Licube Aims to Become Fuel Supplier for Fusion Power Industry — See How It Works at TechCrunch Disrupt
Fusion power plants require huge amounts of lithium, and Licube is preparing to become a key supplier.
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If fusion power goes out, and there are signs it will, the world will need a lot more lithium.
That's the premise behind Licube, a startup that has licensed technology from Hirosaki University in Japan to purify lithium-6, the form of lithium that fusion plants need to make their fuel from natural lithium.
The reason is related to fuel supply. Many things have to go right for fusion power to reach the grid, and one of them is fuel. Most of the planned power plants operate with a combination of two fuels, deuterium and tritium. Deuterium is easy to find, but tritium is extremely rare in nature, and it's an open secret in the fusion world that there isn't enough of it to power any planned plant.
The proposed solution is to manufacture the tritium on site, inside the power plant itself. A fusion reaction produces a stream of fast particles called neutrons. Startups plan to surround the reactor with a coating of lithium, so that when a neutron hits a lithium atom, the atom splits into helium and tritium. The tritium can then be collected, purified and returned to the reactor as fuel.
Not all lithiums do this equally well. It exists in two slightly different forms, lithium-6 and lithium-7, named for their weight. Lithium-6 is far better at capturing neutrons and producing tritium, but it only makes up about 7.5% of natural lithium, the rest being heavier lithium-7. Separating the two is difficult, and there is little capacity to do so today, so the world does not have enough lithium-6 either.
Licube sees a huge market for solving this problem. “If fusion goes online, it should become a $50 billion market by 2040,” Licube co-founder and CEO Yohei Kiguchi told TechCrunch.
Licube is one of 20 startups pitching at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on Tuesday as part of the Startup Battlefield Pitch competition.
While fusion has the potential to capture a significant portion of the multi-trillion dollar energy market, fusion startups are still years away from building their first power plants.
"Fusion is the biggest market in the future, but we also know that the future may be a few years late," said Di Quigucci.
Until fusion becomes a big market, Licube plans to use the same technology to refine lithium for use in the semiconductor, pharmaceutical, fission reactor and spacecraft industries.
The core technology is based on electrolysis, a device that uses electric current to drive chemical reactions. In the case of Licube, lithium is dissolved in a liquid on one side of a ceramic membrane. As the electrical current flows from one side of the membrane to the other, the lithium-6 moves faster. Lycob can then draw out that liquid and isolate the lithium-6.
Aim to enrich stellite to at least 99.995% lithium-6. Fusion companies can feed highly enriched lithium into their fuel production systems.
Di Quigucci was inspired to launch Licube after visiting ITER, an experimental fusion reactor being built in southern France. After retiring from his previous company, Enechange, an energy switching platform network in Japan, he lives a few hours' drive away in Monaco, he said.
"I realized I was too young to retire," he said. "I'm an energy guy. I want to do something bigger."
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Tim de Chant is a senior weather reporter at TechCrunch. He has written for a wide range of publications, including Wired magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Ars Technica, The Wire China, and NOVA Next, for which he is editor.
De Chant also teaches at MIT's Graduate Program in Science Writing, and was awarded a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT in 2018, during which he studied climate technologies and explored new business models for journalism. He received his PhD in environmental science, policy and management from the University of California, Berkeley, and his BA in environmental studies, English and biology from St. Olaf College.
You can contact or confirm with Tim by emailing him at [email protected].
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