Fusion has been “ten years away” for decades — but one corner of the field just crossed a line that changes the conversation. In December 2022, Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s National Ignition Facility achieved ignition: a self-sustaining fusion reaction that produced net energy. And they’ve repeated it.So what happens when you take the only fusion approach that’s proven to work, and focus less on new physics… and more on building the industrial supply chain to do it again and again, cheaply and reliably? You get a field t...
Fusion has been “ten years away” for decades — but one corner of the field just crossed a line that changes the conversation. In December 2022, Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s National Ignition Facility achieved ignition: a self-sustaining fusion reaction that produced net energy. And they’ve repeated it.
So what happens when you take the only fusion approach that’s proven to work, and focus less on new physics… and more on building the industrial supply chain to do it again and again, cheaply and reliably? You get a field trip!
In part one of a two-part field trip to Livermore, California, Molly visits Inertia Enterprises’ “House of Fusion” to meet two of the company’s co-founders:
- Jeff Lawson (yes, that Jeff Lawson — founder of Twilio and majority owner of The Onion) on the business case for commercializing ignition, and why Inertia thinks the economics are finally ready.
- Mike Dunne, former Lawrence Livermore power-plant designer and Stanford professor, on what it takes to turn a lab breakthrough into a power plant — from a gigawatt-scale “engine” that can follow renewables on the grid, to building a million precision fuel targets a day.
We talk about:
- What “ignition” actually means — and why it’s different from “fusion someday”
- Why Inertia is starting with the only physics regime that’s been proven to produce net fusion energy
- The two big bottlenecks: high-power diode lasers and mass-manufactured fusion targets
- How scaling semiconductor manufacturing could drive laser costs down (and why “1,000x” matters)
- What a fusion target is: a tiny fuel capsule inside a miniature “oven” (and why lead beats gold for economics)
- Why a fusion plant looks more like a high-RPM engine than a one-off experiment — and how that changes everything
- Potential early markets beyond electricity: high-temperature process heat for steel, cement, and fertilizer
- What it looks like to build a fusion company in Silicon Valley: Apple/Waymo-style process engineers, high-end metrology, and a Nerf gun used as a stand-in for high-speed target tracking
- Thunderdome. Yes, really.
Links:
- Inertia Enterprises: https://inertia.com/
- Everybody in the Pool: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
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