THE CRUNCH
Licube, a startup pitching at TechCrunch Disrupt's Startup Battlefield, wants to supply the fuel that fusion power plants would need. It has licensed technology from Japan's Hirosaki University to purify lithium-6, an isotope that makes up only about 7.5% of natural lithium but is far better at producing tritium, the scarce fuel most planned fusion plants would rely on.
The plan hinges on how fusion plants would make their own fuel. Tritium is extremely rare in nature, so startups plan to surround reactors with a lithium blanket: when neutrons from the fusion reaction strike lithium atoms, the atoms split into helium and tritium, which can be collected and fed back into the reactor. Lithium-6 does this job much better than the more common lithium-7, but separating the two is difficult and there is little capacity to do it today.
Licube's approach uses an electrolyzer, a device that drives chemical reactions with electrical current. Lithium is dissolved in a liquid on one side of a ceramic membrane, and as current flows across, lithium-6 moves faster, allowing it to be drawn off and separated. The company aims to enrich lithium to at least 99.995% lithium-6.
Co-founder and CEO Yohei Kiguchi told TechCrunch that if fusion comes online, the market should be worth $50 billion by 2040. He acknowledged fusion startups are still years from their first power plants, so Licube plans to use the same purification technology in the meantime for lithium used in semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, fission reactors and spacecraft. Kiguchi, a former energy executive who founded the company after visiting the ITER reactor in France, said he realised he was "too young to retire."