Inertia moves to commercialize one of the world’s most sophisticated scientific experiments.

Nuclear power startup Inertia Enterprises said Tuesday it has signed three contracts with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to help bring to market a laser-based fusion reactor pioneered by the California lab.

The deal will give Inertia a boost over rival startups. LLNL’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) is the only experiment to demonstrate that controlled fusion reactions can produce more power than needed for ignition. Inertia raised a $450 million Series A in February, establishing itself as one of the best capitalized startups in the industry.

Inertia and LLNL are studying a type of fusion called inertial confinement, which uses external forces to compress fuel pellets to create conditions for fusion, as opposed to other approaches that use strong magnetic fields to confine plasma until the atoms fuse.

At NIF, 192 laser beams are fired into a large vacuum chamber and converged on a small gold cylinder called a hohlraum, which contains diamond-coated fuel pellets. When the laser hits the hollraum, it vaporizes and emits X-rays that explode the BB-sized fuel pellets inside. The diamond coating converts into plasma, which expands and compresses the deuterium-tritium fuel.

If this doesn’t sound strange, keep in mind that all of this needs to happen multiple times per second for the technology to produce power to the grid.

Laser-powered reactor designs were first theorized in the 1960s as a safer way to study thermonuclear weapons, but scientists also recognized their potential for power generation. Construction of the NIF began in 1997 and took 25 years to reach the break-even point, which would release more power than needed to get the fusion reaction started.

Several startups, including Inertia, Xcimer, Focused Energy and First Light, are attempting to translate this concept into commercial-scale power plants. Because NIF’s laser is based on older technology, the hope is that the new laser will be more efficient, lowering the energy needed to ignite each fusion reaction and making it easier for each reaction to release enough energy to make a commercial-scale power plant profitable.

The agreement between Inertia and LLNL includes two strategic partnership projects and one collaborative research and development agreement. The two organizations said they would work together to develop more advanced lasers with the goal of better performance and manufacturing, and to improve fuel targets. Inertia also licenses approximately 200 patents from its lab.

It was probably inevitable that Inertia and LLNL would continue to collaborate. Annie Kritcher, co-founder and chief scientist at Inertia, helped design the successful experiment that achieved scientific breakeven at NIF. The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 paved the way for her to establish the company while maintaining her position at LLNL.