If fusion power pans out, and there are signs that it will, the world will need a lot more lithium.
That’s the bet 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 own fuel, out of naturally occurring lithium.
The reason comes down to the fuel supply. A lot of things have to go right for fusion power to hit the grid, and one of them is the fuel. Most planned plants would run on a mix of two fuels, deuterium and tritium. Deuterium is easy to come by, 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 every planned plant.
