E139: Make fusion energy, then repeat. Inertia Fusion, Part 1

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 Energy’s “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 Dunn, 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 Fusion: https://inertia.com/ - Everybody in the Pool: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/ - Subscribe to the Everybody in the Pool newsletter: https://www.mollywood.co/ - Become a member for the ad-free version of the show: https://everybodyinthepool.supercast.com/ - Join our Discord! https://discord.gg/2EsDhwQC2z * * * Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.