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Fusion startups have a tough row to hoe. Their mission? To create a new kind of power plant that produces more energy than it consumes \u2014 something no one has ever done with fusion energy before. That means proving their technology works, showing it can be scaled up, and convincing investors it can all be done profitably. That\u2019s already a tall order. But there\u2019s another big challenge that gets far less attention: where to get the fuel.<\/p>\n
Most fusion startups<\/a> will say that they\u2019ll be producing their own fuel, thank you very much. And technically, they\u2019re right. But that answer glosses over a key point: to make tritium \u2014 one of the key ingredients for fusion \u2014 they first need a specific isotope of lithium, one that\u2019s in very short supply today.<\/p>\n That thought dawned on Charlie Jerrott a few years ago when he was working at fusion startup Focused Energy.<\/p>\n \u201cI realized no one is working on this supply chain stuff. There\u2019s a whole bunch of fusion companies. There isn\u2019t a single company that is going to make the fuel for those companies,\u201d he told TechCrunch.<\/p>\n So Jerrott and his Focused Energy colleague Jacob Peterson decided to set off on their own, founding Hexium<\/a> with an eye toward solving fusion\u2019s future fuel problems.\u00a0<\/p>\n Hexium, which has been operating in stealth, emerged on Tuesday with $8 million in seed funding, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. MaC Venture Capital and Refactor led the round, with Humba Ventures, Julian Capital, Overture VC, and R7 Partners participating.<\/p>\n Hexium\u2019s key technology uses a decades-old method 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 sort uranium isotopes. But after spending $2 billion getting AVLIS ready to produce uranium for nuclear power plants, the Cold War ended and thousands of tons of nuclear fuel flooded the market by way of old Soviet weapons-grade uranium<\/a>.<\/p>\n As a result, AVLIS sat more or less unused until a few years ago, when Hexium picked up the technology and tweaked it to sort lithium isotopes.<\/p>\n To do that, the startup will use lasers that can be tuned with picometer precision. The ones that Hexium will use are relatively low power \u2014\u00a0\u201cwe\u2019re talking tattoo removal energy,\u201d Peterson said \u2014 but their precision allows them to interact with a specific lithium isotope.<\/p>\n Like most elements, lithium isn\u2019t just one configuration of protons, neutrons, and electrons. In the wild, there are two stable isotopes: lithium-6, which has three protons, three neutrons, and three electrons; and lithium-7, which has an additional neutron. Each isotope has its own signature, so to speak, that\u2019s expressed as a wave function. Think of it like how different people\u2019s voices produce different waves when visualized on a computer. Hexium tunes its lasers to interact with lithium-6\u2019s wave function alone.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019ll just blow right by a lithium-7 atom. It\u2019ll go unnoticed,\u201d Jerrott said.<\/p>\n To separate lithium-6 from lithium-7, the company will shine its lasers into vaporized clouds of the metal. When the laser hits a lithium-6 atom, it\u2019ll become ionized. The ionized atom will then be drawn to an electrically charged plate where it will condense into a liquid and run down into a trough, like beads of water on the outside of an icy glass.<\/p>\n Hexium can then package the lithium-6 and sell it to fusion companies, which will use the metal to both breed tritium fuel and protect their pilot and commercial reactors from harmful radiation. As for the remaining lithium-7? It\u2019ll get sold to operators of conventional nuclear reactors, which use that isotope as a protective additive in cooling water.<\/p>\n Over the coming year, Hexium will be using its seed funding to build and run a pilot plant. If all goes well, Hexium will replicate that design in modular fashion to produce anywhere from tens to hundreds of kilograms of lithium-6.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t have to build a facility the size of a Costco or a football stadium,\u201d Jacobson said. \u201cWe can do it in a facility the size of a Starbucks, and we achieve good economics at very small scale, and then we just parallelize our process.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n