LIS Technologies (LIST), the US startup working on a novel laser-based approach to uranium enrichment, says it has raised another $12 million in funding - said to be its third consecutive oversubscribed round.
Attracting support from previous investors including Innovating Capital, the latest effort brings total funding raised to date to $47 million, and will be used in part to aid the development of the firm’s own proprietary laser sources.
A May 16th filing with the US Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) confirms the latest equity funding activity, although it states a figure of $9.6 million. Earlier filings from August and December 2024 show totals of $8.6 million and $21.5 million respectively.
CRISLA
Co-founder and CEO Christo Liebenberg said in a release announcing the latest fundraising: “The success of this and our previous raises underscores the confidence that investors have in our mission, team and technology.
“This raise will enable us to continue growing operations, add more senior technical engineers, regulatory leaders and to rapidly advance our projects, which would be closer to demonstration activities crucial for meeting the company’s growth objectives.”
While the idea behind laser separation of isotopes for uranium enrichment is far from new - selective vibrational excitation of uranium hexafluoride has been studied for around 50 years - it is yet to make any commercial headway against established separation technologies using diffusion or centrifuges.
Typically the technique has been designed around the use of carbon dioxide lasers emitting at 16 µm, but LIST says that its alternative approach - known as “Condensation Repression Isotope Selective Laser Activation” (CRISLA) - overcomes many of the complexities and limitations of those designs, partly through the use of 5.3 µm laser emission.
CRISLA is said to be optimized for both low-enriched uranium (LEU), seen as crucial for the continued operation of the 94 nuclear reactors currently generating power in the US, and high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU), which has a higher concentration of fissile uranium and will be needed for future generations of reactors including small modular reactors.
Upgraded labs
LIST claims that CRISLA offers several advantages over diffusion and centrifuge techniques, as well as other laser enrichment processes, for example through selective excitation of fissile uranium hexafluoride to a higher vibrational energy state than with 16 µm sources, and a simplified system architecture thanks to lower absorption at the shorter wavelength.
That is said to translate to better efficiency and throughput, meaning lower enrichment costs and a flexible technology that can be optimized for LEU or HALEU fuel.
“The funding secured in this raise will enable the company to advance into its next phase of growth,” LIST announced. “This includes systems engineering, integration and testing of our test demonstration facility in our newly upgraded laboratories in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, while also developing LIST’s own proprietary lasers in the US.
“Our goal over the next couple [of] years is to not only repeat earlier baseline results, but to optimize it, and then demonstrate that our technology can produce LEU in a single stage, and HALEU in two stages, with fully scaled and industrialized equipment.”
The funding will also allow the company to diversify the use of CRISLA for other applications, for example producing isotopes for nuclear medicine.
