Inertia
🇺🇸 US · Active
Inertia is a US laser fusion company led by chief executive Jeff Lawson, with Mike Dunne as chief technology officer and Annie Kritcher as chief scientist. It aims to build a power plant on the physics demonstrated in December 2022 at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California. The company says its laser system would combine about a thousand smaller lasers, each twenty times more efficient than those at the National Ignition Facility, that its plant would fire ten targets per second, and that it would mass-produce targets for less than one dollar each. It is a member of the Fusion Industry Association.
- Sector
- Fusion
- Technology
- Laser ICF, indirect drive
- Fuel
- Deuterium–tritium
- Role
- Fusion developer
Terms
- Laser ICF, indirect drive
- Laser energy is converted to X-rays inside a small gold or uranium can (a hohlraum), and the X-rays drive the capsule. The NIF configuration. Only about a tenth of the laser energy ends up absorbed by the capsule, most of the rest heating the hohlraum wall, which is the main efficiency cost indirect drive carries relative to direct drive.
- Deuterium–tritium
- Lowest ignition threshold; 80% of energy in 14.1 MeV neutrons. The reference fuel for every near-term net-gain claim.