Nano Invests In Laser Enrichment

Wedoany.com Report-Nov 9, US-based start-up NANO Nuclear Energy announced a collaboration with LIS Technologies (LIST), a privately-held emerging company which is developing laser enrichment technology. NANO says the collaboration “intends to reinvigorate the United States’ domestic uranium enrichment and fuel fabrication capabilities”.

It includes a $2m investment by NANO into LIST’s recently closed, over-subscribed $11.88m SEED round financing.

As part of a strategic agreement, NANO and LIST will collaborate on advancing LIST’s enrichment technology as it develops and moves towards the regulatory licensing process. LIST will ultimately provide NANO with quantities of uranium hexafluoride (UF₆) fuel for use in NANO’s portable microreactors, currently in the conceptual design stage, and for future sale by NANO and LIST to third parties.

NANO will develop supportive capabilities, including deconversion and fuel fabrication facilities, that will enable LIST’s enriched UF₆ to become part of an integrated fuel manufacturing process that delivers fuel to both NANO’s microreactor systems and the wider nuclear energy industry. LIST will provide NANO with enriched UF₆ at no cost to be fabricated and sold to customers and LIST will receive compensation as part of a profit-sharing arrangement to be agreed.

NANO believes that LIST’s technology has the potential to be fully developed, licensed and capable of producing commercial quantities of low enriched uranium (LEU) and high-assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel within ten years.

LIST’s technology utilises infrared lasers to selectively excite and separate desired isotope molecules as part of the enrichment process. The technology can also potentially be used to produce stable isotopes for medical and scientific research and has applications in quantum computing manufacturing for semiconductor technologies. LIST says its proprietary laser-based process is energy-efficient and can be deployed with relatively favourable capital and operational costs. It is protected by a United States Patent and Trademark Office-issued patent.

NANO Nuclear, founded in 2022, is developing ZEUS, a solid core battery reactor, and ODIN, a low-pressure coolant reactor, each representing clean energy solutions that are portable, on-demand NANO’s subsidiaries include Advanced Fuel Transportation (AFT), HALEU Energy Fuel (HEF) and NANO Nuclear Space (NNS).

AFT “led by former executives from the largest transportation company in the world” aims to build a North American transportation company that will provide commercial quantities of HALEU fuel to small modular reactors (SMRs), microreactor companies, national laboratories, military, and US Department of Energy (DOE) programmes.