At least the physics of Inertia’s approach are already proven, the startup’s CEO Jeff Lawson told me, pointing to the fusion experiments at Lawrence Livermore’s National Ignition Facility as a proof-of-concept. The lab’s demonstration of net energy gain caps more than six decades and $30 billion (in 2026 dollars) of U.S. fusion research. The remaining challenges, he argued, are all engineering-related, requiring “elbow grease, hard work, and smart people” rather than breakthroughs in fusion science.
"It seems to us like a startup or a commercial company of any variety should be focused on commercializing a proven scientific result, as opposed to actually trying to demonstrate the basic science to begin with," Lawson told me. Basic science, he argues, is better left to national labs and universities, where researchers can pursue "unbounded problems" that don’t align with the expectations and timelines of venture-backed startups.
Indeed, no fusion startup has yet achieved scientific breakeven, the milestone Lawrence Livermore first hit in 2022, and has since repeated numerous times. But leading players such as Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Helion Energy maintain that it’s only a matter of time before they validate the physics behind their own reactor designs, which they claim will be highly cost-competitive.
Lawson, on the other hand, readily acknowledged that Lawrence Livermore’s tech is uneconomical in its current form. His bet is simply that the more predictable path to a commercial reactor is to drive down the cost of the lab’s validated fusion approach, known as inertial confinement. This system relies on high-powered lasers firing at a millimeter-scale pellet of fusion fuel, compressing it to extreme temperatures and pressures until the atoms fuse. Today, the National Ignition Facility makes each individual fusion target by hand, a workable solution given that it only uses about a dozen per year.
That production model, however, isn’t remotely plausible for a grid-scale power plant. Because each fusion reaction lasts just a fraction of a billionth of a second, a commercial facility must fire its lasers at a fresh target about 10 times per second to generate continuous electricity — requiring the production of hundreds of millions of targets each year.
Scaling production to roughly a million pellets per day and making them inexpensive enough for commercial operation without compromising the strength or precision required for fusion ignition is central to Inertia’s roadmap. That includes goals five, seven, eight and nine — industrializing the manufacturing of the carbon shells that hold the fusion fuel, making the thin films that hold those carbon shells both durable and cheap, scaling up and automating fusion target assembly, and speeding up how fast targets are filled with the requisite deuterium-tritium fuel.
The other central focus of the roadmap is the laser system, which will ultimately consist of 1,000 individual units operating in concert to compress and heat the fusion fuel. Key priorities include reducing the system’s cost (goal two), dramatically increasing its firing cadence (goal three), and bolstering its durability to withstand high-intensity operations (goal four). Goal six also complements these efforts, calling for the development of a control system capable of tracking moving fusion targets to precisely align each laser shot.
Goals one and 10 bookend the journey with some broader milestones. The first focuses on increasing the fusion target’s energy gain — the ratio of fusion energy produced to laser energy delivered — to more than 25 times ignition. Today, the National Ignition Facility’s best-performing laser shot has yielded a gain of just over four times what it took to start the reaction. Goal 10 then zooms out to the ultimate objective: integrating all these technologies into a commercially viable power plant that can deliver either electricity or industrial heat to end customers.
To reach that point, Inertia has embarked on an industrial engineering hiring spree, recruiting folks with experience taking complex hardware systems from prototype to mass production, “not unlike the processes that are used in the semiconductor or consumer electronics world,” Lawson explained. The company has been making progress on its component development goals since the beginning of the year, he told me, and expects to announce the successful demonstration of a few of these milestones in the coming months. Lawson ultimately expects Inertia to complete the core components of its laser and target manufacturing systems by the middle of next year.
The team will spend the next two to three years integrating these individual pieces into two fully operational subsystems, a prototype laser system and a target manufacturing line. Around 2030, the company will begin combining those subsystems into a first-of-a-kind fusion power plant, which will also serve as the proving ground for the target chamber, tritium fuel breeding system, and power conversion system that turns fusion heat into electricity. By the middle of the next decade, Inertia aims to be generating power from this first plant, setting the stage for the company to build and connect additional grid-scale commercial power plants.
There are plenty of engineering trade-offs that the company will have to solve for. Take the decision around how to size the target chamber, for example. “If you make it bigger, your walls have an easier time and survive longer, but it’s more expensive. If you make it smaller, your walls have a tougher time because they’re closer to all the heat and energy that the fusion reaction is creating, but now your power plant costs less to build.”
But to Lawson, this represents exactly the type of problem Inertia was built to solve: complex engineering issues that come to the fore once scientists have demonstrated the fundamental physics are sound. He thinks other fusion companies may someday reach this stage, as well — though he’s unwilling to hazard a guess on exactly what approach or startup is best positioned to do so.
“There have been generations of scientists who’ve made their predictions about fusion energy and gotten it wrong,” he told me. “I’m not going to pretend to be smarter than them. All I’m here to say is, just knowing that one did work, we can commercialize it.”
Esri
What If Lab
