The new Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) company, and an interview with CTO and co-founder Mike Dunne with The Fusion Report
Today, The Fusion Report (TFR) will interview Mike Dunne, the Chief Technical Officer (CTO) and co-founder of Inertia Enterprises, one of the latest companies in the Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) space. Inertia is commercializing fusion by designing state-of-the-art lasers and mass-manufacturing the targets necessary to build a fusion power plant. We will then follow up with an article about Inertia Enterprises and their approach to commercializing fusion energy.
Interview with Mike Dunne, CTO and co-founder of Inertia Enterprises
Mike Dunne, the CTO and co-founder of Inertia, has a long history in the laser ICF space. Along with Jeff Lawson (CEO and President) and Annie Kritcher (Chief Scientist), Mike co-founded Inertia Enterprises seven months ago on August 27, 2025; the company recently raised $450 million in initial investments in February 2026. Mike Dunne also serves as a professor of photon science at Stanford University. Before Inertia, Mike Dunne was director of the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) Program at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory from October 2014 to October 2025. Prior to SLAC, Mike was the program director for fusion energy at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), the Director of the Central Laser Facility (CLF) at the United Kingdom (UK) Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), and a senior manager at the UK Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE).
- TFR: NIF has been the only approach that has achieved Q>1 in fusion, and yet the difference between target yield and facility yield is huge, especially around laser efficiency. How much do you see that lasers have to improve to make the facility yield greater than one possible? And what do you see as the key breakthrough that makes the lasers become more efficient?
Mike Dunne: This, along with the fuel target economics, is one of the crucial questions to be answered to make laser fusion work. While most fusion efforts have been (and continue to be) in exploratory physics mode, laser ICF is the only one of the hundreds of approaches to fusion that has actually achieved energy gain (Q>1). It means we not only know how big the lasers need to be, but we also know what configuration the fuel has to be in to burn and achieve fusion gain. Now we can worry about laser efficiency, which at NIF is woefully inefficient, at around 1%. The good thing is that NIF’s flashlamps are actually 1980s or 1990s technology. Today, we have very compact, high-power semiconductor pumped lasers that are much more efficient, maybe 10% or 20% efficiency, which moves you into achieving net facility gain, which just on its own gets you in the realm of break-even. Now the question is whether you can build a system that is at scale and is affordable. The journey Inertia needs to go on now is getting these down to mass-produced prices. - TFR: You have put a lot of energy (pun intended?) into making more efficient targets. What do you think is the key to making that work?
Mike Dunne: So that, in many ways, is a similar story. We need to take the targets from NIF and turn these from expensive hand-built items to ones that are mass-produced and cheap. NIF shoots maybe six of these per year; not 6 million or 6 thousand, but six. The costs of the manufacturing process, which involves chemical vapor deposition and thin film processes, is spread over only a few targets. Our challenge is making a mass-produced process for fusion targets that builds millions of these at a time. The manufacturing line would not be that much different; it may be a bit larger, but now you’re amortizing across a billion targets per year. The real question for us is no longer the energy gain in fusion; it is the cost per unit. Then, as long as you’re getting adequate uniformity and density, your targets will work as effectively as those high-cost R&D targets. That’s the second area for Inertia to investigate––how do we make them smooth enough and round enough? We are using experts that come from places like Apple who have done this type of mass manufacturing scale-up before for different products in different markets. - TFR: From a market perspective, do you think it is more important to aim at standard grid power, behind-the-meter power, or industrial heat sources? From a geographical perspective, are you aiming for the US markets, European markets, or Asian markets, or trying to supply all comers?
Mike Dunne: I think time will tell, but the high-temperature industrial heat market will likely be one of the easiest ones to transition to. It’s not regulated the same way as the grid is, nor does it have the myriad of interconnect regulations that the grid has. Just the lead times of getting high voltage infrastructure equipment are daunting––it is multiple years. Most approaches to fusion make high-temperature heat, half of which is thrown away in thermal steam cycles. Plus, the grid demands extremely high resiliency; if your gigawatt plant falls off this grid, you’ll be noticed. Even in the toughest heat industries, however, you have thermal inertia to help out. There is no doubt that after a few years, fusion is well-suited for grid-based loads or for behind-the-meter solutions. Moreover, IFE is well-suited for these grid-based loads, as you can turn it up or down fairly easily to load-follow (for example, to respond to the ups and downs of a grid with a high fraction of solar and wind power). And you can also use the thermal energy to drive electrical generation later on in the day by banking it in molten salt storage. - TFR: That brings up the approach that Helion uses for energy capture. What do you think of this approach?
Mike Dunne: Like all approaches, there are potential opportunities and clear challenges. In addition to the unsolved physics problem, I think some of the challenges will be in making helium-3 fuel to produce the required charged particles. There is no approach today to produce helium-3 in an energy-efficient way; it’s possible that could change as we develop at off-earth mining capabilities or tritium plants. But even if you solve that, there is still an added level of complexity and the question of whether or not the system can survive the neutrons and gamma rays kicked off during fusion. You ultimately would need fairly complex protection of the coils and wires that would have to be able to work in this environment. B. - TFR: How critical is the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to improve power yields for initial confinement fusion (ICF)?
Mike Dunne: There are many ways it can be used, and I’ll give three examples. First in process control in production lines, whether it be for targets or solid-state lasers. That’s a pretty good use case for AI where you’re looking for patterns, which it can do far better than humans. It can look at the data and tell us when to tweak the process to get back into conformance.
Another area is in target injection. If you think about our systems, we have to match a laser beam to a fuel target, which is being injected at a very high velocity, and do it about 10 times a second with very high accuracy. And it will never be at exactly the same spot on every iteration, because life is never that simple. Again, it is a great use case for pattern recognition where you don’t have to worry so much about what is causing the variations, but more about how you will deal with them. We are actually building that system at Inertia, where we can track the targets and adjust the lasers accordingly, and teach the system how to do it over thousands of simulated iterations.
A final example is the chamber that will hold our fusion environment, which will just be relatively simple steel walls. It is a specific type of steel that resists neutron activation, but for all intents and purposes, it is just steel. It will last a few years and then have to be replaced, but it’s a good starting point to get to market quickly and robustly. It would be great to have something that lasts for decades, but we do not know how to make that material today. AI might be helpful to understand what needs to be measured in each iteration of the material we build and what markers or patterns we should look for during testing. As we iterate multiple times (and AI iterates multiple times), we can foresee a potential long-term solution. At Inertia, we’re not relying on this, it would just provide added value as and when these advanced materials emerge.
Article: Inertia’s Approach to Laser-Based ICF
No doubt about it – lasers are COOL!!! For most of us sci-fi fans, lasers bring forth visions of ray guns, “impulse drive” fusion-powered spaceships, and loads of other cool future tech. At the same time, the practical side of us reminds ourselves of all the high-tech capabilities that lasers provide us with, including science, communications, displays, materials cutting/welding, data storage systems, medical uses, and (hopefully very soon) commercial energy from fusion. Let’s look at how Inertia Enterprise is going to utilize state-of-the-art lasers in the commercialization of fusion energy.
Inertial Confinement Fusion: It’s All About Lasers and Fusion Targets
The goal of fusion energy is to fuse the nuclei of two atoms (typically deuterium and tritium, two isotopes of hydrogen) into a single new atom, releasing high-energy neutrons and large amounts of free energy. There are two primary approaches to fusion for commercial purposes: magnetic confinement fusion (MCF), which uses magnetic fields to heat and compress hydrogen plasma; and inertial confinement fusion (ICF), which uses high-energy beams to heat and compress the plasma. The leading form of ICF (laser-based ICF) was used at the LLNL National Ignition Facility (NIF) in December 2022 to achieve fusion with Q>1 (producing more energy that was put into the target}, the first time it was achieved. While a number of different approaches have been utilized to try to achieve fusion, only NIF’s approach has been successful to date.
For a laser-based ICF, it is all about the lasers and the fusion targets. The more efficient the laser is at converting electricity into coherent light, and the more efficient the target is in absorbing the energy from the coherent light, the more efficient the process is. NIF utilizes 192 infrared flashlamp-pumped neodymium glass lasers which were frequency-tripled to ultraviolet beams, delivering over 500 trillion watts of peak power. These 192 laser beams converged into a small (~2mm) pellet of frozen deuterium and tritium (D-T) hydrogen fuel. However, NIF was never meant to be a production fusion facility. Its lasers were essentially handcrafted, as were its target assemblies, at great expense.
This is where Inertia’s approach comes in. Instead of using 192 high-cost lasers, Inertia will utilize 1,000 diode-based lasers, each producing 10 kilojoules of pulsed laser energy. Inertia’s lasers will have an efficiency of at least 10% (much more efficient than the lasers used at NIF), and will operate at a “shot” frequency of up to 10 hertz (though the shot frequency will likely vary based on the desired output power of the power plant). Similarly, the fusion targets will be mass produced to cut costs down to roughly $1 of fuel per shot. The entire process is optimized for efficiency.
Other Processes. Converting Heat to Electricity, and the First Wall
In most of the areas other than lasers or the fuel pellets, Inertia’s engineering is focused on utilizing the current state-of-the-art in power plant engineering to the extent that it will meet their requirements, rather than taking risks on new technologies. A good example is approaches to generate electricity from the fusion process. While some vendors have looked at utilizing charged particles from the fusion reaction to generate electricity, particularly where helium-3 and deuterium (D-He3) is the fuel, Inertia believes that this is too complex a process to be worth the effort. Instead they believe the tried and true approach of heating water into steam and turning it into electricity by turbines and generators is the safest approach. While this approach was not the most efficient (30%-50% efficiency is typical), it is low risk and only standard equipment is required.
An area that is a little more exotic, but where Inertia is still taking a conservative approach, is that of engineering the “first wall”. While a number of vendors are engineering complex solutions to this problem (including liquid metal walls), Inertia plans to take a very simple approach – utilizing heavy gauge steel. While a steel front wall will have to be replaced every couple of years (a bit of a pain), it is something that can easily be dealt with as part of a normal maintenance process. Even artificial intelligence (AI), which is fairly common by now, will be limited in where it has a high payoff, such as the optical inspection and production management of targets, or in the injection and positioning of targets where AI has a clear and definable value.
Critical Market Segments for Inertia
In a similar manner, Inertia is being cautious when they look at initial market segments and geographies to focus on. A good example is industrial heat/energy use cases. While the mountains of red tape to connect a new power source to the electrical grid today are fairly high, luckily the same cannot be said for industrial heat and energy. Moreover, the industrial heat and energy market is roughly a third of the total energy use market worldwide. This makes fusion energy a good solution for industrial heat and energy, one with less risks than the grid or behind-the-meter electricity.
Conclusion: Know What Your Strategic Priorities Are
In any startup, no matter how well-funded or how great a team you have, it is essential to know what your critical tradeoffs are, and more importantly what they aren’t. By focusing on a few critical trade-offs, you can reduce the total number of risks that you must address, allowing you to put more energy into the critical areas that you must address. This unfortunately is oftentimes an area that having more money makes harder to address rather than easier to address. If Inertia continues with the approach that they are taking so far, it bodes well for their likelihood of success in the long term.
