Fusion startup Inertia Enterprises said it has found a way to cut the time it takes to make its fuel pellets from several days to just minutes. By slashing fuel filling time, Inertia says it has knocked down one of the ten barriers it must overcome to deliver the first phase of its commercial power plant ambitions. The startup gave TechCrunch an exclusive first look at the process.
The advance was not guaranteed: Investors gave Inertia $450 million on the premise that it could commercialize technology developed at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), which is an elaborate science experiment that requires painstaking care and feeding to operate. At the NIF, making fuel pellets can take a week or more and cost a small fortune. That’s not a great recipe for a profitable operation.
The outside is a spherical diamond shell, and just inside, there’s a thin layer of frozen deuterium and tritium, the isotopes of hydrogen that can fuel a fusion reactor. Inside the crystalline layer lies a mix of gaseous deuterium and tritium. Each solid layer must be as close to perfectly spherical as possible.
Those fuel pellets are then wrapped in gold casings known as hohlraums, which convert laser energy into X-rays that compress the fuel pellet inside. If everything goes to plan, that compression causes atoms to fuse and release energy. But even small imperfections in the spherical shape can disrupt the ignition process, preventing a fusion reaction from reaching its full potential.
Inertia had to condense the process to the point where it makes commercial sense without straying too far from the physics discovered at NIF. The team had a head start: Annie Kritcher, co-founder and chief scientist at Inertia, designed the first fusion experiment at NIF that released more power than it consumed. After several rounds of development, the startup was able to grow the crystals in about 30 minutes, something that could take up to a week at NIF.
Altogether, a single fuel pellet can be made in about two to three hours, and the process can be ramped to industrial scale. Inertia developed the process with help from the NIF at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, with which the startup has formed a public-private partnership. Inertia has an advantage that NIF does not, though.
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