A Startup Found a Way to Make Fusion Fuel Pellets in Hours Instead of Weeks
Inertia Enterprises says it has found a way to make its fusion fuel pellets in about two to three hours, down from the week or more the process takes at the National Ignition Facility. The company gave TechCrunch an exclusive first look at the manufacturing process on August 20, 2026 TechCrunch.
Fusion is the process that powers the sun: forcing atoms together to release energy. One way to do this on Earth is called inertial confinement fusion, where powerful lasers are fired at a tiny fuel pellet to compress it until the atoms fuse. The main bottleneck in making these pellets was growing the crystals they need. Inertia can now grow those crystals in about 30 minutes, compared with up to a week at NIF. The complete pellet, including assembly, takes two to three hours end to end, and the company says the process can be ramped to industrial scale TechCrunch.
The pellet itself is a tiny spherical shell made of diamond. Inside it sits a thin layer of frozen fuel made from deuterium and tritium, which are heavy forms of hydrogen, with a gas mixture of the same fuel at the center. Each pellet is wrapped in a gold container called a hohlraum, which takes incoming laser energy and converts it into X-rays that compress the fuel to fusion conditions. That design mirrors the approach used at NIF, where Annie Kritcher designed the first experiment that released more energy than it consumed. Kritcher is now co-founder and chief scientist at Inertia Enterprises TechCrunch.
Jeff Lawson, co-founder and CEO, leads the company alongside Kritcher. Inertia was founded in 2024 and announced its formation with the goal of commercializing fusion energy ANS. In February 2026, the company raised a $450 million Series A funding round to commercialize the physics proven at NIF, with the stated aim of building a power plant that depends on constructing the world's most powerful lasers Bloomberg, GlobeNewswire.
Inertia developed its fuel pellet manufacturing process with help from NIF at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under a public-private partnership announced earlier TechCrunch, Inertia/LLNL. The company plans to use a laser four times more powerful than the one currently at NIF TechCrunch.
Beyond speed, the shorter filling time reduces the amount of tritium Inertia needs to hold at any given moment. Tritium is scarce, radioactive, and tightly regulated. Cutting the inventory on hand during manufacturing eases a real operational and regulatory constraint, not just a throughput one. Inertia says it has now knocked down one of ten barriers it must overcome to deliver the first phase of its commercial power plant ambitions TechCrunch.
The framing of "ten barriers" is worth pausing on. Inertia has identified a set of engineering and physics challenges between where NIF stands today and a working commercial plant, and it is checking them off one at a time. Fuel pellet manufacturing is one. The laser system, presumably, is another. Each barrier solved is necessary but not sufficient: a commercial fusion plant requires not just achieving fusion once but doing it repeatedly, injecting new pellets continuously, keeping the reaction chamber intact, producing more fuel as it is consumed, and generating more electricity than the whole system uses. Solving pellet production in hours rather than weeks addresses just the supply-chain piece of that puzzle. It does not address energy output, chamber durability, or the economics of shooting hundreds of pellets per day with a laser that does not yet exist.
The broader context is that turning fusion into a practical energy source has always faced two problems: getting the physics of ignition to work, which NIF did, and engineering a system to do it repeatedly and cheaply. NIF's pellets are essentially hand-crafted, each taking a week or more and costing what TechCrunch describes as "a small fortune." A commercial plant would need to consume pellets at a rate of several per minute. Even at Inertia's improved two-to-three-hour cycle, the gap between current throughput and commercial-scale demand remains wide. The company's claim that the process "can be ramped to industrial scale" is a forward-looking assertion, not a demonstrated capability.
What Inertia has done is take a process that was slow, lab-bound, and done essentially by hand, and compress it by roughly a hundredfold on the time axis. That is a genuine engineering achievement. Whether it translates into a viable pellet supply chain depends on data the company has not yet disclosed: how many pellets come out with defects when production scales up, whether the rapidly grown crystals stay uniform, and what the overall yield looks like when the process moves from a workbench to a factory floor. For now, Inertia has reduced a hard problem to a more tractable one, and has identified nine more it still needs to solve.
