Inertia is going to commercialize one of the world’s most advanced scientific experiments

Fusion power startup Inertia Enterprises said Tuesday it has signed three contracts with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to help bring the laser-based fusion reactor it pioneered to the California lab for sale.

Contracts can provide Inertia addition to the competition starters. National Ignition Facility (NIF) at LLNL to date just an experiment proving that integrated controlled systems can produce more energy than they need to burn. Inertia burst into view in February with $450 million Series A, making it one of the good start capitalized in the industry.

Inertia and LLNL are working on a fusion model called imprisonmentwhich creates fusion by compressing a pellet of fuel using an external force, unlike other methods that use magnetic force to trap plasma until the atoms fuse together.

At NIF, 192 laser beams are thrown into a large vacuum chamber to converge on a small gold bag called a hohlraum, which contains a pellet of diamond-encrusted fuel. When the lasers hit the hohlraum, it gets vaporized and emits X-Rays that explode the BB-sized fat pellet inside. The diamond coating turns into plasma, which expands to cover the deuterium-tritium fuel.

If that doesn’t sound strange enough, remember that all of this has to happen several times a second if the technology is going to generate power on the grid.

The design of a laser-driven reactor was first proposed in the 1960s as a safe way to research nuclear weapons, although scientists also recognized its potential for power generation. Construction of the NIF began in 1997, and it took 25 years to reach the point where the stack produced more energy than was needed to run it.

A number of startups, including Inertia, Xcimer, Focused Energy and First Light, are trying to turn the idea into a power plant. Because NIF lasers are based on older technology, the hope is that the new lasers will be more efficient, lowering the energy required to burn each compound and making it easier for each process to produce enough energy to make the electronic control worthwhile.

The agreement between Inertia and LLNL involves two joint projects, and one research and development agreement. The companies said they will work together to develop high-quality lasers and control fuel targets with an eye on efficiency and productivity. Inertia also licenses about 200 patents from the lab.

It was perhaps inevitable that Inertia and LLNL would continue to work together. Annie Kritcher, co-founder and chief scientist of Inertia, helped design a breakthrough experiment at NIF that achieved a scientific breakthrough. In 2022 CHIPS and the Science Act paved the way for him to found a company while he retained his position at LLNL.