Fusion energy startup Inertia Enterprises said Tuesday it has signed three agreements with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to help bring the laser-based fusion reactor pioneered at the California lab to market.
The agreements could give Inertia a boost over rival startups. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at LLNL is so far the just experiment to show that controlled fusion reactions could produce more energy than they need to ignite. Inertia burst onto the scene in February with a Series A of 450 million dollars, making it one of the best capitalized startups in the industry.
Inertia and LLNL are working on a type of merger called inertial confinementwhich 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 to converge on a small gold cylinder called a hohlraum, which contains a diamond-coated fuel pellet. When the lasers hit the hohlraum, it vaporizes and emits X-rays that explode the billiard-ball-sized pellet of fuel inside. The diamond coating transforms into plasma, which expands to compress the deuterium-tritium fuel.
If this doesn’t sound exotic enough, keep in mind that all of this must 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, although scientists also recognized its potential for energy production. Construction of the NIF began in 1997 and it took 25 years to reach the break-even point where a fusion reaction released more energy than needed to get it going.
Several startups, including Inertia, Xcimer, Focused Energy and First Light, are attempting to turn the concept into commercial-scale power plants. Because the NIF lasers are based on old technology, the hope is that the new lasers will be more efficient, reducing the energy required to start each fusion reaction and thus making it easier for each reaction to release enough energy to make a commercial-scale power plant profitable.
Technology event
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
The agreements between Inertia and LLNL cover two strategic partnership projects and a cooperative research and development agreement. The organizations say they will work together to develop more advanced lasers and improve fuel targets for better performance and manufacturing. Inertia is also licensing nearly 200 of the lab’s patents.
Perhaps it was inevitable that Inertia and LLNL would continue working together. Annie Kritcher, co-founder and chief scientist of Inertia, helped design the successful experiment at NIF that achieved scientific break-even. The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 paved the way for her to found a company and retain her position at LLNL.
