Licube, a startup presenting at TechCrunch Disrupt, is positioning itself as a fuel supplier for a future fusion industry. Fusion reactors are expected to run on deuterium and tritium, but tritium is extremely scarce. The planned workaround is to breed tritium inside the plant by surrounding the reactor with lithium; when neutrons hit lithium-6, it splits into helium and tritium. Natural lithium is only about 7.5% lithium-6, and separating it from lithium-7 is difficult and currently done at limited scale.
Licube has licensed an electrolyzer-based method from Hirosaki University that uses a ceramic membrane and electrical current to pull lithium-6 through faster than lithium-7. The company aims to enrich lithium to at least 99.995% lithium-6. CEO Yohei Kiguchi told TechCrunch that if fusion comes online, this could be a $50 billion market by 2040. But he acknowledges fusion may be delayed, so Licube plans to sell the same purified lithium to semiconductor, pharmaceutical, fission reactor, and spacecraft industries in the meantime.
Kiguchi says he was inspired after visiting ITER, the experimental fusion reactor in France, and came out of retirement from his previous energy-switching company Enechange. Licube is one of 20 startups in the Startup Battlefield pitch competition at Disrupt. The report is based solely on TechCrunch's coverage; no other sources were provided for comparison.