Inertial Confinement

Compressing fuel so fast it fuses before it can fly apart; the alternative to magnetic confinement.

Inertial confinement fusion compresses a fuel pellet with lasers or ion beams until it briefly fuses under its own inertia. It is the approach used at the National Ignition Facility. Kronos uses magnetic confinement, a continuous rather than pulsed approach.

Inertial confinement takes the opposite approach to Kronos: instead of holding a diffuse plasma steadily, it compresses a tiny fuel pellet so violently that it fuses in nanoseconds before flying apart. NIF's 2022 target gain proved the principle, but the driver efficiency and repetition rate needed for a power plant are very different engineering problems from continuous magnetic confinement.