The original HALEU consortium had CRISLA in it. What CRISLA has done is now formed a company (LIS technologies) which now replaces CRISLA in the consortium. MG well understands the maturity (or otherwise) of the CRISLA technology since he and Jeff Eerken's were partners in 1988-80 (see HERE page 55) - Cameco was also involved at the time and it was (at the time) touch and go as to whether Cameco was in a joint venture with CRISLA but the Cameco board rejected it in 1993. In 1997 Silex was supported by USEC (the per-predecessor to Centrus) who put in significant investment (about US$35m) into Silex but dropped Silex in 2003. During this period the "silex treaty" was signed between Australia and the USA which goes until 2029 (30 years) - this is the reason that Silex currently holds 51% of GLE (for Cameco to take a majority Canada will need to join the "silex treaty". .
Silex then went into the "wilderness" until 2005/6 when a joint venture was formed with GEH who put in about US$500m and proved the Silex process which was then the Wilmington test loop but it operated in a "batch" mode (CRISLA has not (as far as I know) achieved this milestone) in about 2010 and was evidently sufficiently impressive to GEH for them to obtain an enrichment license from the NRC for a 6MSWU plant in Wilmington (cancelled in 2021). Acconding to Jeff Eerkin patent (see HERE) the use of a 16micron laser which (see sentence 28 of the Eerkens patent is "The main reason this scheme was not pursued in the past was that the absorption cross-section for 3v3 excitations of UF6 near 5 microns is approximate 5,000 times weaker than for v3 excitations around 16 microns".
Christo Liebenberg (see HERE) the CEO of LIS Technologies worked for GLE from January 2006 to December 2011 so will be subject to the Silex Treaty and thus US military confidentiality laws. As Grant Isaacs (of Cameco) recently said the GLE project has now morphed from an enrichment project to a tier 1 UF6 mine (with the Paducah DoE talis project) producing 5mlbs of NUF6 per year for at least 30 years. In addition the Wilmington test loop (completed in 2009/10) was a "batch" process which proved up the parameters (such as the "enrichment factor") which LIS Tehnolgies still have to do. They also do not have a prior NRC approval. The test (scheduled for next year) is the move (TRL/6) from a "batch" process to a "continuious" process this is a significant (and expensive) test wghich CRISLA (and ASP technologies) still have to go through - it will be time consuming and expensive. The competitors also need to obtain approval from the NRC to set up a test loop to prototype their product (a big and expensive step) using UF6 (neds a license).
As I understand it that Struve Horst (the co-developer of Silex with MG) is South African and probably (like Christo Liebenberg) worked on the South African nuclear weapons program in the aparthied era. This program is the root of the ASP technology (the stationary wall centrifuge). I don't know (since it's secret) but i would haxard a guess that the Silex "separtor" is based upon the "stationary wall" centrifuge - but that's a guess. The fact that Silex uses the 16 micron laser beam to turn UF6G dimers into UF6G monomers (and thus roughly double the mass ratio) will IMO provide a significant "edge" to the resulting enrichment factors for the Silex prcess versus the ASP process. The South Australian Royal commission of 2016 (in the Hatch report - vetted by Silex) sghowed (if you work back the numbers) that they obtained enrichment factors of about 5 to 6 (Silex officially claim (2 to 20) - if this is correct then competitors will (IMO) find it hard to beat.
IMO with Cameco as a partner, the DoE Paducah tails project agreement in place and in production by 2028 (with hopefully US government support from the Infation reduction Act and others); it's going to be very difficult for either ASP or LIS Tehnologies to be effective competitors this decade.- also cracking the power of the 16 micron laser technology (with it's 5000 times factor) IMHO gives SLX (and GLE) an unassaliable lead at least until well into the next decade (when Paducah will be in operation and proven) - hopefully I'm not being over confient but everything in nuclear usually takes longer (and more expensive) than you think and SLX are well on the way - it's taken a long time and been expensive (thankfully largely to GEH and USEC) but SLX have (luckily) stuck at it over the decades and hopefully will now reap the rewards.
SLX Price at posting:
$3.07 Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
(20min delay)
