Inertia Enterprises says it can make fusion fuel pellets in hours

In short: Inertia Enterprises says it has cut the time needed to make its fusion fuel pellets from days to hours.

What happened

Inertia Enterprises, a fusion power startup, told TechCrunch it found a faster way to make the tiny fuel pellets used in its planned power plant. The company says the “fuel filling” step went from taking several days, sometimes a week at a major research lab, to taking minutes, with a full pellet taking about two to three hours to produce.

Fusion power is a way to make energy by pushing together two kinds of hydrogen so they combine and release energy (like copying what happens inside the sun, but on Earth). Inertia is building on work done at the National Ignition Facility, a large U.S. government lab experiment where fuel pellets are made very slowly and at high cost.

These pellets are hard to make. They use a diamond shell and layers of frozen hydrogen fuels called deuterium and tritium. The layers must be very close to perfectly round, because small flaws can reduce how well the reaction works.

Inertia said it can move faster partly because it plans to use a laser that is four times more powerful than the lab’s current laser. That extra power gives it more tolerance for minor imperfections.

Why it matters

Speed matters because a commercial power plant would need many pellets, not a few prototypes a year. Inertia says its full-scale plant would use about ten pellets every second. Faster manufacturing could also reduce how much tritium the company needs to keep on hand. Tritium is radioactive, expensive, and limited in global supply, which makes storage and handling a practical challenge.

Source: TechCrunch AI