Fusion Fuel Lithium Enrichment

Licube licensed technology from Hirosaki University in Japan to purify lithium-6; lithium fusion plants need to make their own fuel. Most planned plants would run on deuterium and tritium, but tritium is too rare to supply every plant, so reactors would breed it by surrounding the core with a lithium blanket.

Lithium-6 captures neutrons far better than lithium-7 but makes up only about 7.5% of natural lithium, and little separation capacity exists today. Licube's electrolyzer dissolves lithium in liquid on one side of a ceramic membrane, where lithium-6 moves faster under electric current, targeting at least 99.995% enrichment.

While the concept of fusion remains years away in a scalable sense, Licube plans to serve semiconductor, pharmaceutical, fission, and spacecraft customers, signaling how enrichment suppliers could earn revenue while positioning for fusion demand.