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.
“But when you really double-click on it, you’re like, wait a minute, they’re only making a handful of them a year,” Jeff Lawson, co-founder and CEO of Inertia, told TechCrunch. “I put on my commercial hat and was like, wait a minute, I know the word for this: Prototypes.”
At Inertia, the team set about turning those prototypes into something mass manufacturable. “That’s why we’re hiring people from the likes of Apple,” he said. “There’s a bunch of industrial engineers who are like, ‘Alright, I guess I have to go figure out how to make that a billion times over in a factory.’”
