Fusion startups have a troublesome row to hoe. Their mission? To create a brand new type of energy plant that produces extra vitality than it consumes — one thing nobody has ever accomplished with fusion vitality earlier than. Meaning proving their know-how works, displaying it may be scaled up, and convincing traders it could all be accomplished profitably. That’s already a tall order. However there’s one other massive problem that will get far much less consideration: the place to get the gasoline.
Most fusion startups will say that they’ll be producing their very own gasoline, thanks very a lot. And technically, they’re proper. However that reply glosses over a key level: to make tritium — one of many key elements for fusion — they first want a particular isotope of lithium, one which’s in very brief provide right this moment.
That thought dawned on Charlie Jerrott a couple of years in the past when he was working at fusion startup Targeted Power.
“I spotted nobody is engaged on this provide chain stuff. There’s an entire bunch of fusion corporations. There isn’t a single firm that’s going to make the gasoline for these corporations,” he advised TechCrunch.
So Jerrott and his Targeted Power colleague Jacob Peterson determined to set off on their very own, founding Hexium with a watch towards fixing fusion’s future gasoline issues.
Hexium, which has been working in stealth, emerged on Tuesday with $8 million in seed funding, the corporate completely advised TechCrunch. MaC Enterprise Capital and Refactor led the spherical, with Humba Ventures, Julian Capital, Overture VC, and R7 Companions collaborating.
Hexium’s key know-how makes use of a decades-old methodology that makes use of lasers to separate isotopes of lithium. Atomic vapor laser isotope separation (AVLIS) was perfected by the Division of Power within the Eighties to type uranium isotopes. However after spending $2 billion getting AVLIS prepared to provide uranium for nuclear energy crops, the Chilly Warfare ended and hundreds of tons of nuclear gasoline flooded the market by means of old Soviet weapons-grade uranium.
Consequently, AVLIS sat kind of unused till a couple of years in the past, when Hexium picked up the know-how and tweaked it to type lithium isotopes.
To try this, the startup will use lasers that may be tuned with picometer precision. Those that Hexium will use are comparatively low energy — “we’re speaking tattoo removing vitality,” Peterson stated — however their precision permits them to work together with a particular lithium isotope.
Like most parts, lithium isn’t only one configuration of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Within the wild, there are two steady isotopes: lithium-6, which has three protons, three neutrons, and three electrons; and lithium-7, which has an extra neutron. Every isotope has its personal signature, so to talk, that’s expressed as a wave perform. Consider it like how totally different individuals’s voices produce totally different waves when visualized on a pc. Hexium tunes its lasers to work together with lithium-6’s wave perform alone.
“It’ll simply blow proper by a lithium-7 atom. It’ll go unnoticed,” Jerrott stated.
To separate lithium-6 from lithium-7, the corporate will shine its lasers into vaporized clouds of the steel. When the laser hits a lithium-6 atom, it’ll turn into ionized. The ionized atom will then be drawn to an electrically charged plate the place it’s going to condense right into a liquid and run down right into a trough, like beads of water on the surface of an icy glass.
Hexium can then package deal the lithium-6 and promote it to fusion corporations, which is able to use the steel to each breed tritium gasoline and shield their pilot and business reactors from dangerous radiation. As for the remaining lithium-7? It’ll get bought to operators of standard nuclear reactors, which use that isotope as a protecting additive in cooling water.
Over the approaching yr, Hexium might be utilizing its seed funding to construct and run a pilot plant. If all goes nicely, Hexium will replicate that design in modular style to provide wherever from tens to lots of of kilograms of lithium-6.
“We don’t should construct a facility the scale of a Costco or a soccer stadium,” Jacobson stated. “We are able to do it in a facility the scale of a Starbucks, and we obtain good economics at very small scale, after which we simply parallelize our course of.”