Episode 137: The Missing Ingredient for Fusion Energy

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds tackling the climate crisis head on. I'm Molly Wood.

This week, let's talk about nuclear. So far on this show, I have mostly talked about fusion energy, the holy grail, but there is a lot happening right now in advanced fission, including new designs that aim to be safer, smaller, and easier to deploy.

But both fusion energy and next-generation nuclear fission share a very real problem. They need materials that, I have recently learned, do not yet exist at meaningful commercial scale, specifically enriched lithium isotopes. But don't worry, this week's guest is on it.

Dr. John Elling was a chemist at Los Alamos National Laboratory for years, but being blessed or cursed with an entrepreneurial spirit, he founded several companies to commercialize hard science. But he turned his attention to lithium enrichment in 2018. Let's hear the rest from him.

Dr. John Elling: Well, I'm John Elling. Uh, I am one of the founders and the CEO of Molten Salt Solutions, and Molten Salt Solutions is developing technology for large-scale supply of lithium isotopes that enables the next generations of nuclear power.

Molly Wood: What is the big problem that you were trying to solve with this company?

John Elling: Well, this is the, this is the biggest problem I've ever approached with, with technology. Uh, the, the problem with fusion is that you really can't do it without lithium. Uh, you need to have a supply of hundreds of tons of enriched lithium six, uh, to make the fusion fuel.

And fusion is proceeding like gangbusters. There's 40, 50 companies developing fusion technology now, uh, it really seems as if, uh, we're gonna be able to pull it off, uh, and, and figure out a way of generating fusion energy, uh, from, you know, these cheap and abundant fuel that do isotopes of hydrogen. But alongside that, unless somebody finds a way of producing the fuel for this, you really aren't gonna be able to commercialize fusion.

And you know, this turned out to be a really exciting opportunity, and so of course, Los Alamos knows a lot about fusion and everything about isotopes. And back in 2018 when we were looking at the field, we realized that alongside all of the really important fusion technology that was being developed was this huge unmet need in materials, 'cause nobody knows how to en enrich hundreds of tons of isotopes, um, you know, at a cost-effective way that can be used as fuel.

So we really jumped into it with both feet. We, at Los Alamos, it was kind of just this open question. You know, if you, if you need to do this by the hundreds of tons, what's the most cost-effective way of doing it? And, you know, it's, it's just remarkable that you have a resource like, like Los Alamos, whose job it is to know everything there is to know about enriching isotopes. And you can just lay that question on the table and you have a huge brain trust that says, know, there's a hundred ways of enriching isotopes. This is the way you should go about it. You know, if you're, if it's this isotope and you need a hundred tons of it a year.

Molly Wood: Maybe walk us through a couple of the pieces of that. One, um, I suspect that not everybody is aware that lithium…

John Elling: Sure.

Molly Wood: is an essential component of both, from what I understand, fission and fusion, um, nuclear fission and fusion energy. What, what is the hard part here? Is it availability or is it sounds like it's the enriching… what does that mean?

John Elling: So lithium occurs in two natural, stable, non-radioactive isotopes, lithium six and lithium seven, and nobody cares about that unless you're putting lithium into an environment with neutrons.

Uh, and what happens in neutrons when neutrons hit lithium six? Is it turns it into an isotope of hydrogen called tritium. And tritium is one of the two hydrogen isotopes that are squeezed together, uh, in order to make fusion happen. So most fusion that's being contemplated commercially is a deuterium tritium fusion.

And the whole trick is how do you get an atom of deuterium and atom of tritium to squeeze so tightly together that they fuse and release a bunch of energy? So to do that you need tritium. Um, it's the consumable, uh, one half of the fuel. Uh, and to generate the tritium, they actually use the neutrons from the fusion reaction to hit lithium six, which turns into tritium, which then goes back into the front end to make more fusion reactions, which then releases more neutrons.

So it's this great, you know, clean, abundant, unlimited fuel cycle. Uh, lithium is everywhere. The battery industry is pulling it out of every possible source. Uh, but to turn it into the, the clean abundant fuel for fusion, uh, you have to turn the lithium, uh, six into tritium.

And the fusion folks want enriched lithium six. Lithium six is about 7.5% of the naturally occurring, uh, lithium, the rest of it's lithium seven. So you have to have some process to go from seven point half percent lithium, six to 90% lithium six, so that they can put it in their tritium breeder blankets.

And you also mentioned fission as as, um, uh, a market for this as well, and it's actually kind of funny because, um, fission wants enriched lithium seven for the same reason that fusion wants enriched lithium six. When you put in the advanced fusion reactors, fission reactors, the molten salt reactors, um, that are being developed as sort of a fail-safe generation four, uh, small modular reactors. A lot of those reactors are considering lithium fluoride as part of their salt mixture. Well, they want the lithium and lithium fluoride to be all enriched in lithium seven because when the neutrons hit the lithium, they don't wanna generate tritium.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

John Elling: So exactly the same phenomenon. Neutrons onto lithium. The Molten Salt reactor folks and the generation four reactors don't want to generate tritium. So they need 99.995% lithium seven, and the other side of our process produces lithium six to the fusion folks who want to generate tritium. So for us…

Molly Wood: Got it. So you really, so you really, it sounds like, can and intend to serve both markets? Or are you sort of primarily focused on in, um, enabling fusion?

John Elling: Uh, absolutely we're gonna serve both markets, um, and…

Molly Wood: Win-win? You're all about a win-win.

John Elling: Yeah.

Molly Wood: Yep.

John Elling: Um, and for us, that gives us two market areas, um, for, uh, two different products. So it really validates the business case for a standalone lithium enrichment company. Uh, because of course if you're a fission company and you're making molten salt reactors, you can always do it yourself, but you're making it for your use. Whereas I get to sell it to both markets and, you know, produce highly-efficient enrichment that minimizes the waste and, and, uh, has two product areas. So it really…

Molly Wood: Right.

John Elling: Makes a business case for a, for an enrichment company.

Molly Wood: What is the, uh, what is it about your approach that makes the technology cost-effective and fundamentally different? You know, this is always the, like, why isn't anybody else doing this question? Granted, they're not all turbo geniuses, so there's that.

John Elling: Right. It's, uh, I'd like to say it's 'cause we're really smart and of course we really are. But, um, there's lots and lots of ways of enriching isotopes and in fact, there's now probably six to 10 other companies talking about enriching lithium six for fusion because it is a very, very present problem…

Molly Wood: Hm.

John Elling: In the trajectory of fusion development. Um, and so there's lots of different technologies that are being thrown at it. Um, and all of them will work. The only question is who gets economies of scale? And we designed our approach from the beginning, um, so that we get economies of scale, so that the cost of production per kilo goes down as you go from 10 kilos to 10 tons to a hundred tons.

Um, and what we're using is just solvent exchange. We're just using the, the preference of lithium isotopes to be in an organic solution and an aqueous water salt water solution. Um. And the vibrational energy difference of lithium six versus lithium seven salt, sometimes lithium six prefers to be in the oil layer and sometimes lithium seven prefers to be in the salt water layer. And it, the, the difference in the distribution of lithium six in, in the oil layer and lithium seven in the water layer is only about 3% and that's if you do it right. Um, so you obviously if you're gonna go from 7.5% lithium six to 90% lithium six, you have to do 3% changes a lot of different times. And what we have is an extremely efficient way of doing this standard liquid-liquid extraction very efficiently, thousands of times.

Um, other companies are actually using liquid-liquid extraction, they don't have our efficient extractor. Um, so if they need to do, you know, one 3% change in the isotope, they have to buy one piece of machinery. So to do a thousand of them, you have a thousand of these contactors and now you're the US government, because…

Molly Wood: [Laughs[ Got it.

John Elling: Only they can afford that kind of money.

In fact, that's how we used to do it, um, because lithium six was enriched, um, back in the nuclear weapons days. Um, and the government did it with, you know, an enormous installation of hardware and fluid. And their fluid was mercury, which didn't work out well for the environment 'cause they…

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

John Elling: Lost track of about 2 million pounds of it. Um, so, you know, the, the, the way of doing it now, commercially, of course, you don't want to use mercury, which is the only way it's been done at scale before. So ours is a mercury-free method. Um, much safer, much lower risks, much cleaner for the environment. Um, and it'll scale up, um, and it'll scale up using standard chemical engineering principles with a very, very efficient machine to run them.

Molly Wood: Um, I wanna ask about in fact, your machine, your first commercial facility in a minute, but before that you, you know, you alluded to, this might be like sort of a silly question, but you alluded to the fact that, that lithium is abundant. Battery, battery, you know, companies are interested in extracting as much as they can.

I mean. I, is it abundant enough? Are you like in a fight for this resource with, with the ever-growing battery in industry?

John Elling: Not yet. Um, but, and, and the, the lithium producers, uh, who are supplying, uh, as much lithium as they can possibly extract from the ground to the battery industry, don't really see fusion coming. Uh, but the size of the fusion market in the fullness of time is going to be requiring millions of tons of natural isotope abundance lithium, uh, in order to provide the hundreds of thousands of tons of enriched lithium six, for example.

So we will be a substantial fraction of the current battery demand the next 30 years, uh, in order to fuel fusion reactors who are selling electricity on the grid. So that's really good news for the people that are producing lithium.

At the same time, you might expect that the battery market is going to fragment a little bit. Uh, right now, lithium batteries are really mature technology, so people are using them for everything, including things that don't need high power-to-weight ratios like, you know, the battery in your garage that backs up your house. Who cares how much it weighs?

Molly Wood: Right.

John Elling: So over the next 30 years, I would expect that the battery market is going to differentiate on technology and maybe be a less little less reliant on lithium. Uh, but regardless, lithium is one of the most common elements on earth. Uh, and you know, the attention that the battery industry is paying to lithium is good for everybody, fusion and the battery industry. Because, you know, they're finding much better ways of producing it with much lower impact, and we'll just leverage that and be another market for it.

Molly Wood: And then talk about your growth trajectory given where fusion is now. Like you said, there are a ton of companies in this space. We've talked to a couple on this show already, at least. Um, but it is still relatively small. It like, what does it look like? Are you on a 30-year timeline? Or is it the fact that you can sell to the fission industry, which is also developing SMRs, you know, keeping… will, will that help you along until fusion actually is, you know, exponential?

John Elling: Well, just the fusion development alone over the next 10 years is gonna require somewhere between 500 and 700 tons of enriched lithium six. And the current commercial capacity to produce, uh, enriched lithium six in the world is zero. So we've got our work cut out for us.

Molly Wood: Oh… so you're fine. [Laughs]

John Elling: Yeah. Yeah. We, we have, um, you know, a multi-billion dollar market over the next five to 10 years, just supplying the people developing fusion, uh, with, uh, the lithium that they need in their development efforts.

And it's really important that we do that. Um, because if they can't get it, obviously they can't develop it, but everything is also sort of this engineering cost benefit, right. If they don't know how much it's gonna cost, how do you engineer the optimum way of producing tritium?

Molly Wood: Right.

John Elling: So we have to hit this market to provide them the material and provide them the cost of the material so that they can do their engineering and, and optimize the cost of electricity.

Molly Wood: Right.

John Elling: Um, and in the fission industry, the companies that are ahead in molten salt reactors haven't been able to buy lithium seven. And so the two companies, um, in of the five that are starting to build prototype reactors, they started enriching their own. And they don't wanna do that. I mean, there are, you know, there are nuclear engineers. Why do they want to be doing chemistry plumbing? Um, so, uh, we have also have our work cut out supplying that market because, uh, as they start to stand up their prototype, um, reactors, they need lithium seven. And there's no supply. So we're actually…

Molly Wood: Got it.

John Elling: in a race to supply the markets, um, not with other companies. I, we'd love to have some competition to, to help us out, but this short term demand is a real scaling challenge for the entire lithium enrichment, uh, industry that are, that my company and anybody else that's trying to make the technology.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Time for a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about the potential climate impact of all of this and where Molten Salt Solutions is headed in the very near future.

Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We're talking with Dr. John Elling of Molten Salt Solutions

Molly Wood: I mean, I'm glad we're digging into this in this way because it becomes clear what a huge enabling layer you are, I mean, you're effectively de-risking fusion as an industry, and then allowing, you know, like a lot of these promises about SMR, small nuclear, small modular reactors to come to fruition at all.

John Elling: Absolutely. Uh, there are whole trade publications to the whole point that unless they can solve this lithium six commercial availability, fusion just won't happen. And fusion is gonna save the world. I mean, it's, it's the end of human energy evolution. I mean, it's, for me, it's great 'cause I get to be part of the ultimate energy solution. Right.

Molly Wood: Yeah, totally. Yeah. How do you think about that? I mean, is this, is this a primarily technology-driven thing? Is it, are you excited about, is it, you know, is it climate-driven for you? Like what's the, what's your motivating force when you get up and do this?

John Elling: Yeah, that, that's a really interesting question because, uh, you know, we're, we're experienced entrepreneurs here. Um, we've had a crack at a number of, of different technologies. I've had a couple of successful exits. This is the first time I've been involved in technology that's gonna change the world.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

John Elling: And if you think about it, a million years ago, humans learned to control fire. Um, quarter of a million years ago, humans learned to make fire, and everything after that has been improving our ability to generate and use energy. There is nothing after fusion. Right. If you, you talk to anybody in, in the industry or the, you know, future prognostication, um, you know, what's better than coal? Well, oil, natural gas, windmills. What's better than fusion?

Molly Wood: Right.

John Elling: There isn't anything, right? So I get to participate in the end of a million years of energy evolution in, you know, humans and whatever was before humans, Neanderthals and before that.

And it's gonna do, you know, profound good for humanity in the planet, right? It's, it's cheap, abundant energy, know, minimal or no, uh, waste, uh, you know, low impact source of the fuel. Um, you can distribute it, you know, just keeping up with the growth of, of, uh, the population and keeping, you know, the, the population growing out of, of poverty. We need to triple energy production by 2050. I mean, and, and the best possible way to do that is renewables with, with fusion in the mix. And, and, and I get to enable that. I mean, for me, this is one of those things where, yeah, you could make a better medical device. That was fun, but, I get to participate in…

Molly Wood: Right.

John Elling: you know, and a pinnacle of, of, uh, civilization and, you know, save the planet at the same time. It's, uh, really an incredibly exciting area to be involved in. I mean, when you can wake up and say, when this company works, I'm gonna make the world a better place. We're gonna make the world a better place.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

John Elling: Right. It's why I've got scientists, um, you know, who came outta Los Alamos to, to help me start this company after we asked Los Alamos the question, how would you do this? And the scientists, you know, did the same thing that I'm doing, right? Which is, holy cow, you know, here's a career that's a, a, a career problem.

Molly Wood: Yeah. Wow.

John Elling: We're really all very excited. And, and this is not just Molten Salt Solutions. I mean, you can get everybody in the fusion industry to get, you know, to, to express this kind of excitement. It's, it's really cool to be at this stage of humanity, at this stage of energy production.

Molly Wood: I mean, literally that answer is why I do the show. That was, that is incredible. Um, and a great place to say where you are in terms of doing this. You have just announced, it's my understanding, plans for your first commercial production facility, a first for a US company. Um, what is, what, where is it? What's the deal? What's the, what's the timeline? What's going on there? And congratulations.

John Elling: Yeah. Thank you very much. Alright. So we signed two offtake agreements with Type One Energy and, uh, with Gauss Fusion and, uh, just those two of the 45 or more companies, um, in terms of, of the offtake agreements, projecting demand is, keeps me fully occupied and up at night to scale, to meet just two of those customers’ demands.

Molly Wood: Wow.

John Elling: So we are racing, uh, to build the first commercial production facility. Uh, it will be, uh, right next to our current laboratory and, and, uh, and workspace here in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Because the first commercial production facility is both producing stuff as fast as we possibly can, but it's also, uh, really a research and development tool. So the scientists will be fiddling with it endlessly to optimize this, that, and the other thing, to increase the, uh, production, to lower the costs, that kind of a thing.

So the first pilot plan is always kind of this awkward, yeah, you're using it to produce commercial stuff, but you're also messing with it to get all the technology to work better and, and work better together. Um, and then we're hoping to scale the next level of production here in New Mexico. And after that, um, you know, it's, it, it should be turnkey technology. We can put it anywhere. Um, I'd love to see it take off in New Mexico because I've been an entrepreneur in New Mexico for 28 years. Um, but, you know, it's, it's a business decision at that point, you know, where does it make sense to produce this stuff by the hundreds of tons.

Molly Wood: Where does it make sense to produce this stuff by the hundreds of tons? I mean, leaving aside the, you know, is it, is it geography dependent? Is it best to co-locate near lithium extraction facilities? You know, like is there, are there geographical constraints or benefits?

John Elling: Yes, there are. Um, right now a lot of our location, uh, consideration is incentive. Uh, so some states want to get involved in fusion and some others wanna get involved in the fusion supply chain. And this is the key piece of the fusion supply chain and also advanced nuclear fission. So incentives are very important to, uh, you know, technology companies that are starting up, um, and have to spend equity for the first production systems. After you start getting customer orders, um, and customer deposits, then you can do other, other business financing. But right now we're spending equity, so incentives make that cheaper to build.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

John Elling: You can make arguments that you might wanna put this next to a lithium mine. Um, and in particular, alongside developing the material, we're also developing the purity specifications, 'cause obviously the lithium material you put in batteries, they care about different things and different purities and the lithium that you put into, um, neutron environments like, uh, nuclear reactors and fission machines. So working on the purity requirements and a natural part of that is finding out that maybe the lithium from Nevada is got the purity that we like as a feedstock or from the Texas oil wells, or it’s probably not gonna be from the rock mines in Africa. Um, but, you know, maybe the brine ponds in Chile. So we're, we're sort of nailing down, what would we prefer to be our feedstock? Because obviously from a chemical engineering standpoint, if you don't put the stuff in the front end, you don't have to pay to purify it out the back end.

Molly Wood: Right.

John Elling: So there'll, there'll be a lot of that in at least identifying the feedstock and maybe co-locating. Um, lithium six is a, um, sensitive material for export because of its, uh, previous use and nuclear weapons. Uh, so we obviously aren't gonna put it any place that is a geopolitical risk. Um, and it’s also ultimately a domestic supply chain, right? So in the same way that nuclear fuel is now being looked at as a critical material and we're trying to onshore the mining and the enrichment that we had just let Russia take over.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

John Elling: We, we kind of want to make sure that we don't develop the same problem in fusion energy where we're buying all of the fuel for fusion and all of the enabling material for small modular reactors from offshore suppliers that have some sort of supply chain risk.

Molly Wood: Right. We should specify here too. Actually, I was gonna ask you about this, that it's, I understand that right now Russia is essentially the only place providing enriched lithium at any scale?

John Elling: They are providing enriched lithium seven right now for the fission community. Um…

Molly Wood: Right.

John Elling: And they're largely producing that, um, out of the nuclear weapons complex that they didn't, disassemble. Um, we used to produce enriched lithium six, uh, from our complex at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, but we completely cleaned that up and disassembled it. Um, the Russians still have their facility and as they were producing lithium six for their weapons, they produced a lot of lithium seven, which is the waste. So now when you want lithium seven, you can just kind of mine the dumpsters in Russia.

Molly Wood: Right. [Laughs] Great.

John Elling: But they're only, they're only really producing it by the a hundred kilograms. So, so even, and they're not producing lithium six. Um, so, you know, even, even that is a, you know, inadequate to the point of triviality for the demands we're talking about in fission and…

Molly Wood: Yeah.

John Elling: Fusion is not relevant at all. We know the Chinese are doing it, um, but we don't know how, um, uh, because they're all in on molten salt reactors and they're investing in incredible amount of money in fusion as well.

Molly Wood: Yeah. Hmm.

John Elling: But I would expect that that won't play in the Western world market.

Molly Wood: What is the level of, of government support for this technology right now, would you say? I mean, it seems to me that the current administration has been pro-nuclear. Is that a tailwind for you?

John Elling: It is a, it's a tailwind, um, for us, um, specifically in fission because they, um, DOE really reduced the regulatory barriers to people in small modular reactor world. And so a bunch of companies are now taking advantage of that and building first of a kind, um, prototype reactors that are gonna go hot and generate neutrons. And those that are using lithium salts as, as their coolant or their, their solvent for their fuel all need lithium seven. So it's really, uh, been a kick in the pants for the lithium seven market. Uh, on lithium six and fusion, our government has been a real advocate of fusion since we essentially kicked off the enthusiasm with the National Ignition Facility in, in, uh, Livermore. Um. With their Q Greater Than One experiment and announcement.

Molly Wood: Right. Like 2022? I wanna say, I'm trying to remember the exact time that happened, but…

John Elling: I think it was November of 2020… I think it was 2022. Yeah. And, and that's, you know, when you see a graph of the number of fusion companies, there's an inflection point where it went from something like 13 to 50 in…

Molly Wood: Right.

John Elling: the course of a couple of years, um, because everybody, you know, kind of realized, hey, we could actually do this.

Um, the funding from the Department of Energy in fusion, and in particularly the fusion supply chain in lithium hasn't been significant. Um, RPE put out a small, uh, amount of money, um, uh, two years ago. Um, we're hoping that RPE had an announcement last week in San Diego that they were gonna put $135 million into fusion, and they, one of the things they were talking about was the importance of lithium six in the supply chain. So hopefully if we put two and two together, we'll we'll see some arpa, uh, e, uh, interest in funding this area.

There's been of magnitude more funding, uh, overseas. Um, the German government and now the Spanish government has put a bunch of money into lithium enrichment. And the British folks, um, two years ago, uh, put out a call for proposals, then they funded for efforts in lithium enrichment. Uh, they’re four university commercial partnerships. So they're, they're kind of raw research. They're not really ready for production. Um, but uh, yeah, we're hoping that the US government kind of plays catch up in the lithium world.

Molly Wood: I am, 135 million does not sound like very much, especially when we consider how much private funding has gone into fusion at this point. But it, it feels to me like that's, we need that. I mean, we, I feel like I've, I have heard scientists be, say for years that we've been on a fusion never level of funding for, what, 50 years now? Something like that.

John Elling: Yeah. It’s been, and, and the money in fusion, and I'm not denigrating the DOE'S efforts and, and the research that they've funded has been more in the enabling technology. You know, how do you get the squeezy stuff to work?

Molly Wood: Right.

John Elling: And now that they've got a bunch of squeezy stuff that's starting to work, uh, now they're, they're starting to take a look at the supply chain and it's, you know, it's, it's behind some of the other, uh, government fundings in other countries. Um. And you're right, 135 million compared to the 10 million in private funding. Um, isn't bad, but I'll, I'll still take the money.

Molly Wood: Yep. It's a start. Yep, exactly. It's a start. Um, okay. And then finally, what does your, I mean, it sounds like you're at a flat out sprint all day, every day. Um. What does your ideal timeline look like?

John Elling: We would like to be producing commercial quantities, uh, to these first offtake agreements, um, next year. And the commercial quantities would be kilogram quantities, um, to meet their, you know, initial research needs. Um, you know, if I, if I was producing enough next year, uh, it would be close to a hundred kilograms and I probably can't do that. Um. But, uh, yeah, we're, we're looking at kilograms to hundreds of kilograms next year. And then, uh, probably scaling to 20 tons and then 200 tons in the following three years. And that, you know, that would be, that would be scaling to meet the demand that I've already got documented in the offtake agreements.

And…

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

John Elling: Remember that’s only two of 45 companies. Um, so we could, you know, scaling right now is our central obstacle. The technology works, we've demonstrated it, everything came together. Um, it's really only one innovation in chemical processing. Everything around that is just plain vanilla chemical engineering. Um, unfortunately you buy all that equipment from China, so if the tariffs went away, I'd appreciate it. But, um, you know, scaling up is, is right now a matter of doing the chemical engineering fast enough.

Molly Wood: Dr. John Elling is the founder and CEO of Molten Salt Solutions. Let's go fusion. Thank you so much for the time.

John Elling: Thank you

Molly Wood Voice-Over: That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool.

One quick nerdy footnote before we go. There are several types of fusion technology concepts, and not all of them depend on enriched lithium-6. The most technically and economically feasible fusion technologies use deuterium-tritium as fuel. Tritium is hard to come by, and so enriched lithium-6 is an ingredient that helps breed more tritium. That's why Dr. Elling thinks this will be a big market.

There are other fuel combinations, like deuterium-deuterium, which skips the need for the hard-to-find tritium, but the physics are way harder. The really clean and elegant physics solution is apparently deuterium-helium 3, But Dr. Elling told me that one has a tiny little supply chain challenge related to getting helium-3 from the moon.

All right, I'm done now. Thank you for indulging me. I appreciate you.

You can find the show notes, the transcript, the newsletter, and all the past episodes of this show at everybodyinthepool.com. And check out the description in your podcast app of choice to support this show directly or join our Discord to chat along with climate tech early adopters just like you.

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