we’ll be shooting targets at roughly 10 Hz (10 times per second). This means injecting the target into the chamber at a high velocity and hitting it on the fly with laser beams. (This is similar to how ASML’s EUV lithography system hits injected tin droplets with a laser at 50 kHz.) While this may sound hard, photons are actually very fast compared to matter! But this is a control system that needs to be developed. We will demonstrate that we can track and engage a target moving at the required speed of injection and with the required precision to achieve ignition.
7) Make durable, cheap thin film tents. The carbon shell of a fusion target is held in place by thin films. At the NIF, these films are very thin to ensure they don’t interfere with the fuel implosion. But unlike NIF’s stationary targets, we’ll be injecting the targets at 10 Hz at a high velocity into the chamber. The thin films must be stronger to survive this injection and to endure the high temperature of the fusion chamber. We will demonstrate that economical films exist that are both thin enough to enable ignition and gain, and also strong enough to survive the thermo-mechanical insults 4 of injection.
8) Make target assembly scalable. As mentioned, the NIF targets consist of just four parts. But they must be assembled into a fusion target, including the step of fueling the target with DT fuel. At the NIF, where only a handful of ignition-quality targets are assembled and shot per year, they can be fueled and sealed manually. To achieve commercial scale, we must automate the target assembly. We will demonstrate that a scalable, batch assembly process exists to fill and seal the fusion targets.
9) Fuel targets quickly. At the NIF, fueling the targets is a slow process. It often takes days—and sometimes more than a week—to grow a single pristine DT crystal on the inside of the HDC shell. For commercialization, we need to fuel more quickly and in large batches. That is for efficiency, and also ensures that the amount of tritium in our fueling stage at any one point in time is kept to an acceptable regulatory level. We will demonstrate that a method exists to quickly fuel targets with high-enough ice quality to produce high fusion energy in large batches while keeping low tritium inventory.
10) Integrate everything for a working fusion power plant. The point of commercialization is to eventually produce economical energy (process heat and/or electricity). One of the hard problems in designing a fusion plant is long-term survival of the walls that form the fusion chamber. Inertia’s baseline design uses a simple gas-armored first wall to absorb the bulk of the insult, coupled with low-cost, easily replaced solid walls. This approach doesn’t require a breakthrough in materials science, and crucially, enables low fusion gain, relaxing the requirements on the physics performance. But tradeoffs remain; the larger the chamber, the longer the walls last but the more expensive it is to build. With more beamlines, plant operations become easier, but the plant will breed less tritium. We need to find the optimal solution within the set of tradeoffs. We will demonstrate a self-consistent plant design that utilizes demonstrated physics and incorporates our laser design decisions, target survival decisions, and fuel needs of a sustainable plant.
Conclusion: Why These Stories Are Important for Fusion Energy
The biggest problem in fusion is something that fusion companies don’t control: raising capital to fund a pipeline of commercial fusion energy power plants, starting with the first-of-a-kind (FOAK) plant to prove the concept. Fusion energy could provide a significant amount of energy without the baggage of fossil fuel or nuclear fission energy sources. As Group Chief Executive C.S. Venkatakrishnan puts it, “Fusion has the potential to become an important part of a secure, resilient and low-carbon energy system. Barclays is pleased to support the UK Infinity Fusion Consortium as part of their efforts to advance sustainable innovation.” To say that a reliable source of capital is valuable in this effort is an understatement, and it is great that Barclays is one of the first banks to put their money behind their mouth.
The second biggest problem in fusion is picking the right direction. Fortunately, in that approach we get to stand on the shoulders of our predecessors, who have shown us a lot of what works and what doesn’t, and what likely needs to be done to finish the job. This is especially true for IFE, which LLNL NIF has blazed a trail on how to exceed Q>1 (multiple times!). While LID IFE is not the only approach possible to commercialize fusion energy, it is one of the simpler ones – it is in a way a “brute force” method. In a way, it is a true engineering problem (or problems), rather than a physics problem, which is good for Inertia. In some ways, they have done a better job than anyone else in laying out exactly what their priorities are going forward, which certainly helps. Now as they say, it’s simply a small matter of execution…
