E140: Inertia Enterprises (Part 2) — Annie Kritcher and the night ignition happened

In part two of my two-part field trip to Livermore, California, I sit down with Inertia Enterprises’ third co-founder — Annie Kritcher, the chief scientist at Inertia and a longtime physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Annie was the lead designer behind the December 2022 National Ignition Facility (NIF) shot that achieved ignition — a self-heating fusion “burning plasma” that produced more fusion energy out than was delivered to the target. In this episode, Annie walks us through what it took to get there (spoiler: not one magical breakthrough), what “the ignition cliff” actually means, and why Inertia is betting that manufacturing and economics — not brand-new physics — is the fastest path to commercial fusion.

We talk about:

• Annie’s path from nuclear engineering + plasma physics to becoming NIF’s lead designer on ignition platforms
• Why the historic ignition shot was the result of years of iteration (and a few duds along the way)
• The “pancake” shot (and the lab’s surprisingly extensive breakfast-food vocabulary for failed plasmas)
• What it felt like to get the 3:00am text — “I think we got ignition” — and why relief came before celebration
• Why many in the field had nearly given up on laser fusion ignition — and how close the NIF campaign came to being cut
• Why other fusion companies pursued different approaches: history, uncertainty, and the (very real) cost problem for lasers + targets
• The core commercialization challenge: scaling to high-repetition-rate shots (think “engine cycles”) and producing targets cheaply enough to fire millions per day

Links:

• Inertia Enterprises: https://inertia.com/
• Everybody in the Pool: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
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