First trade show, with CEO John Elling, and now, a fun news story opening of how my partner Maryanna Saenko pursued them: "’I’ve been an entrepreneur for 28 years, and it’s the first time I’ve ever had a cold call from a VC,’ Elling told me. ‘So I answer the email and darn if they don’t invest in us.’
This isn’t Elling’s first startup rodeo. A former scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, he left in 1998 and embarked on a string of ventures to commercialize technologies rooted in the lab’s research. Molten Salt Solutions, which he founded in 2018, also built upon breakthroughs in the lab in pursuit of producing lithium-6 for the fusion industry [for tritium breeding] and lithium-7 for next-generation molten salt fission reactors, where the isotope is a critical component of the reactor’s coolant."
"Assuming both fusion and next-generation fission reactors do eventually take off, the market opportunity for Molten Salt Solutions’ humble isotopes is enormous, as securing a cheap supply of these materials could materially lower the cost of building reactors. “It’s one of those marquee problems that you can work on in your scientific career,” Elling told me. “Because you look down the road and you go, you know, we could actually change the price of energy on the globe.”"— today’s news
The challenge is that lithium naturally occurs in a mix of two isotopes which differ by the presence of an extra neutron in lithium-7. So they are very hard to separate, and thus very hard to enrich to high purity. It used to take rooms full of equipment. The company’s technology was developed at Los Alamos National Labs, a liquid-liquid separation method using high-speed counter-current chromatography.
Now hiring for engineers: www.MoltenSaltSolutions.com
In systems like Commonwealth Fusion’s design, fusion occurs inside a magnetically confined vacuum vessel. Most reactor designs plan to use a FLiBe (Flouride-Lithium- Beryllium) molten salt to absorb hot neutron flux, limiting damage to the vacuum vessel and adjacent components. Natural Lithium contains ~7.5% Lithium-6 (Li-6), which absorbs neutrons, producing tritium. Increasing the percentage of Li-6 is necessary to limit the damage high-energy particles might cause and promote tritium breeding for a cost-effective commercial reactor.
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