The force of integration has a fuel problem; Hexium has a laser solution

Emerging fusion companies have a difficult row to a shovel. Their mission? To create a new type of power plant that produces more energy than consuming – something no one has done with Fusion Energy before. This means proving their technological works, which indicates that its scope can be expanded, and to persuade investors all can be done in a profitable way. This is already a long arrangement. But there is another big challenge that receives much less attention: where do you get fuel.

most Emerging fusion companies He will say they will produce their fuel, thank you very much. Technically, they are right. But this answer shines on a major point: to make tritium – one of the main components of fusion – they first need a specific counterpart of lithium, which is in a very large number of the show today.

The thought emerged on Charlie Gereot a few years ago when he worked for the energy -focused Fusion Startup company.

“I realized that no one is working on these things in the supply chain. There is a full set of integration companies. There is no single company that will make fuel for those companies.”

Therefore, Girut and his energy colleague Jacob Peterson decided to start alone, and establish them Hexium With the eye towards solving future fuel problems for Fusion.

Hexium, which was working in Stelth, appeared on Tuesday with $ 8 million in seed financing. Mac Venture Capital and Refactor led the tour, with Humba Ventures, Julian Capital, OverTure VC and R7 partners.

The main technology in Hexium uses a method that belongs to contracts that use lasers to separate lithium isotopes. The Ministry of Energy was mastered in the 1980s to sort uranium isotopes by the Ministry of Energy in the 1980s to sort uranium isotopes. But after spending $ 2 billion on AVLIS ready to produce uranium for nuclear power plants, the Cold War ended and thousands of tons of nuclear fuel ended to the market by Old Soviet weapons.

As a result, Avlis sat more or less unused even a few years ago, when Hexium picked up the technology and modified it to sort the lithium analogues.

To do this, you will use the start -up starting to be set with a picometer. Peterson said that the HEXIUM will use is a relatively low force – “We are talking about tattoo removal energy”, but its accuracy allows them to interact with a specific lithium counterpart.

Like most elements, lithium is not just one composition of protons, neutrons and electrons. In the wild, there are two stable analogues: lithium 6, which contains three protons, three neutrons and three electrons; Lythium 7, which contains additional neutron. Each counterpart has its own signature, so to speak, it is expressed as a wave function. Think of it like how different people’s voices produce different waves when you imagine on the computer. Hexium suffers from laser to interact with the function of the Lithium 6 wavelery alone.

Girut said: “It will explode directly to the seed of Lithium 7.

To separate lithium 6 from lithium 7, the company will disturb the laser in the evaporated withdrawal of the metal. When the laser strikes a legenum 6 atom, it will become a supple. After that, the ionic corn will be pulled into an electric charged plate where it will condense in liquid and wander in a basin, such as water beads on the external surface of a ice cup.

Hexium can then fill lithium 6 and sell it to integration companies, which will use the metal to form tritium fuel and protect their experimental and commercial reactors from harmful radiation. As for the remaining lehium 7? It will be sold to traditional nuclear reactors operators, which use this counterpart as a preventive additive in cooling water.

Next year, Hexium will use seeds financing to build and operate a pilot factory. If things go well, Hexium will repeat this design in a normative way to produce any place from dozens to hundreds of kilograms of lithium 6.

“We should not build a Costco or the football field,” said Jacobson. “We can do this in a Starbucks size facility, and we achieve good economies on a very small scale, then we are parallel to our process.”