A national lab made a nuclear fusion breakthrough. A new startup wants to make it into a power plant

"The lab's initial breakthrough in 2022 was an early but historic step. In the experiment, researchers pointed 192 powerful lasers at a can roughly the size of a pencil eraser that contained a tiny capsule made of fusion fuel. The laser beams entered the end of the can and created a 3 million-degree oven, heating up the pellet and exploding it."

""There are a lot of startups out there pursuing fusion with a number of different methods," Lawson says. "But none of them were really basing their work on Livermore and just taking the most direct possible path, from what has now been working at Livermore to a working power plant design.""

""You get to these extreme starlight conditions-miniature stars inside of the can for a brief second in time," Kritcher says."

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieved fusion "ignition" by firing lasers at a tiny fuel pellet, producing more fusion energy output than input. The 2022 experiment used 192 lasers focused on a can the size of a pencil eraser containing a fusion fuel capsule, producing a roughly 3 million-degree oven and briefly creating miniature star conditions. A startup named Inertia is spinning off to commercialize that laser-driven approach to pursue affordable, 24/7 clean energy. Founders Andrea Kritcher, Mike Dunne, and Jeff Lawson combine fusion experiment expertise, power-plant design, and entrepreneurship to take a direct path toward a working power plant design.

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