Inertia says its lab process cuts fusion fuel-pellet production to hours

A fusion fuel pellet that once demanded days of careful work now takes about two to three hours, Inertia Enterprises says. The startup’s team has also reduced the crystal-growing stage from as long as a week at the National Ignition Facility to about 30 minutes, bringing a laboratory bottleneck closer to factory speed.

The object being manufactured is less like a conventional fuel cartridge than a tiny precision target. A spherical diamond shell contains frozen deuterium and tritium, hydrogen isotopes that can fuel fusion, with a gaseous mixture inside. Each layer must stay close to perfectly spherical: imperfections can disrupt the compression needed to ignite the reaction.

A gold casing called a hohlraum surrounds the pellet and turns laser energy into X-rays. Those X-rays compress the fuel until atoms can fuse and release energy. Inertia developed its faster process with help from the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory through a public-private partnership. Annie Kritcher, Inertia’s co-founder and chief scientist, designed the first NIF fusion experiment to release more power than it consumed.

The startup says its approach can be scaled to industrial production. Its planned laser would be four times more powerful than NIF’s current laser, which Inertia says gives the pellet more tolerance for imperfections and helped speed manufacturing. The company is one of the fusion ventures trying to turn NIF science, where pellets can take a week or more to make, into a repeatable commercial process.

So what changes in practice? Faster pellet production could make a future facility smaller, faster and more efficient, Inertia says, while reducing the tritium inventory it must hold. Tritium is radioactive and currently costs about $30,000 per gram; Science reports that only about 25 kilograms are stockpiled globally. Inertia expects a full-scale commercial plant to use ten fuel pellets every second, but that plant remains an ambition, not a deployed power station.