Fusion startup Inertia Enterprises has developed a faster way to manufacture fuel pellets, shortening production from several days at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) to minutes for one key step and two to three hours for a complete pellet. The company says the advance removes one of the ten barriers on its path to a first-phase commercial power plant and is based on work originally done at NIF, the elaborate laser facility at Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

NIF’s fuel pellets are time-consuming to make: a spherical diamond shell holds a thin frozen layer of deuterium and tritium, and inside that lies gaseous deuterium and tritium. Every layer must be nearly perfectly spherical because small imperfections can disrupt ignition. NIF may produce only a handful of pellets a year, which is appropriate for a science experiment but not for a business. Inertia co-founder and CEO Jeff Lawson described this as the difference between prototypes and mass manufacturing, and said the company is hiring industrial engineers, including people from Apple, to solve factory-scale production.

Inertia’s approach is built around a laser that will be roughly four times more powerful than the one at NIF, which gives the system more margin for imperfections in the pellet. With that margin, the startup could speed up crystal growth from what can take a week at NIF to about 30 minutes, and a full fuel pellet can be made in two to three hours with room to scale industrially. The startup worked with NIF as part of a public-private partnership, and it is led by co-founder and chief scientist Annie Kritcher, who designed the first NIF experiment that released more power than consumed.

A faster fuel-making process also shrinks the amount of tritium Inertia must keep on hand. Tritium is radioactive, expensive, and globally scarce: about $30,000 per gram, with roughly 25 kilograms stockpiled worldwide, according to the journal Science. Like many fusion companies, Inertia plans to eventually breed its own tritium using the fusion reactions, but it needs initial inventory. Lawson said reducing this latency makes the facility smaller, faster, and more efficient overall. Inertia expects its full-scale commercial power plant to use ten fuel pellets every second.