Inertia Empreses is a Livermore, Calif.-based developer company founded in 2024 to commercialize laser-based inertial confinement fusion, after energy boost first demonstrated in late 2022. at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) National Ignition Facility. Inercia is co-founded by CEO Jeff Lawson, former CEO of Twilio, a cloud-based customer engagement platform; Chief Scientist Annie Kritcher, an LLNL physicist and integrated modeling and design fusion program; i Mike Dunne, Chief Technology Officer, Professor of Photographic Science at Stanford University and former Director of LLNL’s Fusion Energy Program. “In just three years, we’ve gone from the first experiment to producing more fusion energy than was delivered to the target, to repeating that result many times, and increasing the target’s gain,” says Kritcher. Inertia also recently completed a $450 million seed Series A funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation also from Google Ventures, Modern Capital, Threshold Ventures, Uncork Capital, Long Journey Ventures, WndrCo, IQT and Neo, are ready to enable the construction of a grid-scale power plant in 2030, with a The laser manufacturing facility and production line also envisioned making millions of tiny pellets that would be needed to generate fusion reactions. Inercia says the diode-powered laser emitter planned for its prototype plant will be able to generate 18 times more power than it will use, but full-scale production will need to increase the input-output power ratio to more than 30. The company’s long-term goal is to build a 1.5 GW power plant. Here, Dunne expands on key aspects of Inertia’s mission and the challenges ahead in this exchange edited for space and context.
Don’t: Other companies focused on fusion energy are still in the basic research phase; they have yet to demonstrate whether their approach is capable of achieving a net energy gain, which is open scientific exploration. Instead, Inertia is directly based on the only approach to fusion that has been proven to successfully produce more energy than it consumes. This is the culmination of more than 60 years of work and about $30 billion in investment (in today’s dollars) by the US government. The scale of this work, and the 12 years that have passed from the National Ignition Facility’s operation to the demonstration of the physics, should help calibrate the challenge. There are a number of laser-based fusion approaches being pursued by private industry, but Inercia’s goal is to take the most direct and least risky path to making fusion work at network scale, and then optimize from that demonstration point. Because Inertia is leveraging known physics, we can confidently focus our efforts and investments on scaling the technology and building a manufacturing supply chain that can deliver fusion energy to the grid. Inertia has partnered with a broad cross-section of the semiconductor laser diode industry, along with the optics industry and component manufacturers required for our fuel targets to ensure that the laser and target systems have an adequate supply chain that can scale to the levels required for the power plant, while also meeting performance, cost and schedule requirements. The specific details of these commitments are currently confidential.
Why did Chief Scientist Annie Kritcher try to start what became Inertia while still at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in what is being called a “first-of-its-kind” deal?
We are very fortunate that Annie has been able to join the founding Inertia team as Chief Scientist, while remaining an employee of LLNL. This ability to be both an entrepreneur and staff member of a national laboratory is the first of its kind [arrangement]recently enabled by the federal CHIPS + Science Act. Annie has been instrumental in getting the ignition and power gain on the NIF laser as well as ramping up the output to higher and higher gain. His ability to co-found Inercia allows him to translate these results into the development of a power plant, which is outside the mission space of national laboratories. For Inercia, its ability to remain within the lab strengthens the strategic partnership and the ability to leverage unique computational tools that have been benchmarked against NIF results. Inertia’s approach is rooted in proven physics, with its physics development led by Annie, who led the design of the ignition results, and power plant development led by [Mike Dunne]who previously directed this activity at LLN. This is combined with a team that has the technical and business expertise to scale technologies for the power plant and access to capital to bring fusion energy to market.
What type of prototype facility is the Inertia building? What is the capacity i timeline to complete design and construction?
In the immediate term, Inertia focuses on three key axes. The first is to build a prototype of the laser system, which we call Thunderwall. This will demonstrate that we can achieve the performance and electrical efficiency required for grid-scale power; the power plant will then host 1,000 of these lasers. The second is to build a prototype of the “target” fuel manufacturing plant, to demonstrate the path to mass production at the required scale and cost. The third to drive the design of the power plant itself, to ensure a robust design that integrates the laser and target systems in a configuration that can scale up to gigawatt power delivery. These activities are based in Livermore, California. At the end of this phase of technological development, we can proceed directly to the construction of the first “pilot” power plant. This is unlike all other fusion approaches, which will need an intermediate physics testing facility. The Inertia Power Plant will initially operate at 50 net MWe on the grid, to meet DOE requirements for a “pilot plant” and then scale to more than 1 net GWe over time.
Looking for quick answers on construction and engineering topics?
Try Ask ENR, our new intelligent AI search tool.
Ask ENR →
What was the attraction to the $450 million private equity fundraise?
This is our first capital raise, and it’s with an investment team that shares our vision and trusts our approach. We see this as a partnership that extends across the different phases of Inercia’s delivery plan. While this funding is critical to advancing commercialization, industrialization and large-scale energy construction projects are capital intensive. We will raise more capital as we achieve our goals and advance our plans.
How is Inertia still involved with LLNL, such as technological advancement, engineering and plant location?
Inertia has a deep collaboration with LLNL that spans from the first agreement with our co-founder Annie Kritcher to the licensing of a large number of patents to commercialize lab-made innovations and joint technology development programs. The location of our pilot plant will be determined in the coming years, based on a rigorous site selection process across the country. By design, Inertia aligns with the US Department of Energy’s strategic direction: leveraging 10-year and ongoing investments in the National Ignition Facility, along with key elements of the long-range fusion energy plan and federal programs to advance inertial fusion energy. These drive innovations in different technical areas and develop the workforce needed to deploy fusion. We will share the details of any specific commitments over the coming months and years.
What is the status of potential customer interest in your technology?
The laser that will power our plant will be the most powerful in the world (in terms of average power): a million times more powerful than the National Ignition Facility, 20 times more efficient, and 1/10 the physical footprint of each beamline. What does this mean? Average power is what is needed to drive a power plant. It’s not enough to fire a super powerful laser just once; which gives you peak power, but not the sustained, continuous power needed to produce electricity. For a fusion power plant, we need to fire the laser hundreds of times per minute (10 times per second) to provide the power needed for a city. So going from the NIF laser that delivers 2 megajoules every few hours to the inertial laser that will deliver 10 megajoules, 10 times per second, is about a factor of 1 million. There is no doubt that there is a very large customer base that spans the electricity and process heat markets. The challenge is not to find customers, it is to provide a solution that works and can be turned into a commercially viable source. That’s our goal as a company: to take the most direct and lowest-risk path to demonstrate the power of fusion at scale, and then optimize it.
What are the biggest risks of inertia?
Many of the biggest challenges we face are similar to those of any company trying to develop and scale large-scale, capital-intensive industrial projects. Ultimately, it’s about integrating the system: ensuring that every part of the power plant works in harmony, from the lasers to the fuel targets to the power production systems. This involves navigating a complex set of trade-offs, understanding how to balance performance against risk, cost and delivery. To do this, we’re building a technical roadmap that builds on other successful commercialization and scale-up efforts, from semiconductor chips to “lidar” lasers in self-driving cars to the technologies built into our smartphones. We’re bringing in people with the necessary experience, from former Apple and Waymo leaders who have scaled similar technologies, to outside advisors with decades of experience working on the merger. Our leadership team and our partnerships with academia, national labs and industry bring together thought leaders from across the country to solve these challenges.
