Fusion startups have a difficult row to hoe.
Their objective? To create a new type of power plant that produces more energy than it takes in something nobody has actually ever made with blend energy before.
That implies proving their innovation works, revealing it can be scaled up, and convincing investors it can all be done beneficially.
Thats currently a tall order.
But theres another huge difficulty that gets far less attention: where to get the fuel.Most blend start-ups will say that theyll be producing their own fuel, thank you quite.
And technically, theyre.
That response glosses over an essential point: to make tritium one of the key active ingredients for blend they initially need a specific isotope of lithium, one thats in really short supply today.That thought dawned on Charlie Jarrott a couple of years ago when he was working at fusion start-up Focused Energy.I understood no one is working on this supply chain stuff.
Theres a whole bunch of blend companies.
There isnt a single company that is going to make the fuel for those business, he told A Technology NewsRoom.So Jarrott and his Focused Energy coworker Jacob Peterson chose to set off on their own, founding Hexium with an eye towards fixing blends future fuel problems.Hexium, which has been operating in stealth, emerged on Tuesday with $9.5 million in seed funding and $2.5 million in a credit facility, the company solely told A Technology NewsRoom.
MaC Venture Capital and Refactor led the round, with Humba Ventures, Julian Capital, Overture VC, and R7 Partners participating.Hexiums essential technology utilizes a decades-old technique that uses lasers to separate isotopes of lithium.
Atomic vapor laser isotope separation (AVLIS) was perfected by the Department of Energy in the 1980s to arrange uranium isotopes.
However after investing $2 billion getting AVLIS all set to produce uranium for nuclear reactor, the Cold War ended and countless tons of nuclear fuel flooded the market by way of old Soviet weapons-grade uranium.As an outcome, AVLIS sat more or less unused until a few years ago, when Hexium got the innovation and modified it to arrange lithium isotopes.To do that, the start-up will utilize lasers that can be tuned with picometer precision.
The ones that Hexium will utilize are relatively low power were talking tattoo elimination energy, Peterson stated however their precision allows them to connect with a specific lithium isotope.Like most components, lithium isnt just one setup of protons, neutrons, and electrons.
In the wild, there are 2 stable isotopes: lithium-6, which has three protons, three neutrons, and three electrons; and lithium-7, which has an extra neutron.
Each isotope has its own signature, so to speak, thats expressed as a wave function.
Think of it like how different peoples voices produce different waves when visualized on a computer.
Hexium tunes its lasers to interact with lithium-6s wave function alone.Itll simply blow right by a lithium-7 atom.
Itll go undetected, Jarrott said.To different lithium-6 from lithium-7, the company will shine its lasers into vaporized clouds of the metal.
When the laser strikes a lithium-6 atom, itll end up being ionized.
The ionized atom will then be drawn to an electrically charged plate where it will condense into a liquid and diminish into a trough, like beads of water on the outside of an icy glass.Hexium can then package the lithium-6 and sell it to blend companies, which will utilize the metal to both breed tritium fuel and safeguard their pilot and business reactors from harmful radiation.
When it comes to the staying lithium-7? Itll get sold to operators of conventional nuclear reactors, which utilize that isotope as a protective additive in cooling water.Over the coming year, Hexium will be using its seed funding to construct and run a pilot plant.
If all works out, Hexium will duplicate that style in modular fashion to produce anywhere from tens to numerous kilograms of lithium-6.
We dont need to construct a center the size of a Costco or a football stadium, Peterson said.
We can do it in a facility the size of a Starbucks, and we attain great economics at really little scale, and after that we just parallelize our process.Update: Included extra details on seed financing.