Fusion power has a fuel problem; Hexium has a laser-powered solution

Summary

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 — 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’s already a tall order. But there’s another big challenge that gets far less attention: where to get the fuel. Most fusion startups will say that they’ll be producing their own fuel, thank you very much. And technically, they’re right. But that answer glosses over a key point: to make tritium — one of the key ingredients for fusion — they first need a specific isotope of lithium, one that’s in very short supply today. That thought dawned on Charlie Jerrott a few years ago when he was working at fusion startup Focused Energy. “I realized no one is working on this supply chain stuff. There’s a whole bunch of fusion companies. There isn’t a single company that is going to make the fuel for those companies,” he told TechCrunch. So Jerrott and his Focused Energy colleague Jacob Peterson decided to set off on their own, founding Hexium with an eye toward solving fusion’s future fuel problems. 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. Hexium’s 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. As a result, AVLIS sat more or less unused until a few years ag...