Texas researchers have discovered a non-toxic way to make nuclear-fusion fuel

The promise of converging energy is cheap and rich power for the entire planet. Scientists have made shocking progress in achieving it at scale, but there are still many problems that prevent it. One of them is the production of fuel, which requires a large amount of enriched lithium. Rich lithium has been an environmental disaster, but Texas researchers believe they have found a way to do it at a cheap price without toxic to the world.

A team of researchers at A&M University in Texas stumbled upon the new process while using a method to clean groundwater contaminated during oil and gas extraction. The study, just published in the Journal of Science, chemistry, is titled “Electrochemical 6-lithium isotope enrichment based on selective insertion of 1D tunnel structured V2O5”.

The impact of research on nuclear fusion can be enormous. “Nuclear fusion is the primary energy source emitted by stars such as the sun,” Zurich and Texas A&M professor and researcher, and one of the authors of the paper, told Gizmodo. The easiest way to fusion on Earth rather than space involves triworms and deuterium isotopes. Tritium is rare and radioactive, so the reactor is currently “breeding” on demand to generate energy.

They reproduce tries by bombarding lithium isotopes with neutrons. Most lithium (more than 90%) on Earth is lithium 7. Propagation Tritium works more effectively with Ultra-Rare Lithium-6. “When using the most common lithium isotopes, tirium is much less efficient when using 7Li compared to 6LI,” Banerjee said. “So modern reactor designs are based on breeding blankets with 6LI isotopes that must be extracted specifically from natural lithium.”

You can turn a naturally rich mixture of lithium isotopes into lithium 6, “enriching” it, but the process is a toxic nightmare. “From 1955 to 1963, the U.S. produced 6LI for thermonuclear weapons applications at the Y12 plant at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, taking advantage of slightly different solubility of 6LI and 7LI isotopes in liquid mercury,” Banerjee said. “This is going well.”

“About 330 tons of mercury were released into the waterway, and the process was closed in 1963 due to environmental concerns,” he said. Mercury is a toxic nightmare that is difficult to clean up. Sixty years later, the heavy metals in the process of extracting lithium 6 from naturally abundant mixtures are still replacing Tennessee. Cleaning up the remnants of the environmental disaster is a major project for Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s current residents.

In a different project, the team at Texas A&M developed a compound called Zeta-V2O5, which is used to clean groundwater. When it transports water through this membrane, it notices something strange: it's really good at isolating lithium 6. The team decided to see if lithium 6 can be harvested from a lithium isotope mixture without mercury.

It works.

“Our method employs the basic working principle of lithium-ion batteries and desalination technology,” Banerjee said. “We insert lithium ions from the water flow inside the one-dimensional tunnel of Zeta-V2O5… Our selective Li Sponge has a subtle but important preference for 6LI than 7LI, which makes for a safer process where lithium can be extracted from water by isotope selectively.”

Banerjee This could lead to large-scale changes in fuel development for fusion generators. It does not require a lot of redesign of existing reactors. “Our work outlines ways to overcome the critical supply chain problems of convergence. But, to be clear, we have not redesigned the actual reactors (Tokamaks or Stellarators), despite the recent great excitement for new innovations and designs in plasma physics.”

Many people are merging is the path to cheap and rich energy. I have heard all my life that it will make it a breakthrough “round the corner” that will be true. It's always been a joke. Just last year, an announcement from atomic scientists asked whether fusion could be “eternal energy.”

But Banerjee is full of hope. “Despite the incredible challenges, the awards for fusion are too big to give up,” he said. “The transformative potential is already obvious, but engineering design, materials science for extreme environments, and understanding of the complexity of plasma processes only lists a few gaps. There are huge differences in global competition and billions of dollars in private and public investments – although still not sure, there are still signs of realistic fusion in two or three twelve-year-olds fusions.”