The Inertial-Confinement Approach

Compressing fuel with lasers or beams — a pulsed alternative to magnetic confinement.

Type

Pulsed

Milestone

NIF target gain, 2022

Inertial confinement (e.g. the public NIF facility, which achieved target energy gain in 2022) compresses fuel pellets to fuse under their own inertia. It is a fundamentally pulsed approach with different engineering challenges — driver efficiency and repetition rate — from magnetic confinement.

Kronos uses magnetic confinement, a continuous rather than pulsed route to a power plant.