Every dilution refrigerator on Earth needs the same rare ingredient to reach the extreme cold that quantum computers require: helium-3. Canada, it turns out, may be the only country that can produce it without relying on a nuclear weapons program.

That's the case Christopher Cassin, CEO and co-founder of Edmonton's Zero Point Cryogenics, has been making in recent months, including in a July Globe and Mail op-ed calling for Ottawa to designate helium-3 a strategic critical resource. In an interview with Vanguard, he laid out why the isotope, and Canada's unusual access to it, could become a defining factor in the global quantum race.

Zero Point builds the dilution refrigerators that cool quantum computers, sensors and communications hardware to within thousandths of a degree of absolute zero. Only two substances stay liquid at those temperatures: helium-3 and ordinary helium-4. Helium-3 is the one that matters for the coldest, most demanding systems, and it is extraordinarily scarce.

Most of the world's helium-3 supply comes from the decay of tritium, a byproduct of maintaining nuclear warheads. That means the United States, Russia and, with less certainty, China hold the largest stockpiles. Cassin argues that leaves Canada in a singular position: its CANDU reactors generate tritium, and therefore helium-3, as a byproduct of civilian power generation rather than weapons work.

"We are one of, call it four countries in the world that have the fuel to power this evolution," Cassin said. "We need to make sure that we are not selling that to a foreign entity and having them sell it back to us."

The stakes, Cassin said, cut two ways. As nuclear arsenals decline, so does the tritium stockpile that produces most of the world's helium-3, tightening a supply that quantum computing, sensing and eventual fusion applications will need more of, not less. NASA has floated mining the moon for helium-3 as an alternative, a prospect Cassin calls complicated.

Canada's position could move the opposite direction. If the country maintains its existing CANDU fleet, and builds more, Cassin argues it could hold the only expanding source of helium-3 on the planet. Ontario Power Generation subsidiary Laurentis Energy Partners has already launched a program to extract helium-3 from tritium stored at the Darlington nuclear station, which Cassin's Globe op-ed pointed to as the kind of infrastructure Canada needs to scale.

Cassin wants Ottawa to treat helium-3 the way it treats other critical minerals: with a formal reserve, rather than leaving it to the market. He pointed to the U.S. Department of Energy's model, which sells its regulated helium-3 supply at cost to researchers and labs working in the national interest, while charging market rates to everyone else.

"It allows them to be very strategic in how they use their resource," he said, "and it allows research to get done more cost-effectively."

For defence planners specifically, Cassin argued the more immediate gap is not policy but hardware. None of the six companies worldwide that build dilution refrigerators commercially, Zero Point included, currently make a version rugged enough to deploy in the field. Fielding quantum sensing for GPS-denied navigation or improved radar, applications Cassin said have taken on new urgency since Russia's electronic warfare campaign in Ukraine, will first require systems that can survive a helicopter or aircraft.

Quantum computing's threat to encryption is no longer a distant problem. Cassin pointed to shifting timelines from firms like IBM, which he said have moved projections for a fault-tolerant quantum computer from the early 2030s to as soon as 2028 or 2029. Adversaries are already collecting encrypted data they cannot yet read, betting that a working quantum computer will unlock it later, a strategy known as harvest now, decrypt later.

That timeline compresses the window Canada has to secure its position, Cassin said, both as a builder of quantum-enabling hardware and as the custodian of the fuel that hardware depends on.

"If we have any leftover," he said of a future Canadian helium-3 stockpile, "then we distribute that out to our allies and our friends."