Fusion power startup Inertia Enterprises said Tuesday it has signed three deals 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 compared to rival startups. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at LLNL is so far the only experiment to prove that controlled fusion reactions could produce more power than they require to ignite. Inerti burst onto the scene in February with a $450 million Series A, making it one of the best-capitalized startups in the industry.
Inerti and LLNL are working on a type of fusion called inertial confinement, which generates fusion conditions by compressing a fuel pellet using an external force, unlike other approaches that use powerful magnetic fields to confine plasmas until atoms fuse.
At NIF, 192 laser beams are fired into a large vacuum chamber so that they 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 BB-sized fuel pellet inside. The diamond coating is converted into a plasma which expands to compress the deuterium-tritium fuel.
If that doesn’t sound exotic enough, keep in mind that all of this has to happen several times a second if the technology is ever 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 power generation. Construction of the NIF began in 1997, and it took 25 years to reach the breakeven point, where a fusion reaction released more power than needed to start it.
Several startups, including Inertia, Xcimer, Focused Energy and First Light, are trying to turn the concept into commercial-scale power plants. Because NIF’s lasers are based on old technology, the hope is that new lasers will be more efficient and lower the energy required to ignite each fusion reaction, thereby making it easier for each reaction to release enough energy to make a commercial power plant viable.
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The agreements between Inertia and LLNL cover two strategic partnership projects and a cooperation agreement on research and development. The organizations say they will work together to develop more advanced lasers and improve fuel targets for better performance and manufacturing. Inertia also licenses nearly 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 the successful experiment at NIF that achieved scientific breakeven. The 2022 CHIPS and Science Act paved the way for her to start a company while keeping her position at LLNL.