Licube, a startup that has licensed technology from Hirosaki University in Japan, is preparing to supply lithium-6 for the fusion power industry. The company purifies lithium-6, the form of lithium that fusion plants need to make their own fuel, out of naturally occurring lithium.
Most planned fusion plants would run on a mix of deuterium and tritium. Deuterium is easy to come by, but tritium is extremely rare in nature, and there is not enough of it to power every planned plant. The proposed workaround is to make tritium on site: a fusion reaction gives off neutrons, and startups plan to surround the reactor with a blanket of lithium so that when a neutron strikes a lithium atom, the atom splits into helium and tritium.
Not all lithium does this job equally well. Lithium-6 is far better at capturing neutrons and producing tritium, but it makes up only about 7.5% of natural lithium, with the rest being the heavier lithium-7. Separating the two is difficult, and there is little capacity to do it today.
Licube sees a big market in solving that problem. “If fusion comes online, it should be a $50 billion market by 2040,” Yohei Kiguchi, co-founder and CEO of Licube, told TechCrunch. Kiguchi also said: “Fusion is the biggest market in the future, but we also understand the future might be late by a few years.”
Until fusion becomes a major market, Licube plans to use the same technology to purify lithium for use in semiconductor, pharmaceutical, fission reactors, and spacecraft industries. The core technology is based on the electrolyzer, a device that uses electrical current to drive chemical reactions. In Licube’s case, lithium is dissolved in a liquid on one side of a ceramic membrane; as electrical current flows across the membrane, lithium-6 moves faster, and Licube can draw off that liquid and separate the lithium-6. The goal is to enrich the lithium to at least 99.995% lithium-6.
Licube is one of 20 startups presenting on stage Tuesday at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco as part of the Startup Battlefield pitch competition. Kiguchi was inspired to start Licube after visiting ITER, the experimental fusion reactor being built in the south of France. He said he was living a couple of hours’ drive away in Monaco after retiring from his previous company, Enechange, an energy-switching platform network in Japan. “I found out that I was too young to retire,” he said. “I’m an energy guy. I want to do something bigger.”