Short answer: By boiling water, making steam that spins a turbine. Longer answer: Fusion creates heat inside the target chamber. The walls of the target chamber are flowing with liquid lithium. Not only does the lithium breed tritium, one of our fuel sources (see “Where will you get tritium?”) but it also carries away the heat produced by the fusion reaction. The heat in the lithium will go through a heat exchanger, transferring the heat to water which boils. The steam then spins a turbine, creating electricity.

Inertia’s strategy is to take the most direct, lowest risk path from what is working today at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) to commercial energy. This is the same process that coal, natural gas, and fission have used to create electricity for the past 150 years, and thus it is well understood and easily deployed. The downside is that the process of thermal to electrical conversion loses roughly 50% of the energy produced. Luckily though, our fusion power plant design creates more than enough energy to compensate for this loss, while still providing abundant, cheap, clean and safe electricity.

Additionally, excess heat can be used to efficiently drive industrial processes. We can produce very high temperatures that can be used to produce everything from fertilizer to green hydrogen, synthetic fuels, water desalination, specialty chemicals and materials, and cement.