The Journey of LIS Technologies: A Laser-Fueled Path to U.S. Energy Independence
Every company has a story. But few companies have a story as compelling as that of LIS Technologies, Inc., which focuses on enriching uranium with lasers to fuel U.S.-based nuclear reactors. LIS Technologies intends to manufacture nuclear fuel on U.S. soil using a patented US-origin technology, ending a decades-long dependence on fuel imported from Russia.
A series of coincidences and events that even Hollywood couldn’t write led Dr. Jeff Eerkens and Christo J. Liebenberg to found LIS Technologies in 2023. Liebenberg sat down with us to share the company’s incredible story — and reveal how he hopes LIS Technologies will revolutionize American energy for the better.
The company’s story began decades ago with a young boy living in the Dutch East Indies, known today as Indonesia. “Jeff Eerkens was born in the early 1930s in Indonesia,” says Liebenberg. “Back then, Indonesia was a Dutch colony, a part of the Dutch empire. During the Second World War, the Japanese took over the island that Jeff was living on, and he, his family, and one hundred thousand other Dutch civilians were interned in a concentration camp and forced into hard labor for three years.”
The camp conditions were brutal. “Jeff was only 10 years old,” Liebenberg says. “He had a difficult time. People died all around him. What saved him from that (Jeff was now 12 years old) was when Japan surrendered due to the drop of nuclear weapons on Japanese cities. On direct order from the Japanese Emperor, he ordered the Japanese to inflict no further harm to the surviving prisoners and just leave them. They fled, and the Allies came and rescued these prisoners who were literally on their last legs.”
Liebenberg and Dr. Eerkens are not proponents of nuclear weapons, but they’re cognizant of the fact that it was a nuclear weapon that ultimately saved Dr. Eerkens from the fate that awaited him in the concentration camp. “Jeff got saved by the nuclear bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima,” Liebenberg says. “I’m very anti-nuclear bombs, and so is Jeff, but it saved his life.”
The bombs did more than save Dr. Eerkens’s life; they inspired a course of study that would lead to an illustrious career and ultimately to the founding of LIS Technologies. “He dedicated his life to learning about the power locked up in the atom. That’s why he became known as the father of laser enrichment,” says Liebenberg.
Dr. Eerkens earned a master’s degree in nuclear engineering and a doctorate in engineering science from the University of California, Berkeley. He then went on to invent Condensation Repression Isotope Selective Laser Activation (CRISLA) and Chemically Harvested and Extracted MLIS (CHEMLIS), two isotope-harvesting techniques that would ultimately become central to LIS Technologies for the development of nuclear fuel as a whole.
While Dr. Eerkens was laying the foundation for CRISLA and CHEMLIS, Liebenberg was in South Africa, studying and optimizing the Molecular Laser Isotope Separation (MLIS) process. His journey led him to Australia, where he later became Laser Manager for Silex Systems in Australia, and Global Laser Enrichment in the USA. After GLE, he spent 12 years with ASML, and helped develop advanced laser systems to produce EUV, the light source that is used today to produce the most advanced semiconductor chips.
Liebenberg has closely followed the development of the CRISLA process throughout his career. Like Dr. Eerkens, Liebenberg believed that the shift to nuclear power was critical to long-term energy independence for the United States. However, to make that dream a reality, the industry needed a new way to enrich uranium with lasers at a large scale — and he came to the conclusion that CRISLA was the way to do it.
Liebenberg contacted Dr. Eerkens in 2014, and they instantly connected both personally and on technical grounds. The two founded CRISLA, Inc. in 2020 before founding LIS Technologies, Inc. in 2023. Liebenberg serves as CEO, and Dr. Eerkens is the CTO.
LIS Technologies aims to bring the CRISLA laser enrichment process back to life, picking up where it was left more than 30 years ago. “Russia is a huge producer of enriched uranium, and when the iron curtain of the former Soviet Union came down, they started flooding the world markets,” says Liebenberg. “They sold enriched uranium for less than half price compared to what it was. That sank many promising technologies, one of them being CRISLA. But it also totally destroyed the U.S. nuclear industry”.
LIS Technologies is planning to use the CRISLA process to help restore energy independence to the United States, an essential step in a world where geopolitical tensions only seem to escalate.
However, that’s not the only way the company is bringing things full circle. LIS Technologies will relocate to the K-25 site at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the headquarters for World War II’s Manhattan Project and the birthplace of American nuclear innovation.
“An atomic weapon saved Jeff’s life,” says Liebenberg. “How was this atomic weapon made in the first place? It started with the enrichment of uranium at the Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant, as part of the Manhattan project, produced at the very same time that Jeff was interned in a Japanese concentration camp”.
“The fissile material was made exactly at the same spot we’re moving to. That enrichment plant has been decommissioned, and they have new buildings on this brownfield site. And LIS Technologies’ new building is right there on that site,” he says. “Full circle for Jeff Eerkens.”
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