Fusion startups have a difficult row to hoe. Their mission? To create a new type of power plant that produces more energy than it consumes – something that no one has ever done with Fusion Energy. This means that the evidence of their technology works, which shows that it can be scaled up and investors can convince that it can all be made profitable. That is already quite a challenge. But there is still a big challenge that gets much less attention: where the fuel gets.
Most merger startups will say that they will produce their own fuel, thank you very much. And technically they are right. But that answer obscures an important point: to make tritium – one of the most important ingredients for merger – they first need a specific isotope of lithium, one that is in very shorts today.
A few years ago that thought urged Charlie Jerrott when he worked at Fusion Startup Focused Energy.
“I realized that nobody is working on these supply chain things. There are a whole series of merger companies. There is no company that will make the fuel for those companies,” he told Techcrunch.
So Jerrott and his targeted energy colleague Jacob Peterson decided to leave, founded Hexium With a view to solving Fusion’s future fuel problems.
Hexium, which operated in Stealth, came up with $ 8 million in seed financing on Tuesday, the company told Techcrunch exclusively. Mac Venture Capital and Refactor De Ronde led, with Humba Ventures, Julian Capital, Overture VC and R7 partners who participated.
The most important technology of hexium uses a decades of old method that lasers uses to separate lithium isotopes. Atomic Damp Laser Isotope separation (Avlis) was perfected by the Ministry of Energy in the 1980s to sort uraniumisotopes. But after having spent $ 2 billion to prepare Avlis to produce uranium for nuclear power plants, the Cold War and flooded thousands of tons of nuclear fuel through the market through Old Soviet Weapon-Quality Uranium.
As a result, Avlis was more or less unused until a few years ago, when hexium picked up the technology and adapted to sort lithiumisotopes.
To do that, the startup will use lasers that can be tailored to Piccometer precision. Those who will use hexium are relatively low power – “We are talking about tattoo removal energy,” Peterson said – but their precision enables them to communicate with a specific lithiumisotope.
Like most elements, lithium is not just one configuration of protons, neutrons and electrons. In the wild there are two stable isotopes: Lithium-6, with three protons, three neutrons and three electrons; And Lithium-7, which has an extra neutron. Each isotope has its own signature, so to speak, that is expressed as a wave function. See it like how different voices of people produce different waves when they are visualized on a computer. Hexium coordinates his lasers to only communicate with the wave function of Lithium-6.
“It just blows straight through a lithium-7 atom. It will go unnoticed,” said Jerrott.
To separate lithium-6 from Lithium-7, the company will shine its lasers in evaporated clouds of the metal. When the laser touches a lithium-6 atom, it is ionized. The ionized atom will then be drawn to an electrically charged plate where it will condense in a liquid and run down in a trough, such as water poles on the outside of an icy glass.
Hexium can then pack the lithium-6 packaging and selling to merged companies, which will use the metal to breed both tritium fuel and to protect their pilot and commercial reactors against harmful radiation. Regarding the remaining Lithium-7? It is sold to operators of conventional nuclear reactors, which use that isotope as a protective additive in cooling water.
In the coming year, Hexium will use its seed financing to build and run a pilot factory. If all goes well, Hexium will replicate that design in a modular way to produce everywhere from dozens to hundreds of kilograms of lithium-6.
“We don’t have to build a facility the size of a costco or a football stadium,” said Jacobson. “We can do it in a facility the size of a Starbucks, and we achieve a good economy on a very small scale, and then we simply parallel our process.”