The U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy has spelled out several areas that present challenges to domestic and global development of nuclear power. Chief among those issues is building a process that enables fuel development on a repeatable, industrial scale, so that projects can move beyond the demonstration phase to commercial operation.
POWER in recent years has written about several companies in the nuclear fuel development space, along with providing commentary about the need for revitalization of the U.S. nuclear supply chain. A January 2026 article looked at whether nuclear power could provide the firm, carbon-free power needed to support ever-increasing demand for electricity.
Dr. John Elling is CEO and co-founder of Molten Salt Solutions, a New Mexico company developing materials for next-generation nuclear and fusion reactors. The group has said its work involves creating technology for producing large quantities of isotopically-enriched lithium, which will be necessary for advanced fission and fusion power. Molten Salt Solutions has what it calls “proprietary chromatography separation and mass spectrometry technologies [that] enable effective isotope enrichment, while our unique metal salt syntheses provide significant safety and cost advantages.”
Elling, a serial entrepreneur, previously founded and led Acoustic Cytometry Systems and Mesa Biotech, companies that each commercialized Los Alamos National Laboratory technologies and achieved successful acquisitions. Elling has extensive expertise in licensing and scaling national lab innovations, with experience as both a technical staff member and visiting entrepreneur at Los Alamos. He holds a Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin, and an MBA from the University of New Mexico.
Elling provided POWER with his thoughts on why researchers should focus on development of fuels for nuclear energy, to enable the subsequent advancement of nuclear power technologies.
POWER: What sparked your interest in developing fuel for nuclear energy?
Elling: I came into this from a slightly different angle than most people in nuclear. My background is in analytical chemistry, which is not usually where you start if your goal is to design a reactor.
Over time, though, it became clear that a lot of advanced energy systems, both fusion and next-generation fission, were running into the same constraint. They are all going to need large amounts of enriched isotopes in advanced materials, and there is essentially no industrial-scale production today.
There has been a lot of attention on reactors, which makes sense. They are more visible and, frankly, more exciting. The materials tend to get less attention. Historically, that part shows up later as a problem.
What drew me in was the opportunity to work on that enabling layer. If these systems are going to move beyond demonstrations, they need a supply base that actually exists. Building that is not as glamorous as building a reactor, but it tends to determine whether the reactor matters.
POWER: There’s excitement around fusion energy. Your group has said there’s a “critical” minerals gap, specifically a lack of lithium-6 to produce tritium fuel. Can you provide some detail about your company’s advanced solvent exchange process for large-scale lithium enrichment?
Elling: Enriching lithium isotopes is not especially hard. There are many ways to do it. There are not many ways to do it at scale.
The U.S. government did this in the 1960s using a mercury-based process, which worked, but is not something anyone wants to bring back. The challenge now is to build an industrial process that is both scalable and environmentally acceptable.
Liquid-liquid extraction is a standard chemical engineering process, and isotope-selective systems are well understood. The issue is that scaling them typically requires very large, multi-stage systems that are expensive to build and operate. That approach works, and several groups are pursuing it, but it is hard to see it supporting a new energy industry on cost.
We took a different approach. It scales about 100 times better and costs a lot less. Our approach is to rethink how that separation happens. We use a continuous solvent exchange process that allows many separation steps to occur within a single integrated system. In practical terms, that reduces capital and operating costs by orders of magnitude compared to conventional setups.
It also makes scaling more modular. Instead of committing to a single large facility, you can add capacity incrementally. That is useful when your demand curve depends on technologies that are still proving themselves.
The underlying issue is fairly simple. If fusion works, lithium-6 becomes a constraint. We are trying to make sure it does not become the constraint.
POWER: Are you working with any companies currently designing fusion systems? Do you have any supply contracts with companies?
Elling: We recently announced supply agreements with Gauss Fusion and Type One Energy. Both are serious teams, and we see those relationships as an important step for us and for the broader ecosystem. These are not just exploratory relationships. They reflect a growing recognition that fuel supply needs to be addressed early, not after the fact.
The goal is to align ahead of large-scale deployment so that fuel availability is built into system design, instead of becoming a bottleneck later. In the near term, we are supplying material for testing and validation, which is a necessary step. Developers need confidence not just in the reactor, but in the supply chain behind it.
More broadly, it also suggests the industry is starting to move past purely technical milestones and into questions of industrial readiness. At that point, inputs like lithium-6 stop being theoretical and start becoming gating factors.
POWER: Are you seeking U.S. federal government support (perhaps through national labs) for your process?
Elling: Our core processing technology has been developed in collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratory. They have their own set of difficult purification problems, so there is a natural overlap.
The lithium isotope work itself has been supported through NSF SBIR programs, along with some state-level support. Those partnerships helped us move from concept to a demonstrated system relatively quickly.
We are looking for additional federal support, and there is a real opportunity right now. Lithium-6 sits in an awkward but interesting place between defense and commercial energy. Most programs are still structured around one or the other. If there were a more coordinated, dual-use approach, it would make it easier to justify early infrastructure investment. It would also send a clearer signal that supply will be there as fusion scales, which is still an open question.
POWER: Who are some of the investors in your company?
Elling: We have raised from Future Ventures and True Ventures, along with non-dilutive funding through grants and government contracts.
Future Ventures actually reached out to us early on. They had already spent time looking at fusion and came to the view that lithium-6 was likely to be a bottleneck. At the time, there were not many teams focused on it, so that conversation moved quickly.
And it is not just fusion driving that. You see the same dynamic on the fission side, particularly with molten salt reactors. Once you look closely at where nuclear is going, the supply chain piece becomes hard to ignore.
POWER: What’s next for Molten Salt Solutions? Where do you see the company by 2030?
Elling: In the near term, the focus is on building commercial capacity. Demand is already ahead of our current supply plans, across both fusion developers and advanced fission programs working with the Department of Energy.
By 2030, lithium enrichment should be a scaled, established business with production facilities delivering material in meaningful volumes. From there, the focus is on expanding into additional isotopes using the same underlying process.
There are a number of adjacent markets where supply is constrained and demand is growing, including silicon-28 for quantum computing, carbon-13 for medical diagnostics, and chlorine-37 for molten salt reactors.
The underlying idea is that this is a platform technology. Lithium is the first application, but the same process extends to a range of difficult isotope separations. What we are building is a way to reliably produce materials that have historically been constrained, at a scale that supports real commercial deployment.
—Darrell Proctor is a senior editor for POWER.
