Inertia Enterprises, a fusion power start-up with ties to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) team that achieved fusion ignition in 2022, has launched as an independent company. In a press release announcing the company launch, Inertia Enterprises said that it is developing a generation of mass-produced, low-cost lasers and fuel targets. Inertia’s GW-scale power plant design, the company said, will be big enough to power a city of over a million people. The company is co-founded by Andrea Kritcher, a member of the team at LLNL that conducted the first controlled fusion experiment to achieve fusion ignition in December 2022; fusion power plant designer Mike Dunne; and tech entrepreneur Jeff Lawson. Kritcher has been the lead designer of the world-first LLNL experiments since 2019, responsible for the physics design that successfully achieved ignition. Jeff Lawson was the founder and CEO of tech platform Twilio, which he grew from inception to over $4B in revenue, a public listing on the New York Stock Exchange, and a global footprint of over 300,000 customers. Mike Dunne is a professor of photon science at Stanford University and an associate lab director of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Previously, Dunne led the five-year program at LLNL to deliver an industry-validated power plant design based on the LLNL ignition approach. Inertia’s strategy is to take the most direct, scientifically proven path from what is working today at LLNL to commercial energy. The company said that it has partnered with LLNL on a "substantial and multifaceted relationship, including research agreements, to advance low-cost, mass-production target design and fabrication." It added that it has licensed nearly 200 patents covering multiple technologies and has reached an arrangement to advance public-private collaboration and technology transfer, allowing Kritcher to co-found the company.
