Fusion startup Inertia speeds up its fuel production

A fusion startup just solved a problem that sounds boring next to physics. TechCrunch reported Thursday that Inertia Enterprises found a faster way to make its fusion fuel pellets. Inertia's approach uses lasers to compress tiny fuel capsules until they fuse, physics already proven at a U.S. national lab. Speeding up how it makes those pellets is one of several barriers standing between Inertia and an actual power plant.

Inertia isn't a fringe player. The company, co-founded by a Twilio co-founder, raised $450 million in February. Investors included Bessemer Venture Partners and Google's venture arm. Its plan is to mass-produce fuel pellets for under a dollar each. It will then build a reactor around lasers powerful enough to ignite them. TechCrunch got an exclusive first look at the new process. That means the technical details haven't been independently confirmed elsewhere yet.

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How many of those 10 barriers can Inertia actually clear before money runs out? Fusion companies have raised enormous sums on the promise that the hardest physics problem is basically solved. What's left is arguably just as hard: manufacturing, materials, and cost, at a scale nobody has ever built before.